Jonathan G Koomey

• A.B, MS, Ph.D.
• CEO at Koomey Analytics

In response to Yossi Sheffi’s article, “The Real Inconvenient Truth,” Mayers and Koomey argue for the use of a variety of urgent measures to address climate change, rather than focusing primarily on long-term development and dependency on carbon capture and storage. Citing the now competitive cost of renewable power and the success of several count...

There are a growing number of blockchain applications in energy systems, but surprisingly little is known about their direct energy demand outside of cryptocurrency applications. Addressing this knowledge gap should be a key policy priority so that the energy use of blockchain systems can be better understood and managed as applications proliferate...

Jonathan Koomey is president of Koomey Analytics and has in the past been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, and UC Berkeley. He's one of the leading international experts on the economics of climate solutions and the energy and environmental effects of information technology. Dr. Koomey holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from...

Growth in energy use has slowed owing to efficiency gains that smart policies can help maintain in the near term

Data centers are energy intensive buildings that have grown in size and number to meet the increasing demands of a digital economy. This paper presents a bottom-up model to estimate data center electricity demand in the United States over a 20 year period and examines observed and projected electricity use trends in the context of changing data cen...

Producing, transporting, and refining crude oil into fuels such as gasoline and diesel accounts for ∼15 to 40% of the “well-to-wheels” life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of transport fuels (1). Reducing emissions from petroleum production is of particular importance, as current transport fleets are almost entirely dependent on liquid petrole...

Technology and policy implications of global energy and emissions scenarios can be difficult to analyze because underlying assumptions and drivers of scenarios are rarely made explicit. This article documents methods for standardizing emissions scenario results that can be applied to virtually any scenario, enabling more meaningful comparisons amon...

Constrained oil supply has given way to abundance at a time when strong action on climate change is wavering. Recent innovation has pushed US oil production to all-time heights and driven oil prices lower. At the same time, attention to climate policy is wavering due to geopolitical upheaval. Nevertheless, climate-wise choices in the oil sector rem...

Global oils are diversifying. This underscores the need to compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) implications of different petroleum sources and their pathways. The Oil-Climate Index (OCI) conducts such a “crude-centric” lifecycle analysis of GHGs from a barrel of oil through the value chain—from production, transport, refining, all the way to complete...

In order to understand the electricity use of Internet services, it is important to have accurate estimates for the average electricity intensity of transmitting data through the Internet (measured as kilowatt-hours per gigabyte [kWh/GB]). This study identifies representative estimates for the average electricity intensity of fixed-line Internet tr...

This report estimates historical data center electricity consumption back to 2000, relying on previous studies and historical shipment data, and forecasts consumption out to 2020 based on new trends and the most recent data available. In 2014, data centers in the U.S. consumed an estimated 70 billion kWh, representing about 1.8% of total U.S. elect...

Lovering et al. (2016) present data on the overnight costs of more than half of nuclear reactors built worldwide since the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that this consolidated data set offers more accurate insights than previous country-level assessments. Unfortunately, the authors make analytical choices that mask nuclear power's...

A recent article in Technological Forecasting & Social Change presents a calculation of historical rebound effects in thirty sectors of the United States economy over the period 1960-2005 (Saunders 2013). Here, we show that the empirical data set used to generate those findings-a prominent input-output data set developed by Jorgenson (2007)-is not...

Richard F. Hirsh is a professor of History and Science & Technology Studies at Virginia Tech; he employs social-science approaches to help understand events in the electric power system. His books include Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry and Power Loss: Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric U...

The efficiency of computing at peak output has increased rapidly since the dawn of the computer age. This paper summarizes some of the key factors affecting the efficiency of computing in all usage modes. While there is still great potential for improving the efficiency of computing devices, we will need to alter how we do computing in the next few...

This research investigates the carbon footprint of the lifecycle of console games, using the example of PlayStation®3 distribution in the UK. We estimate total carbon equivalent emissions for an average 8.8-gigabyte (GB) game based on data for 2010. The bulk of emissions are accounted for by game play, followed by production and distribution. Two d...

