BANGALORE, INDIA: As hardware and bandwidth costs continue to drop, the biggest expense associated with large data centres has been their power draw; it's estimated that 1.5 percent of US energy production now goes to feed them.

This is according to a new study from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and networking company Akamai.

Although there have been a variety of solutions for increasing the energy efficiency of these facilities, a new paper describes another approach to cutting power costs: shifting loads to wherever the power is cheaper.

Although it won't save any actual power, researchers have found that it may be possible to save the money spent on power by redirecting data center work to locations where the electricity prices are cheaper.

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Cutting the Electric Bill for Internet-Scale Systems