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Google's Addiction to Cheap Electricity
Googling Yourself writes "Harpers magazine has published a blueprint of Google's new data center at The Dalles, Oregon where they will be tapping into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. Although the plans show three 68,680-square-foot storage buildings, only two of the buildings have been constructed so far. Based on a projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot, the Dalles plant can be expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity. Google's server farm represents a new phase in the transformation of the Columbia River over the past half-century. Across the street from the Google data center is an example the last generation of high energy consumers; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also planning data centers on the Columbia River."
Why don't they build it in DC? The amount of political hot-air around these days would surely be sufficient to power a substantial wind farm.
Site for massive technology company has high power requirements? well of course.
Companies prefer low costs to high costs? k, right on.
This story brought to you by The Dalles, Oregon Chamber of Commerce.
Of course companies that have large compute clusters are migrating to areas that offer steady low cost power and cooling. It is simple business. Power and Cooling account for the majority of the expense of running a DataCenter. The draw is a lot of extremely cheap electricity combined with cold outside air (allowing bypass cooling) is something that is to important to pass up if you have thousands of servers.
One other thing to keep in mind is that in many places the power infrastructure is strained to its limit. For example I heard that to get 1 megawatt of power in downtown San Francisco it will take upwards of Three years for PG&E to deliver. Putting DataCenters in locations that aren't constrained is just good business sense.
Colin McNamara - CCIE #18233 "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer"
Their own search engine has popularized Richard C. Duncan's Olduvai Theory (.pdf) which now has empirical support.
News at 11.
americans seem to have.
While visiting the hoover dam, there also was talk about "cheap electricity" for people in the vincinity.
isnt it uneconomical to sell it cheap if its more worth somewhere else?
With 320 kV lines, you could transmit electricity across the united states with losing 20%, at most. And to reach states with much higher electricity prices, you could stay within single digit percentages of loss.
So why sell it for cheap? its not like the capacities are unlimited...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Maybe the appointed monopolies in other regions don't to buy it?
Most people who drive through The Dalles leave thinking of it as just another Pacific Northwest backwater surviving on ranching and apple orchards. But there has to be one hell of a fiber optic connection running up that way these days...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Google is the queen of Distributed Computing.
Why do they feel the need to consolidate and build such a massively-dense data center?
The idea of building small, dense racks is outweight by power and cooling requirements.
I'm sure the math adds up on paper but one thing worries me: at the speed at which Google is hiring new and inexperienced employees are they really doing the space, power, and cooling math correctly?
Kriston
oh yea thats the good stuff!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
I thought Google wanted to use green electricity and be CO2-neutral, and that doesn't require a specific place (well, a sunny and/or windy place would be nice).
My photo's.
Come put one in Saskatchewan. It would benefit our economy and our (commercial) power rate is 0.0845-ish per kWh.
They should build a data center here in New York State's North Country. We have cheap and plentiful water power, plus its cold enough in the winter that cooling the data center is simple: just open a window.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
50 years ago the Columbia river gorge was filled by the aluminum industry looking for cheap electricity to run their furnaces.
I guess Internet servers are the new fires of industry.
Nobody wants the high voltage lines in their backyard. High voltage lines cause cancer, you know. They're currently fighting NYRI, which is trying to bring upstate power down to New York City.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Google: Help I need my cheap fix Microsoft: Google is going cold turkey again
Does google have electricity receptors I don't know about?
Google needs electicity to power computers as they don't run on steam.
It makes sense that they would get it as cheap as they could.
It disappoints me that a three-word smartass comment gets modded up, even when it misses the point.
TFA addresses much larger issues than shopping for cheap electricity. It's about how the Internet companies require vastly more energy to run than most people realize, and how taxpayers are footing the bill for a lot of it.
Transporting large amounts of power still costs money... all those 320kV lines? Those use large amounts of copper ($$), they have to be mantained ($$)... There are some lines in place, yes, but the more power you send farther, the more cable you have to run, and up goes the cost of providing the power. That cost then gets passed on to the consumer, in the form of not-so-cheap-any-more electricity.
It's more of a local contract thing. In order to build the plant they had to say they'd sell everything the locals needed in exchange for building the plant. Then, its the power brokers who make the fortune selling it across the US.
In San Francisco PG&E could easily get another MW by bumping up the incentives for solar power in the local area affected. Incentives should be market driven. Basically if you live in an area where there are a lot of companies looking to use up more power. Instead of moving in more high power lines they simply set higher incentives for more Solar cells to increase the available capacity in the specific cities that they request power. Lot of times the base load during the evening/night is more than enough to accomodate all the extra power requirements that a business would request.
It's a win-win for PG&E because they get the bigger customer and they get the solar power at a cheaper rate than buying it from elsewhere.
This not news at all. Dates on the blueprints are sept 2005, it is 2.5 years old.
This datacenter has been in operation for a long time and is by no means new, and not even the largest currently in operation. Sheesh.
Download a file, kill a salmon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google is abusing electricity? Man, that can't be good.
Serving up text or serving up a picture of text...Every time someone does that an old hard drive falls into a landfill.
Of course they cause cancer but the answer is not to spend ten hours a day over a span of years within a couple of metres of them. I think the real reason for problems with distribution is little desire and incentive to build infrastructure.
I shouldn't say people, I should say Utilities.
:)) could deliver a customer like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, US Steel, Alcoa, etc. based on the promise of cheap nuclear electricity.
If Utilities were smart, they could use circumstances like this to push Nuclear Power.
High profile companies looking for cheap electricity. You can build a Nuclear Power Plant anywhere, not just where there's a river or lots of wind.
Some of these smaller towns and cities, who like sheep, jump on the "No Nukes" bandwagon might think differently if OG&E (I live in Oklahoma
It has been my experience that more than anything else, rural places like JOBS. If you could attract a high profile customer to a place who, normally, wouldn't care less, Greenpeace (not really fair to pick just Greenpeace, but they are the best known anti-nuclear group) might find it very difficult to drum up support against a nuclear power plant when people can actually see how it will effect them.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
If they want cheap electricity and cooling, they should build a centre near Churchill falls. It's a naturally cold place, and electricity produced at the massive hydroelectric plant there is presently sold to Hydro-Quebec at an unconscionably reduced rate (i.e. the market value prior to the pre-1970's oil crisis). It's a ripe situation to be taken advantage of by a company that benefits from cheap electricity.
I'm addicted to food!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I live in Portland and this is the first I've heard of various tech companies building along the Columbia. It kind of sucks to see Oregon becoming more popular - something like 95% of the state lives west of Portland. I don't want to see the state becoming like California.
:(
So if you're thinking of moving to Oregon, remember: It rains here ALL THE TIME. There's hippies everywhere. Nearly half the women in Portland are lesbians too!
Actually, I didn't make that last line up.
*sigh* Ever our governor once said "Oregon: a nice place to visit, but please don't stay."
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Efficiency = Power / # of users
The author looks only at the total power used (and a total wild guess at that), and not how many people are using it. A centralized datacenter means than when one person is idle, another person can use the system. Also, when part of the world is sleeping, another part can use the same computers. It simply makes sense to do it that way.
I assume the author has another article/picture about trains which decries their inefficiency and fuel usage when compared to driving her own car?
It's a "natural fit" for a search provider / advertising company to go into the most heavily regulated business in existence? Sure, they have cash, but to successfully compete with the incumbents in a particular industry requires more than that: it takes expertise. There's a reason why even the largest companies tend to focus on specific markets, going so far as to spin off profitable divisions if they don't line up with the company's overall direction. A company that tries to do everything will generally end up being slow, inflexible, and bureaucratic.
And before I get modded down: how exactly is Google supposed to get the power to run not just the servers, but the cooling, network switches, and other hardware that will keep it from the equivalent of being Slashdotted?
Considering that Google is one of the top sites on the Internet, I frankly have no problem with this, considering there aren't any viable solutions to produce power of that magnitude (though it'll be interesting if Google eventually just builds its own power plant -- GoogleVolts FTW!); and after all, they've got shareholders to look after...gotta keep the company profitable. Google (and the other companies on that will be on that river) will probably donate some of its funds to carbon offsets to shut everybody up and get good PR at the same time.