?It ain?t what you don?t know that gets you into trouble. It?s what you know for sure that just ain?t so.?

The conventional benefit-cost approach to understanding the climate problem has serious limitations. Fortunately, an alternative way of thinking about the problem has arisen in recent decades, based on analyzing the cost effectiveness of achieving a normatively defined warming target. This approach yields important insights, showing that delaying a...

Investigates global climate stabilization targets for energy policy and planning, and deals with the greenhouse issue as a whole. Part one provides the scientific basis and risk-minimization arguments for specific limits on cumulative global fossil carbon emissions. It reviews the current understanding of the greenhouse effect, the history of the e...

Until recently, the main environmental concerns associated with information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been their use-phase electricity consumption and the chemicals associated with their manufacture, and the environmental effects of these technologies on other parts of the economy have largely been ignored. With the advent of mobil...

As the energy use of games consoles has risen, due to increased ownership and use and improved performance and functionality, various governments have shown an interest in ways to improve their energy efficiency. Estimates of console energy use vary widely between 32 and 500 kWh/year. Most such estimates are unreliable as they are based on incorrec...

Data centre services hold promise for reducing societal carbon emissions, but an imperfect and evolving portfolio of performance metrics obscures which data centre characteristics correspond to low-carbon operations. Meanwhile, policymakers face a pressing question: can we identify and promote tangible characteristics that reliably represent low-ca...

It is tempting to attribute variations in support for nuclear power to prominent accidents such as Three Mile Island in the United States or Fukushima in Japan. To illuminate how such attribution can be problematic, the authors discuss the historical context of the Three Mile Island accident in the United States. They point out that the US nuclear...

This report details the data, assumptions and methodology for end-use forecasting of appliance energy use in the US residential sector. Our analysis uses the modeling framework provided by the Appliance Model in the Residential End-Use Energy Planning System (REEPS), which was developed by the Electric Power Research Institute. In this modeling fra...

This study investigates the effect of modeling assumptions about levelized costs and market penetration on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) forecast for wind technologies. The AEO’s annual report of energy supply, demand, and prices through 2020 is based on results from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) National...

Data centers are a significant and growing component of electricity demand in the United States. This paper presents a bottom-up model that can be used to estimate total data center electricity demand within a region as well as the potential electricity savings associated with energy efficiency improvements. The model is applied to estimate 2008 U....

The electrical efficiency of computation has doubled roughly every year and a half for more than six decades, a pace of change comparable to that for computer performance and electrical efficiency in the microprocessor era. These efficiency improvements enabled the creation of laptops, smart phones, wireless sensors, and other mobile computing devi...

Structural constancy, both across time and across variable conditions, is a necessary precondition for accurate forecasting. Physical systems exhibit structural constancy, but economic and social systems generally do not. In this paper we examine the effects of policy, technology, and price volatility in commodity markets on the relationship betwee...

Our goal for this analysis is an accurate general overview of trends in compute capabilities and power use over time, and for this purpose, the metric of computations per kWh is a reasonable one. We calculate this metric for dozens of different computers, ranging from laptop PCs to mainframes and integrated supercomputers. We rely on long-term perf...

Export Date: 12 February 2018

The impacts of information and communications technology (ICT) on the environment have been a rich area for research in recent years. A prime example is the continuing rise of digital music delivery, which has obvious potential for reducing the energy and environmental impacts of producing and delivering music to final consumers. This study assesse...

Data centers are the heart of the global economy. In the mid-1990s, the costs of these large computing facilities were dominated by the costs of the information technology (IT) equipment that they housed, but no longer. As the electrical power used by IT equipment per dollar of equipment cost has increased, the annualized facility costs associated...

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The electrical efficiency of computers has been rising even faster than Moore's Law.

The growing investment by governments and electric utilities in energy efficiency programs highlights the need for simple tools to help assess and explain the size of the potential resource. One technique that is commonly used in that effort is to characterize electricity savings in terms of avoided power plants, because it is easier for people to...

tangible benefits IT brings, but also because the underlying technological trends proceed at easily measurable, remarkably predictable, and unusually rapid rates. The number of transistors on a chip has doubled more or less every two years for decades, a trend that is popularly (but often imprecisely) encapsulated as “Moore’s law”. This article exp...

