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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."
Come put one in Saskatchewan. It would benefit our economy and our (commercial) power rate is 0.0845-ish per kWh.
Well, yes, and it's a strange point of view to say that a company is "addicted" to one of its inputs. One may as well say that Google is addicted to CPUS, or to buildings, or to fiber optic cables, or to people.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The water in the glass next to me isn't falling...
;-}
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.
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.
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! --
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.
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.
That theory is nonsense as per the paper's own admission. The theory is premised on the fact that there will be no more exponential grow in the nuclear and hydroelectric industries, which is a patently absurd assumption. The main focus of the paper is concerned with peak oil and coal.
No, I got it. It would be hard not to - I think I've heard a "hot air in Washington DC" joke about, oh, four or five times a week for the past 35 years. But the power situation in the DC area is particularly bad, so I figured I'd point out that it's a lousy place to try build a data center.
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.
The Niagara/Buffalo systems feed their densely populated surroundings. There are even nuclear stations in the area to meet demand.
As for cold air, that's seasonal. Summers are very hot in that region, with regular requests that people ease off the air conditioning during the worst of it. So, yeah, not a good place for a big datacenter actually.
(For non-locals, Toronto is so miserably hot in summer that even your friends from *Indonesia* complain about it. But the rest of the time we live in igloos, you bet.)
Subsidies are any form of government granted (financial) benefit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy#Tax_Subsidy
Feel free to read about the other types of subsidies.
In this case, [company] gets to use the full range of government services without paying the same taxes like everyone else.
In TFA I linked, Yahoo and Microsoft are threatening to build their datacenters somewhere else unless they get (amongst other things) a specific exemption from the 6.5% sales tax on their purchases for the datacenters, because "the [Washington] state Department of Revenue recently determined that the server farms aren't eligible for an existing tax exemption for rural manufacturers".
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Heat. Living things grow in the Columbia River.
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yes, but the outside temperature drops at night, making the air cons job a lot easier.
P.S., if you can do a greener websearch on mainframes, by all means go for it. I'd be the first to start using that if it works, but don't expect me to bet on your idea.