Three and a half years ago, the New York Times ran an article on data center efficiency: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html. It's relatively old news, but I've seen it reposted a few places recently so I thought I'd react to it here.
It's disingenuous that the article never mentions that US per capita electricity consumption is actually falling. The US Energy Information Administration has great data their Monthly Energy Reviews: http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/... though I'm having trouble finding the raw CSV's to make my own graphs. From a recent report, even total electricity consumption has leveled off over the last 15 years:
