Seems to be a mental mishmash. For one thing, they are taking it as given that temperature is relevant to device lifetime, but Google's FAST 2007 paper said "higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates".
Second weird thing is that it says cooling accounts for 40% of data center power usage, but this comes right after discussing PUE without contextualizing PUE with concrete numbers. State-of-the-art PUE is below 1.1. The article then links to a pretty flimsy source that actually says server loads are 40% ... this implies a PUE of 2.5. That could be true for global IT loads including small commercial server rooms, but it hardly seems relevant when discussing new builds of large facilities.
Finally, it's irritating when these articles are grounded in equivalents of American homes. The fact is that a home just doesn't use a lot of energy, so it's a silly unit of measure. These figures should be based on something that actually uses energy, like cars or aircraft or something.
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