Yesterday I was talking to Christian Belady, a technologist at Hewlett-Packard. Belady is the brain behind the Green Grid’s power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio, an energy efficiency metric for data centers. I asked him what he thought was driving the growth of IT energy use, and his answer was surprising.

He said IT efficiency is driving IT energy consumption. The more efficiency we get out of our systems, the more we will use them. Which is why data center efficiency is never going to drive down IT energy use.

“The cost of computation is going down,” Belady said. “Performance per watt doubles every two years. If you look over an 8 year period, a typical platform is 16 times more efficient than it was 8 years prior.”

Belady used gasoline as an example. If the price of gas went down sixteen times in eight years, what would you expect to happen to gasoline demand? Instead of buying electricity we’d have a generators in our backyards. “My air conditioner would run on gasoline, not electricity.”

The irony according to Belady, is that by improving the efficiency of IT systems, we’re driving the cost down even faster — therefore driving up consumption.

Funny side note: Belady is headed to Denver next week for a Green Grid Technical Summit. I was looking into heading out there to cover the event and called the Green Grid’s PR team at Blanc & Otus to see if that would be possible. The representative left me a message saying that the event was closed to the press, and I wouldn’t want to go to a boring conference with a bunch of engineers anyway.

My thoughts exactly. Who would want to watch a bunch of mad scientist engineers duke it out over competing approaches to energy efficiency? I’d much rather hear the outcome summarized by non-technical, media-trained IT execs after the fact. Thanks for looking out for me.