From: "Andre Oppermann"
From running a Colo in a place with ridiculus high electricity engery costs (Zurich/Switzerland) I can tell you that the energy consuption of routers/telco (70%) and servers (30%) changes changes significantly throughout the day. It pretty much follows the traffic graph. There is a solid base load just because the stuff is powered up and from there it goes up as much as 20-30% depending on the routing/computing load of the boxes. To simplify things you can say that per packet you have that many "mWh" (milli-Watt-hours) per packet switched/routed or http requests answered over the base load. I haven't tried to calulate how much energy routing a packet on a Cisco 12k or Juniper M40 cost though. Would be very interesting if someone (student) could do that calculation.
the same variation between night and day here - but from our point of view the consumption of the air-pack's are making the differences during the day ... traffic-graph and outside temperature-graphs show more or less the same up and down. Would we interesting to have separate values for the power consumption between server-equipment and air-co ... Greetings Nik