This taxpayer says "better the funds go to Google (or other companies) rather than to a pointless war."
But I don't live in the town in question, so what I say is moot. But don't complain to Google...complain to the city for pimping themselves out to get the corps to build there. We've been down this road hundreds of times across the country with Wal-Mart.
And as an aside, I'm a little loath to quote that Harper's article as gospel considering that the server count in the article went from "1,000s" to "a thousand times more?! With no source?! I have to call shenanigans on that hand-waving, sorry.
(Full disclosure: I have a GMail account. But I would say the above if this was say, Wikipedia that's using that power.)
Where is the fuel for all those generators in case of a long term outage? Or are they going to depend on the small tanks under the generators? Or are they going to depend on a natural gas supply?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I wonder how high Google's energy use REALLY is? Two big factors:
1) The 108MW figure assumes 500 watts per square foot, simply because that is industry standard. I just don't think Google is industry standard 8-). They wouldn't necessarily even have x86-compatible systems if something else has better performance/watt (although I suspect they do use x86 still.) Since they cluster they don't have to buy anything even very high performance as opposed to low-power -- especially if it turns out usual uses are more I/O bound than CPU-bound. This would imply lower watts/square foot. On the other hand, maybe they get boxes that pack even more CPUs than normal into a square foot (more watts/square foot.)
2) "Thinking outside the box". Google has for instance put solar panels up on one office complex they have, which generates 30% of the power it uses. Not saying they'll shave 30% off the power use in a data center (since they use more power than offices) but I suspect they have the "big brains" at Google doing R&D on any ways to cut unneeded power use, much more than at other companies where.. well, hell, in some cases they outsource the whole data center to a third party.
I don't know for sure about the other states/province but they've been trying to get tax writeoffs (aka bribes of tax dollars) to build more server farms here in Washington State.
And supposedly, the other states - Oregon and Idaho.
British Columbia, which has most of the dams (and is building two Columbia River treaty dams now near Revelstoke BC and Trail BC) provides most of the power, so I presume they may also be included in these attempts to get tax subsidies plus cheap power.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just sneak "F.O.B. Boulder City, NV" into the contract.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Not from around here, I take it? We have an entire department of uneconomical projects. We call it the Bureau of Reclamation. Their job is to build vast, expensive capital projects and subsequently give the benefits to select landowners for a pittance. For example, the Bureau will build a dam and sell the electricity to nearby farmers well below the market price of electricity, sometimes even below the cost of generation. The Bureau will then also sell the water from the dam to the same farmers at a fixed cost in perpetuity. On top of all that, a typical Bureau farm project grows a needless crop which the federal government subsidizes. You can find plenty of farms in the western USA where the farmers get electricity at $0.05 per kilowatt hour and water at $9 per acre-foot and are growing federally subsidized crops such as cotton. In the vast majority of Bureau of Reclamation projects the initial capital costs have never been paid by the farmers who benefit.
Is as hypocritical as they come... They locate in Oregon touting "clean" energy provided by hydroelectric power - never mind the salmon kills.
Nonetheless... can you imagine the uproar among their fan base if they would have relocated to the Ohio Valley where cheap - coal fired electricity exists and a region that desperately needs the jobs.
8000 Watts = 27,300 btu/hr
(34,100 btu/hr) / 1.08 / 30 = 1050 CFM per rack
And that is assuming that you have an airtight seal between the hot and cold aisles (which you should be pretty close to if you're going that dense)(or you should fire your mechanical designer). Unless you increase the footprint or get crazy and supply from above and below (possible but costly), you're supplying that air through a cross-section of 4sf at a diffuser velocity of 250 fpm. That's not a datacenter, it's a windtunnel.
Now, I am going off a bit half cocked here. You could indeed get up to 500 W/sf if the hardware is designed to be cooled, probably by water but possibly by high delta-t air. And the potential for entirely passive cooling of that level of heat is there. I'm just a little sensitive to people tossing out numbers that are patently silly. If they'd at least use an intelligent fan supply algorithm on the recircs (and please god, don't use those constant flow CRACs) it wouldn't waste quite as much power.