The direct electricity used by data centers has become an important issue in recent years as demands for new Internet services (such as search, music downloads, video-on-demand, social networking, and telephony) have become more widespread. This study estimates historical electricity used by data centers worldwide and regionally on the basis of mor...

Rapid growth in internet communication in the last decade has augmented and, to some extent, replaced other means of information transfer. This paper attempts to calculate the energy used by "the internet" in transferring a discrete quantity of information and the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this case, we aim to determine the ener...

This paper presents an estimate of the potential for energy efficiency improvements in the U.S. building sector by 2030. The analysis uses the Energy Information Administration's AEO 2007 Reference Case as a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, and applies percentage savings estimates by end use drawn from several prior efficiency potential studies. T...

We present a reactor-by-reactor analysis of historical busbar costs for 99 nuclear reactors in the United States, and compare those costs with recent projections for next-generation US reactors. We argue that cost projections far different from median historical costs require more justification than estimates that lie close to those medians. Our an...

As countries begin to reassess and expand their energy research and development programs, it is appropriate to understand the likely costs of alternate approaches. Unfortunately, communities of experts have a well-known optimistic bias in their judgments. We review findings from several disciplines that underscore this tendency toward overconfidenc...

In response to energy security and environmental concerns, the U.S. is collaborating with nine other countries to develop fourth-generation reactor technology that the industry intended to be safer than current reactors, available at lower total cost, and incurring financial risks no greater than those for other energy technologies. From a three-de...

This report is the appendices to a companion report, prepared in response to the request from Congress stated in Public Law 109-431 (H.R. 5646),"An Act to Study and Promote the Use of Energy Efficient Computer Servers in the United States." This report assesses current trends in energy use and energy costs of data centers and servers in the U.S. (e...

This report was prepared in response to the request from Congress stated in Public Law 109-431 (H.R. 5646),"An Act to Study and Promote the Use of Energy Efficient Computer Servers in the United States." This report assesses current trends in energy use and energy costs of data centers and servers in the U.S. (especially Federal government faciliti...

A recently published article in the Wall Street Journal cited increased power density requirements for servers on the order of 3000 W/sf. While existing datacenter power consumption patterns do not currently suggest such high power densities, emergent high performance servers may in fact require substantial changes to facility design of power and H...

2 Executive Summary As electric utility interest in cost effective opportunities to reduce electrical consumption has grown, attention is increasingly turning to the electronic products previously classified as "miscellaneous load" or "plug load." These devices include a wide range of products operating on ac-dc power supplies, such as computers, m...

Learning - i.e. the acquisition of new information that leads to changes in our assessment of uncertainty plays a prominent role in the international climate policy debate. For example, the view that we should postpone actions until we know more continues to be influential. The latest work on learning and climate change includes new theoretical mod...

RESUMEN El sector energ�tico est� experimentando transformaciones sustanciales como consecuencia del desarrollo de las energ�as renovables, cuyo impulso no s�lo aporta beneficios ambientales, sino que tambi�n reduce la dependencia energ�tica y contribuye a la creaci�n de empleo. En este trabajo realizamos un an�lisis prospectivo del empleo en el se...

As information and communications technology matures, the nature of the infrastructure that supports it evolves and special-izes. While the telephone infrastructure had been built as a network with central offices acting as hubs, the information and communi-cations technology maintains a similar structure, but instead, has hubs of specialized Inter...

This article examines the widely cited claim that the network electricity use associated with a wireless personal digital assistant PDA is equal to the electricity consumed by a refrigerator. It compiles estimates of the data flows of wireless PDAs and related networks and allocates network and phone system electricity use based on these estimates....

The primary objective in this paper is to focus attention on the empirical basis for skepticism about the effectiveness of the market mechanism in yielding cost-effective energy efficiency improvements. The authors present a series of examples that provide evidence for market failures related to energy efficiency. The discuss the role of energy eff...

