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Not Just Paris: Community Activists Target Data Centers (datacenterfrontier.com)
1sockchuck writes: This week's case in which a Paris data center lost its license isn't an isolated incident, but the latest in a series of disputes in which community groups have fought data center projects, citing objections to generators or power lines. Data center site selection is often a secretive process, with cloud builders using codenames to cloak their identity. Community groups are using social media, blogs, research and media outreach to bring public attention to the process and voice their concerns. Protests from a Delaware group led to the cancellation of a data center project that planned to build a cogeneration plant. In Virginia, a coalition has organized to oppose a power line for an Amazon Web Services data center. Everyone wants their Internet, just not in their backyard.
"We want all the best things that modern life has to offer, we just want someone else to have to suffer the minor downsides and mild inconveniences of having things like data centers or power plants or landfills or offshore windmills spoiling our pristine view."
It was my understanding that, especially for comparatively low-margin-high-volume purposes, the virtues you looked for in a datacenter site were "Cheap land, cheap power, relatively easy to put a fence and some security around if needed".
That seems like a set of requirements that would mostly encourage construction out in the sticks, where concerned neighbors are going to be few and moderately distant.
I realize that there are some datacenters in densely settled areas(often grown up around historic telco and fiber infrastructure; or catering to businesses that want a colo they can check up on in short order if the need arises); but I'd always gotten the impression that those were relatively expensive boutique offerings, while the truly gargantuan 'stack-em-deep, sell-em-cheap' "cloud" and web-services stuff was much more cost sensitive.
Am I substantially misinformed, and there are actually a lot of people trying to put a datacenter and some ghastly diesel generators in the middle of an urban neighborhood? Are these various concerned citizens mostly residents of thinly settled rural areas who want to continue enjoying the openness of a parcel of open land that they don't actually own?
the large amount of diesel gas stored on site in a populated area? Not sure if that's actually a problem or not, since I don't know what they mean by 'large'. There's plenty of safe ways to store it (we have gas stations after all) but they're expensive and I'd worry about corner cutting. Then again I"m a yank and here in the states those kind of corners get cut all the time due to poor gov't oversight & lack of funding for the regulators.
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The Internet is out there in the clouds!
>> Community groups...voice their concerns
You realize what the endgame is here, of course. It's to elevate the organizers to the point where they get paid to shut up (usually with no benefit to the community they claim to represent) as soon as they declare interest in a lucrative project.
See Jesse Jackson for a great example of this. Lots of protesting, leading to little or no improvement in "his" community but instead large financial gains for himself and his family (e.g., beer distributorships for his sons).
Serves them right.
Don't invite these problems
No generators or tanks exposed.
Build the complex with a courtyard in the center of the project -put muffled generators there. Make storage tanks resemble just another part of the building -surround with a wall that matches the overall architecture (insert fake windows and doors if necessary)
Build the whole project to resemble those typical suburban office complexes that are ubiquitous everywhere -make it match one just down the street.
I've used generators that you can't tell are running when your just 25' from them -tractor trailer sized units
(-and maybe also explore other backup fuels such as propane or battery!)
Yes this may cost more but still cheaper than getting shut down or building in the middle-of-nowhere (which is also a viable option -I have 640ac in north eastern Montana surrounded by oil wells and fracking sites -so obviously the people here don't seem to care about a tiny bit of data center noise)
So, are there any human social institutions that aren't actually a malignant scheme on the part of some puppetmaster; or would we be largely solitary if it weren't for the scamming opportunities?
Proximity is important just not that important. The smallest DC's I deal with are in commercial buildings at that's maybe 5k of raised floor. These building already much have generators since they have elevators. They are not so big they can not get ones that have good soundproofing. As far as fuel around here nearly everybody has a couple hundred gallons in their basement to run the furnace it's rather safe.
Really isn't this a zoning issue datacenters at this scale should be in industrial space with established noise ordinances. It's realy not that hard to deal with noise leakage traditional methods work ok and some of the new but expensive ones do wonders.
No sir I dont like it.
