Are data centers part of the efficiency solution, or a part of the problem? Well, they're both.

These modern steel mills require electricity capacity equivalent to 30 nuclear power plants each year worldwide. And at some facilities, up to 90 percent of energy is wasted due to redundancies and underutilization of equipment. At the same time, however, these facilities have powered an IT industry that has brought extraordinary new efficiencies across our economy.

In this podcast, we'll talk to Kathrin Winkler, the Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC Corporation, about the role of IT in efficiency and about how a large firm with a portfolio of data centers attacks energy consumption.

This week marks the official launch of our energy efficiency channel. We've released a free report on "intelligent efficiency" that looks at how IT has dramatically reshaped the energy efficiency industry. You can download the report here.

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