As a side note, if google is spending 0.5 Watts to cool per 1 Watt of cpu heat (a power usage effectiveness of 1.5) in their new Portland facility, they need to put some of their eggheads** to work trolling the current datacenter efficient design literature. I know their solar cell powered campus is sexy, but they could save an order of magnitude more energy for a tenth the cost by getting their datacenter up to snuff (the obvious freecooling, the barely-justifiable-but-sexy adsorption chillers, and the esoteric thermal stack harvesting to offset fan power for starters)(a rigid hot aisle/cold aisle design is, of course, assumed just to get a 300W/sf datacenter that won't cook the top slots with recirc).
* OK, if you can make cold air for free via free cooling, go for it but I expect you to do the work on the fan controls to actually harvest a few kW's for the added humidity control complexity. ** Based on a presentation I saw at ASHRAE, Google does have at least one sharp tack in the drawer, so I suspect this is a matter of a Harper's 'expert' making up numbers.
I agree! Let's keep Portland weird! All of you normal people...OUT, OUT, OUT! :)
Hey guess what else gobbles up ENORMOUS quantities of electricity?
Aluminum smelting. Yeah so the next time you wrap up some brownies for that bake sale outside your No Nukes protest - remember how much juice was used for that.
Mainframes, for example? Google's current deployment architecture is simply very energy- (and space-) intensive. Different servers are optimized for different types of computing, and Google does a lot of what mainframes do best. Maybe Google will figure that out before trashing the environment any more.
There's no way they're going to be using over 100 megawatts.
Apparently the writer doesn't know how big of a power plant it takes to generate 100 megawatts.
In general, 1 megawatt would power about 1000 homes, so 100 megawatts would be 100,000 homes.
Let's figure an average of 3 people per home. That would be 300,000 people.
Last December, the population of New Orleans was said to have gotten back to 300,000 residents.
So, Google's power consumption for one data center site would similar to the city of New Orleans?
I don't think so.
Even so, if the data center was using that kind of power, think how much of standby power generation they would need to have for redundancy.
1.21 Gigawatts
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
If you live in the Maryland area you would find the BGE is trying to get people to use less power. As nice as it sounds, they are not doing this out of their own heart. You may pay a simple $0.02 KW/h (0.07 MJ) to BGE (depends). As you use more power then BGE has already made deal for, the price to them goes up. The more you use, the more it cut into their profit.
Places like where Google is running from, make most of, or all of their power. The price is cheap for them. I am too lazy to look into it but many areas the price for power is controlled by other groups. This makes them a lot like AT&T was; AT&T controlled the phone (before the crackup), but the prices had been low.
The article says, and I quote (emphasis mine):
"...Microsoft and Yahoo have contracted for a combined 90 megawatts of electricity -- MORE THAN THE WORLD TRADE CENTER HUMMING AT PEAK POWER ON A HOT SUMMER DAY."
Perhaps Harpers is just a little bit behind on current events.
Exactly how much power it takes to lift a squirrel
http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/02/15/the-laser-elevator/
They already are. Look at the Google Techtalks on youtube. One recurring topic there is nuclear power.
It'll be a great place for a data center, it's beautiful country...a geek paradise. Lots to do. Windsurfing in the gorge, mountain biking and hiking, skiing in the winter. A short drive to the Oregon coast going west and eastern Washington wine country to the east. Plenty of night life in Portland. Saturday Market under the bridge. Shop sales tax free in Oregon.
I'm sure they'll have no problem recruiting for those jobs. They'll get to work with Bonneville Power Assoc. for their electric needs, in the shadow of the DC Transmission system that ships the excess power to California. Cheaper to build the centers there than at the end of the power pipeline in CA where the price is much higher.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'd be amazed if Google isn't making use of the river. The Columbia is cold year round (well, at least "cool" even in late summer) and has a tremendous volume -- average yearly flow is more than ten times that of the Colorado River. That was one of the other big attractions to locating right on the river for industries like smelters -- essentially unlimited cold water supply. I'd imagine that Google's cooling systems make use of all that cold water -- they'd be silly not to.