▪ Abstract This paper compares the results of four recent engineering-economic studies of the potential for energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The review includes a sector-by-sector assessment of specific technology opportunities and their costs, as estimated by (a) five National Laboratories, (b) the Tellus Institute, (c) the...

One of the most striking things about forecasters is their lack of historical perspective. They rarely do retrospectives, even though looking back at past work can both illuminate the reasons for its success or failure, and improve the methodologies of current and future forecasts. One of the best and most famous retrospectives is that by Hans Land...

This paper provides a general overview of electricity consumption and peak load in California, by both sector and end use. We examine the growth in electricity demand between 1980 and 2000, as well as the composition of electricity end uses in 1999. One of the main conclusions from this analysis is that electricity use in California in the 1990s di...

Don't take figures for facts just because you see them in print. The author cites common misconceptions about the growth of Internet data and energy use associated with information technologies. He concludes that the misleading statistics mentioned here are just a few of many. Your best defense against being fooled by them is to think for yourself...

Don't take figures for facts just because you see them in print. The author cites common misconceptions about the growth of Internet data and energy use associated with information technologies. He concludes that the misleading statistics mentioned here are just a few of many. Your best defense against being fooled by them is to think for yourself...

There are expanding national discussions on a critical number of energy-related issues ranging from the importance of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions to enhancing the nation’s energy security and moving towards a competitive electric utility industry. The complex interactions surrounding all of these issues have motivated the de...

A recent (1996–2000) acceleration of declines in energy and carbon intensity in the US remains largely unexplained. This study uses Divisia decomposition and regression to test two candidate explanations—fuel mix and weather. The Divisia method demonstrates that fuel mix does not explain the declines in carbon intensity. The fuel mix, both overall...

Abstract This paper explores how long-term energy forecasts are created and why they are useful. It focuses on forecasts of energy use in the United States for the year 2000 but considers only long-term predictions, i.e., those covering two or more decades. The motivation is current interest in global warming forecasts, some of which run beyond a c...

s Abstract Students of public policy sometimes envision an idealized policy pro-cess where competent data collection and incisive analysis on both sides of a debate lead to reasoned judgments and sound decisions. Unfortunately, numbers that prove decisive in policy debates are not always carefully developed, credibly documented, or correct. This pa...

The electricity consumption of data center hosting facilities (also known as server farms or server hotels) is a growing concern to utility demand forecasters, data center facility managers, energy analysts and policy makers. Combining estimates of US computer room floor space for hosting facilities with total computer room power density, we found...

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In spite of the recent explosive growth in the use of office and network equipment, there has been no recent study (until this one) that estimates in detail how much electricity is consumed by that equipment in the United States.In this study, we examined energy use by office equipment and network equipment at the end of 1999. We classified office...

This report and related documents can be downloaded at http://enduse.LBL.gov/Projects/InfoTech.html August 2000 This work was supported by the Office of Atmospheric Programs of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098. 1 Origins of this rebuttal In the past year and a...

In spite of the recent explosive growth in the use of office and network equipment, there has been no recent study that estimates in detail how much electricity is consumed by that equipment in the United States. In this study, we examined energy use by office equipment and network equipment at the end of 1999. We classified office equipment into 1...

Introduction II. Data Center Fundamentals III. The Current Debate IV. Defining Common Metrics V. Estimating Data Center Loads VI. Using Measured Data to Confirm Power Needs VII. Reasons for Exaggerated Forecasts VIII. Implications of Findings IX. Conclusions Appendices: Appendix A. Detailed PDU Data Appendix B. Frequently Used Terms References Mitc...

In 1992 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced Energy Star®, a voluntary labeling program designed to identify and promote energy-efficient products, in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Since then, the EPA, now in partnership with the US Department of Energy (DOE), has expanded the program to cover nearly the entire buildi...

Analyses of alternative futures often present results for a limited set of scenarios, with little, if any, sensitivity analysis to identify the factors affecting the scenario results. This approach creates an artificial impression of certainty associated with the scenarios considered, and inhibits understanding of the underlying forces. This paper...

