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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."
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
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.
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.
Let's try and do some math. A standard industry 1U server is nowadays using as much as 500 Watts. OK, for arguments sake, let's half that, utilization is not always 100%. Then we have 40 servers in a rack, so that adds up to 10 kW per rack.
:) I was looking at roughly 20 racks of servers. And the heat that came out of that row, man oh man, it was pretty intense.....
Now a rack is 2x3 feet, but you need space in front and at the back, so lets take 2 feet wide (that doesn't change) and 10 feet deep, a total of 20 sq.ft. In which case we get to a power consumption of exactly 500 Watt/Sq.Ft. Most datacenters will not have this model of 40 1U servers in a rack running at full blast. But Google probably is one of those that do exactly that.
Once I was in a co-location datacenter where one of the cages was occupied by google. That was still the time when they built their own servers, 4 motherboards in a 1U tray, 144 MBs in a rack. In this case / cage
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
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.
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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