I grew up in a rural community in a little valley in Nevada. There was a little bit of water and a lot of agriculture. Most of the valley was fields. Today, almost all of the fields are gone. There are one or two farmers left, and a lot more houses where those fields once were. The houses are surrounded by millions of acres of desert. Some people built there houses in the desert, but most built in the green belt. Now there is no more green belt.
The point of this story is not that people shouldn't have built houses. The point is that their choice of building lots was unfortunate.
Everyone wants their internet. Of course. And that means that we need datacenters. But it doesn't mean that we need the giant complexes like the Switch proposal in Reno. And it doesn't mean that developers are choosing the best locations for those datacenters. Disagreement and protest are not necessarily a bad thing. Demanding a wider perspective and long-term vision can be a very good thing.
So, they basically make it impossible to know what is coming in, what the impact will be, and if you should be concerned.
Yeah, that sounds awesome ... lie to everybody so you get approved, and then become really terrible neighbors once it's too late for people to have their say.
Gee, I can't see at all why people would be angry about that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
or would we be largely solitary if it weren't for the scamming opportunities
Pretty much. That's the impression I've gotten from man's world in the past 15 years. Well, not just scamming opportunities. There's war, rape, and massive theft, too. But I suppose one could say those are all variations on scamming. Oh! I'm focusing on the moochers and leaving out the vandals. Can't forget them!
Except, unlike the Randian bootstrapper, the Masters of the Universe seem to have convinced the public at large that folks who are actually up to date on state of the art steel production should be on the bottom of society, wage slaved and belittled in the media, and they've convinced your women to discourage other women from learning the state of the art in tech...
It's difficult not to come to the same conclusions as the cow guy.
--kurenai.tsubasa
In other words, they are using data centers in someone else's backyard. I find the hypocrisy of an activist is often proportional to their level of outrage.
It's not really any of the power or infrastructure issues. It's the unpleasant programmer demographic with their geeky T-shirts and poor social graces that come into the neighborhood. They pop up in the coffee shops talking in acronyms and babbling on and on about technical matters. The neighborhood wants them gone.
Clearly the data centers are placed incorrectly. They use the old fashioned approach of placing them on the ground. The buzz word in computing today is cloud computing. Clearly this must result in floating data centers, right? That would make people happy right until they go on vacation and their plane flies into a cloud.
Data centers need high speed connections to the rest of the world, which usually means the Internet. While rural land is cheap, it doesn't have the high speed connections required. Therefore data centers will be located in cities, usually just off the city core, in the closest suburbs.
If your local greenies object to data centers (low danger/high pay modern infrastructure), I'm sure that Texas would love to have that business.
If "community activists" want to drive high-paying jobs away, there's no shortage of locales with competent regulatory regimes that are happy to welcome new data center construction with open arms.
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People have been protesting power lines since they first started building them. (I remember the big hubub in the 70s about them causing cancer) Does it matter that it is connected to a data center? Maybe they should have mentioned that those lines could also have powered a 3D Printer.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I know the tone of this post is "look at these crazy luddites", but at least in the case of the Virginia group, it looks like all they are asking is the lines be run through existing rights of way such as rail lines or highways, rather than through residential neighborhoods. I don't think that sounds all that crazy, especially considering the negative impact high tension lines have on nearby property.
The people promoting the Delaware data center lied to everyone at nearly every possible opportunity, which is why it was so easy to rouse the community against them.
For example, they claimed that their data center would employ lots of local people, when this simply wasn't true. The whole place was going to be nearly lights-out - there'd probably be as many janitors as technicians.
They also misstated the entire purpose of the plant - the so-called data center was always a trojan horse intended to allow them to gain exemptions from zoning laws and secure taxpayer funds to build a noisy, polluting power plant in a totally unsuitable location. That power plant was purposely outsized for the data center in the original plan, and more than doubled in size after it'd gained its initial approvals, and probably would have been built even bigger given the size of the property they were going to put it on. The intention was always to use tax dollars to undercut existing energy providers and sell electricity to local citizens and businesses, the data center was never anything but a front operation.
How do I know all this? Well, I do live here, and I have built three data centers professionally. The whole thing was a total con job from start to finish. That's the reality, and the University of Delaware's investigation revealed this and caused them to withdraw their support from the project (the other backers withdrew their support only because public outcry was calling attention to the many secret side deals they'd made with the power plant builders, that are protected by non-disclosure contracts).