This article presents dollar, energy, and carbon savings associated with adoption of more energy-efficient technologies in the buildings sector for two policy scenarios that represent departures from business-as-usual (BAU) case assumptions. Both scenarios result in net savings in the total cost of providing energy services relative to the BAU case...

This paper summarizes the results of a study—Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future—that assess how energy-efficient and clean energy technologies can address key energy and environmental challenges facing the US. A particular focus of this study is the energy, environmental, and economic impacts of different public policies and programs. Hundreds of...

This report describes an analysis of possible technology-based scenarios for the U.S. energy system that would result in both carbon savings and net economic benefits. We use a modified version of the Energy Information Administration's National Energy Modeling System (LBNL-NEMS) to assess the potential energy, carbon, and bill savings from a portf...

The Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future study relied primarily on “bottom-up” technology-based methods to estimate costs associated with its scenarios. These methods, however, do not allow for calculation of economy-wide or general equilibrium effects of the policies considered. We propose and apply a means of combining the bottom-up estimates with...

Current estimates of data center power requirements are greatly overstated because they are based on criteria that incorporate oversized, redundant systems, and several safety factors. Furthermore, most estimates assume that data centers are filled to capacity. For the most part, these numbers are unsubstantiated. Although there are many estimates...

During the past three years, working with more than 150 organizations representing public and private stakeholders, EPRI has developed the Electricity Technology Roadmap. The Roadmap identifies several major strategic challenges that must be successfully addressed to ensure a sustainable future in which electricity continues to play an important ro...

ENERGY STAR7 is a voluntary labeling program designed to identify and promote energy-efficient products. Operated jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), ENERGY STAR labels exist for more than twenty products, spanning office equipment, residential heating and cooling equipment, new homes, comme...

Reductions in lighting energy have secondary effects on cooling and heating energy consumption. In general, lighting energy reductions increase heating and decrease cooling requirements of a building. The net change in a building's annual energy requirements, however, is difficult to quantify and depends on the building characteristics, operating c...

ABSTRACT Many forecasters use models estimated based on historical elasticities and other behavioral parameters to dolong-term forecasts. The relationships embodied in these parameters are useful in the short run, but mislead and confound ,when ,used to conduct ,long-run forecasts (because policy choices and events will change,those relationships i...

ENERGY STAR [registered trademark] is a voluntary labeling program designed to identify and promote energy-efficient products, buildings and practices. Operated jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), ENERGY STAR labels exist for more than thirty products, spanning office equipment, residential...

Minimum efficiency standards for residential appliances have been implemented in the US for a large number of residential end-uses. This analysis assesses the potential energy, dollar, and carbon impacts of those standards at the state and national levels. We explicitly account for improvements in efficiency likely to occur in the absence of standa...

This article assesses the importance of the residential miscellaneous electricity end use. Miscellaneous electricity is one of the largest and fastest growing residential end uses. Consumer electronics and halogen torchiere lamps are primary catalysts of end use growth. Approximately half of all consumer electronics energy is consumed while in stan...

This paper summarizes a detailed assessment of the achievable cost-effective potential for reducing carbon emissions in 2010 in the US residential and commercial buildings sectors. Our analysis shows that substantial reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions can be realized through the use of more energy-efficient technologies that save money a...

Historically, residential energy and carbon saving efforts have targeted conventional end uses such as water heating, lighting and refrigeration. The emergence of new household appliances has transformed energy use from a few large and easily identifiable end uses into a broad array of ''miscellaneous'' energy services. This group of so called misc...

This report describes an analysis of possible technology-based scenarios for the U.S. energy system that would result in both carbon savings and net economic benefits. We use a modified version of the Energy Information Administration's National Energy Modeling System (LBNL-NEMS) to assess the potential energy, carbon, and bill savings from a portf...

Analysts assessing policies and programs to improve energy efficiency in the residential sector require disparate input data from a variety of sources. This sourcebook, which updates a previous report, compiles these input data into a single location. The data provided include information on end-use unit energy consumption (UEC) values of appliance...