SDD Topic has been refreshed!
A report in 2008 stated that by 2010 electricity used in global data centres would likely account for between 1.1% and 1.5% of total electricity use.
One measure used in data centres is known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
A PUE of 2.0 means that for every watt of IT power, an additional watt is consumed to cool and distribute power
The European Union has established a Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres
http://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/ict-codes-conduct/data-centres-energy-efficiency
The image below shows the PUE rating of Google Data Centres (source) for further reading on PUE (link)
Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a tour inside a Google data center, and shares details about the security, sustainability and the core architecture of Google's infrastructure.
Further reading:
A facebook engineer also explains how they can reduce their usage in this video (Facebook Link)