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Google's Addiction to Cheap Electricity

Posted by Zonk on from the in-what-other-ways-is-google-like-bender dept.

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."

8 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Wind power? by Shuntros · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Wind power? by calebt3 · · Score: 5, Funny

      It was proposed 42 years ago. It is still under review.

  2. Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses by colinmcnamara · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"
    1. Re:Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses by dbIII · · Score: 5, Insightful
      To get some ideas of where the cheapest electricity is look for the locations of aluminium smelters. Aluminium is almost vast amounts of solidified electricity, which is why we started recycling the stuff years before anything else - orders of magnitude in energy usage less to melt than to make from the oxide.

      Google's idea to put a lot of solar panels on the roof makes a lot of sense in purely practical terms if you think of it as a great big UPS. Peak times are going to be in daylight so an outage at night is not as big of a problem (in kW anyway).

    2. Re:Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses by Mike89 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      dude, google is kind of an around the clock operation :p
      Google have so many datacenters in so many places that loosing one at 3 am isn't going to break anything.
  3. Re:Connection... by mrxak · · Score: 5, Funny

    Quick, submit a new story to /., "Google uses lots of internet bandwidth".

    --
    -mrxak
    Onions Will Kill You
  4. Thats' not the point. by nuckfuts · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Google's new slogan: by LM741N · · Score: 5, Funny

    Download a file, kill a salmon.