Inside Data Center Alley’s sweltering Virginia summer, where cooling costs energy
Northern Virginia’s blistering summer heat saw Data Center Alley’s electricity consumption surge even higher than usual.
Like people blasting their air conditioning, the building-size systems powering the modern internet need to stay cool to run smoothly. Climate control accounts for a large portion of the energy used by data centers in general, said Johns Hopkins University electrical and computing professor Yury Dvorkin.
“They go on top of what our existing baseline consumption is,” Dvorkin said. “It creates an additional energy demand in the form of electricity that has never been served before.”