I am doing some research into our data center cooling requirements. I came across this article and thought this bit was interesting:
So how much does it cost to power 100TB (raw) of storage, and how much CO2 emissions are generated per year? That, of course, depends on the type of storage, the number and size of the disk drives, the cost per kWh of power, cooling costs and the average number of lbs of CO2 produced per kWh.
One example is a single storage system using 750GB SATA disk drives yielding 144TB of raw storage in a single cabinet footprint, which would require less than 52,560 kWh and cost about $10,512 per year with an emissions footprint of about 39.42 CO2 tons. To account for cooling costs, simply double the above numbers for a worst-case scenario. By comparison, a 1999 Chevrolet Tahoe generates about 7 to 10 tons of CO2 per year, while a Lexus RX333, depending on miles driven, generates about 5-6 tons of CO2 per year, and a 24 cubic foot refrigerator yields about 1.22 tons of CO2 per year.