Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University have conducted a study and found that moving common applications to the cloud can save significant amounts of energy.  The study is summarized in this report.  According to Scientific Computing,

“The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing, etc.). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut information technology energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in Los Angeles.”

What is unique about this study is not only the findings, but also the model that was created to do the study – it is free and available for public use.  This model is called CLEER (Cloud Energy and Emissions Research Model) and it analyzes the energy and carbon impacts of cloud computing.  It is available to the public here.