Energy savings of cloud computing could power L.A.

Berkley Lab has released a research report suggesting that - despite data centers 

currently accounting for 1-2% of global electricity use - the potential for energy savings from cloud-based computing is substantial: if all U.S. business users shifted their email, productivity software, and CRM software to the cloud, the primary energy footprint of these software applications might be reduced by  as much as 87% or 326 Petajoules. That's enough primary energy to generate the electricity used by the City of Los Angeles each year (23 billion kilowatt-hours).

Cloud data centers are also likely to play an increasing role in reducing demand for physical goods and services (a process known as dematerialization) through the provision of digital news and entertainment, e-commerce, and remote work and collaboration capabilities. For example, life-cycle assessment studies suggest that digital music can reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions intensity of music delivery by 40%-80% compared to compact discs and that digital news can reduce CO2 emissions of news delivery by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to a newspaper.

Last week, Google hosted a conference called How Green is the Internet?