Just 'cause I know it gets butchered at times. It's "The Dalles" like "The Pals". And "The" is part of the name. Oh and just in case, "Willamette" is like "Want to bet?" (not "met tee") and it's Will-AH-met not Will-ah-MET", plus "Oregon" which rhymes with "Washington", not "Bon Bon"
Who did they talk to in order to get the 500W/sq ft metric? From my experience most datacenters coming online today are around 150-200W/sq ft and most preexisting ones (that were built during the dotcom boom) are around 75-100. For example, in Manhattan there are virtually no datacenters that can handle more than 100W/sq ft. Some are being built right now in downtown that are around 175, but they won't be ready for a few months.
IOW, TFA is BS.
The Dalles is 90 miles from Portland, a bit drive home after a night of clubbing. And in the winter, the road (I-84) up the Gorge is frequently closed due to ice storms, snow storms, hurricane force winds, and landslides.
Close enough to Portland to matter, certainly, but it's not like you're living in the Portland suburbs.
The Dalles itself is pretty much a wasteland. While it does have a Burgerville, which is great drive-thru, that's also the height of cuisine in the town.
Actually, long-haul lines are all alumium these days. The resistivity is slightly higher, so the lines are thicker, but the aluminum costs less and weighs less for the same load capacity as the copper.
Your point is still completely correct, though.
Because transporting information is a hell of a lot cheaper than transporting electricity.
The only product Google sells is digital information. Transporting data is dirt cheap. So Google could care less where the data is, as long as they can access it quickly.
Transporting electricity requires big cables made of very expensive metals. Power transmission systems are massive and require a lot of maintenance. They are affected by wind, ice, and lightening. The amount of power Google uses is not at all trivial to have run into urban or suburban areas. Worse yet, when electricity is transmitted, a lot of it leaks out along the way.
Compared to electricity, transporting information is dirt cheap. Data can be transported by much less expensive and much smaller fiber optic cables. Fiber optics require a lot less maintenance than power lines. Lightening strikes, ice, and high winds don't usually have any impact on fiber backbones. Better still, comparatively tiny amounts of electricity are needed to maintain data integrity over long distances. And unlike power transmission, the valuable stuff being transmitted doesn't leak out along the way.
All Google cares about is getting the information back and forth between its users. So it really doesn't matter where the data center is. Electricity is even cheaper at places like Canada's James Bay project. I suspect the only reason Google doesn't go to places like that is the difficulty in getting quality staff to work so far north and so far from "civilization".
Until recently I lived my entire life in Eastern Washington, in the shadows of massive dams along the Columbia River, owned by the government and run by local Public Utility Districts (PUD's). Yes, power is cheap and plentiful here.
Cheap and plentiful enough that both Yahoo and Microsoft have built similar structures in Quincy Washington (find a map of the state and look dead center---you'll find it). Quincy is in the heart of Grant County which grows more potatos per capita then any state in the union. Plus, the Grant County PUD built a fiber optic network years ago in a bid to usher in technological advancement & progress.
So you have a sleepy farm town like Quincy being transformed--what was once potato farms are now server farms. Interesting to see the march of progress: it is truly a new century.
Richard Duncan is a paranoiac lunatic hack.
Dog is my co-pilot.
ignoring that the Loonie is worth more than $1 US now, I believe.
Yahoo is locating a data center in the county I live in and MS a little farther down the Columbia and on the other side.
In addition, the county-owned public utility districts (which are both of those and the Dalles where Google is) also operate a fiber-network in the Pacific Northwest.
At The Dalles is one of the many dams along the Columbia River that supply all that electricity. But before the dam was completed in 1957, it had been one of the most important places in North America for the indigenous people. On March 10, 1957, hundreds of observers looked on as a rising Lake Celilo rapidly silenced the falls, submerged fishing platforms, and consumed the village of Celilo, ending an age-old existence for those who lived there.
Woody Guthrie supports Google data centers: "Roll on, Columbia, roll on, roll on, Columbia, roll on Your power is turning our darkness to dawn So roll on, Columbia, roll on." -Roll on, Columbia, Woody Guthrie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll_On_Columbia/
This line of reasoning always confuses me. How is giving someone a tax break the same as giving them a subsidy? You imply that businesses in some way pay taxes. I know the tax rate on corporate profits is 35% in most places, but the reality is that these costs are simply passed on to consumers. It's the consumers who really pay the tax.
