While yes, datacenters will be a significant consumer of energy in the foreseeable future, I honestly don't feel bringing "cloud" into the picture gives relevance other than the buzzwords.
Like what the article actually says, cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved. Imagine the amount of redundancy an organisation have to have to handle peak demand, vs a cloud provider aggregating the demands together.
The graph is probably even more telling. With (assumed) increased need for technology going forward, we actually have almost static demand for energy due to these technologies. It's actually a good news!
End of the day, yes technology is expected to consume more energy in the future, but in a good way, they will be somewhat aggregated to cloud. That means we can look into solutions targeted to cloud providers that actually have significant impact to the environment (eg. more incentives to use solar panels in cloud datacenter)
Like what the article actually says, cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved. Imagine the amount of redundancy an organisation have to have to handle peak demand, vs a cloud provider aggregating the demands together.
The graph is probably even more telling. With (assumed) increased need for technology going forward, we actually have almost static demand for energy due to these technologies. It's actually a good news!
End of the day, yes technology is expected to consume more energy in the future, but in a good way, they will be somewhat aggregated to cloud. That means we can look into solutions targeted to cloud providers that actually have significant impact to the environment (eg. more incentives to use solar panels in cloud datacenter)