Most Green ICT attention focuses on the data center, but there is growing evidence that the data center represents a minority of total ICT energy consumption and carbon emissions. The latest supporting data comes from Australia .

The data is contained in a report about the country's 2009 ICT energy and CO2e titled Carbon and Computers in Australia, commissioned and published by the Australian Computer Society. The report attributes only ~34% to data centers and ~9% to network infrastructures*, the majority being attributed to edge gear. Interestingly, households outweigh enterprises 60% to 40% in edge gear energy consumption and carbon emissions. (See our ever-growing inventory of over 14 billion pieces of edge gear.)

A presenter at a US National Science Foundation workshop put the issue well: "Goal must be energy-proportional computing at all levels - Not just in the data center" The challenge is that data centers represent a concentrated point of leverage amenable to technological solutions while edge gear also requires dealing with behavior and cultural issues like entitlements.

I was struck that the edge gear category "Printers and Imaging Equipment" represented an amount of consumption and emission similar to that of PCs. Both of these edge gear categories were a little bigger than the servers, themselves. You can see the whole breakdown by device category on page 9 of the above-linked document.

*This does not include edge networking equipment in households and enterprises, which alone accounts for 7% of the total, and is bundled under edge gear is this post's summary of the report data.