We should outlaw corporate taxes entirely, since all they do is hide the tax from the people who really pay it.
....With 320 kV lines, you could transmit electricity.....
The problem is that there are not anywhere near enough lines to carry the amounts of power involved, even if there were minimal losses. Environmentalism and NIMBY prevent the construction of new lines. Many would rather have an 8 lane freeway, rather than a huge ugly power line across or near their property. Most folks don't make such a fuss over an optical cable under ground.
All theory is gray
....the Bureau will build a dam ....
Could you please tell everyone here, when and where, lately, the bureau has built a large dam, on the scale of any of those on the Columbia?
All theory is gray
WHy should the west have to sell our electricity to the east? The power company is happy selling it at the price that they are. We need all that power here. In addition, 20% loss AND infrastructure is a hell of a hit.
The east coast is finally starting to build up nukes and wind generators. You still have an issue with NIMBYs concerning tidal, wind, etc. but that will change. The reason is that EU and japan will almost certainly have not choice BUT to add a carbon tax. Once that is started, then we will see nations do the right things with moving off of coal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think those lines are made from aluminum. That's still expensive though.
At last! someone has a use for Manitoba Canada. We sell most of our power to the U.S. anyway. And cooling is not a problem, believe me. Minus 40 degrees with the wind chill for the last month.
Ok, well, ya it's warm in the summer, but thats like 4 weeks, eh.
Read Tom Whipple's article. In case you think this article doesn't matter because it's in an obscure newspaper, consider that Falls Church is a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a median family income of nearly $100,000, where a lot of the elite Federal bureaucrats live.
In case you weren't aware, The Dalles, Oregon has it's own hydroelectric dam. Delivery time on hookups even for large amounts of power is pretty quick, depending on the exactly location.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Our energy is 100% hydro-electric, and is only 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
They haven't, because in the Carter years the Reclamation machine came to an abrupt halt. What's your point though? They're still selling the electricity and the water below cost and most of the dams still haven't paid off their capital debts. As I'm sure you know, there aren't any other rivers like the Columbia, so the fact that there aren't any water projects on that scale doesn't seem relevant.
I have to call bullshit on that union comment. 'We are the laughing stock of states in the union'?
hmmph
Around these parts, in this the smallest state in the union, we would call the problems of Oregon a good day. As self-declared laughing stocks go, we take the cake. And just because Newport is nice doesn't do jack for the rest of the state.
Union-controlled socialist state?
Check.
Only state beside Michigan to lose population last year?
Check.
The popular game show 'Criminal Proceedings Against a Crooked Rhode Island Politician'?
Check.
Despicable infrastructure and public education?
Check.
But hey, we should all ignore the local economy and housing situation because they're shooting some movies and TV shows here, including Richard Gere's new movie about a dog. Oh ya, that other dog movie Underdog? Shot in Rhode Island too.
'Shoot your dog movies here Hollywood! We're cheaper!'
Oh, and don't get me started on the accent or the townies.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
I thought they had mostly gone from growing cotton to growing Monsanto GM corn, as feedstock for the ethanol fuel trade. That's a very green way of taking 7 calories of petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers and diesel fuel to produce about 1 calorie of ethanol to add to the gas tanks of American automobiles.
That is going to turn around the global warming crisis, and it also gives our petrochemical industries something worthwhile to do.
From May - September it is absolutely gorgeous weather. Free health care for everyone with a permanant resident card or citizenship. ...and winter? Return tickets to Mexico are like 300 bucks!
They have the power! Hurray! Seriously now, if Google doesn't do something good, who's gonna do it anyway?
They should do this. ;)
South Africa's current problem isn't an "Olduvai"-type crisis, if such a thing even existed in the first place. It was caused by a short-sighted government who refused to let the utility expand and maintain their generating capacity and infrastructure and now got caught with their pants down.
Duncan's theory doesn't take into account the possibility of high capacity alternatives such as orbital microwave, solar-thermal and even fusion if/when it comes around. Hell, given an accurate prediction of oil death, the USA might even go and haul a comet into orbit. Expensive and difficult, but cheaper than the cost of losing a society.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Did anybody else spot the 16,500 sqft. "Transient Employee Dormitory Building" on the blueprint? The fine print reads, "2 Story, 20 Units."
A hostel for Google engineers, on shift rotation at this week's datacenter?
Hotel Google.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Cancer? Source please.
Its next to a fracking river FFS
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
... an asymptote in high-energy-density computing, with subsequent development progressing along the lines of a ubiquitous omnipresent space of interconnected processors.
Or maybe quantum computing will emerge from the laboratory and make all these giant data centers nothing more than 21st century buggy whip factories. Microsoft will be buying up all of them, cornering the market, as it were.
Which yesterday do you want to go to today?
I'm all for criticising big corporations when they've done something wrong, but putting their datacentres next to power plants is a good idea. Sure, it'd be better if they could find a way to reuse the waste heat, or use more energy-efficient PCs, but even if they did those things, having their datacentres near the generators makes sense.
If this means that they get the electricity metered slightly cheaper, based on the fact that they're only paying for what they use, not the additional 7% that's wasted in long-range transmission, then fine. As long as they're not being given too much of a discount, or having their datacentre subsidised, I don't see the problem.
Eric Baird
In the province of Quebec in Canada, there's the state owned company Hydro-Quebec (world largest hydro electricity producer) that sells the cheapest electricity in north america. Quebec seems an ideal place for this kind of installations.
-lots of qualified staff here also, IT industry is one of Quebec top industries
-Most IT staff are bilingual, so language is not that much a problem.
-cold temp (about -10 to -30 during the winter) mean less energy compsumtion to lower the servers temp.
-Lowest companies taxes than most US states (one of the highest individual taxes however)
Will Alcan just been sold to RioTinto and probably soon rationalising is activities in QC, they're should be some great deals available.
Besides, if my Slashdot karma was to go down, I didn't want my actual Karma to go down as well.
Get your own free personal location tracker
University of Wisconson - Madison has it's own too that provides some degree of power and also hot water and steam for heating of the campus. They're trying to shut it down though because it's an out-dated coal plant.
Must be a regional thing.
Everyone I've ever met from Wisconsin\general Mid West says Oregon as in bon bon, John, Ron, and Mom.
We also say bubbler though.
These data centers might best be fueled in whole or in part by green or greener alternatives. Hydrogen fuel cells fueled by natural gas or some collectivized sourced fuel such as clean hydrogen generation might be one(one idea was to build man-made ponds of hydrogen producing lifeforms(already proven)-- estimated that several put in the State of New Mexico could produce enough hydrogen to meet all the energy needs of the entire United states and even make us a net-exporter of hydrogen).
I think it should be looked at because it could be a great source of benefit to the corporations public image aside from possible cost savings. Collectivized would mean several corps and other types of organizations come together to generate their own cooperative and clean energy thus possibly having an economy and feasibility benefit from a larger scale operation-- one where the consumers of the energy are the owners of it's production.
I still don't know why China and India aren't being more aggressive at alternative energy development. It would be lovely to see one day when we have hydrogen power running our homes cleanly not from a central source but from multiple competing sources. No more wasteful grid power but clean DC(non cancer causing power) coming from a separate fuel cell for all of our homes and offices.
It would also make us safe from problems when the electric grid goes down we'd all have separate fuel cells--It would be impossible for a bombing to shut-down a city.
I think NYC has a hydrogen road map and has entire office complexes fueled by natural gas powered fuel cells as an example. There really is so many possibilities that are well developed we could easily have a non-nuclear fission clean energy world in 5 years flat if we really tried to.
By the way carbon sequestration is silly... carbon is very useful for many products why not make money from it too?
And most of those "Farmers" getting the cheap water and power while being paid not to grow much are large agriculture corporations, such as Monsanto and Con Agra.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
... the corruption alone should give you some perspective.
Or make a trip to Houston Texas. Make sure to ask how their city plan compares to Portland's.
There's lots to laugh at in this Union besides Oregon.