I can't comment on Paris or other places where similar things have happened; maybe those data centers were real. The Delaware one was a power plant disguised as a data center and the people proposing it were liars and con men who were trying to loot the public tax coffers.
for privately owned cars. So around here we get in the habit of calling any liquid fuel 'gas'.
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It's hypocritical to use a well-situated resource to complain about a poorly-situated resource? Did you think your rant through?
Poor dear little things. Little self-absorbed, self-important pampered professional objectors. Living on Cape Cod, I know this type well. They have fought the Cape Wind offshore wind power project to a halt for 15 years where it is now all but dead because they don't want to see the towers way off on the horizon from their precious beach houses. They manufactured other reasons, but it was their personal slice of heaven they were jealously guarding. There was one real objection, which had they concentrated on it, would have resonated with me: the power source, which all ratepayers would have been saddled with, was phenomenally expensive.
If these idiots weren't afraid of a few powerlines running through town, they would just manufacture other absurd objections.
Our government would happily accept their bribe
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
>> Community groups...voice their concerns
You realize what the endgame is here, of course. It's to elevate the organizers to the point where they get paid to shut up (usually with no benefit to the community they claim to represent) as soon as they declare interest in a lucrative project.
See Jesse Jackson for a great example of this. Lots of protesting, leading to little or no improvement in "his" community but instead large financial gains for himself and his family (e.g., beer distributorships for his sons).
That is not always true. My dad used to lead a community group for a section of town that covered about 10-15k people in a community of 100,000. The part of the community we lived in was often neglected by the rest of the city. We did not have a grocery store that was less than 15 minutes away by car without traffic. There was one park and no library. The city got its hands on something like 1000 acres of land in that area. My dad's group help ensured that part of that land was used to bring a library, a grocery store, and a new park to the local residents. The city just wanted to sell the land off to large multinational corporations. I spent a lot of time gathering signatures for petitions and other such things and I never saw my dad get so much as a coupon for all our hard work.
While you're definitely correct in your example and I'm sure that's what motivates the leaders, there's also this:
Community groups are using social media, blogs, research and media outreach to bring public attention to the process and voice their concerns.
Welcome to the new Millennial SJW Social Activism Via Online Outrage. What we're seeing more and more are SJW "hashtag activists" who use social media and blogs to bludgeon those they dislike. Yes, they're almost always led by puppetmasters who are using them to line their own pockets or further their own careers, but the actual pawns posting to blogs and spreading the junk via social media are just part of the new Millennial "outrage culture."
Think of things like the constant stories about how misogynistic STEM is or how misogynistic gamers are when they demand reviewers reveal their personal connections to the developers of products they're covering. There's this whole culture of Millennials who just want to be outraged in the name of "social justice" and they're being played by the puppetmasters.
Yes, there are definitely those out there who are in it for the money and will drop it as soon as they get their, uh, "consideration," but they're not the dangerous ones. The dangerous ones are the Millennials who fall for this junk and aren't interested in money so much as they are in destroying someone else in order to prove how great a "social justice" warrior they are. Because they don't just target people with the resources to deal with them, they also go after individuals and destroy their lives. Think things like donglegate or, worse, junk like this blog where they try and get regular people fired for exercising their free speech rights.
So, sadly, you're only partially right. People are out there destroying what other people made in order to get paid off. But the scary thing is that there are others who are out there destroying people's lives and livelihood solely for the sake of destroying. And these are the pawns people like Jesse Jackson use to get their way, and they don't stop just because the person who started their false crusade was paid off.
Your question is sadly relevant. We create these huge powerful organizational structures (corporations, governments, religions, etc) without any thought of what might go wrong. And if you haven't had any experience in these large organizations, you could look at a number of studies suggesting that the top layers of these organizations are reserved for psychopaths, and people with some variety of anti-social disorders / no capacity for empathy. History suggests all these structures will eventually fail and be replaced. I think it will be a more painful process in these modern times.
Nuke France from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
the people largely don't want *another* HV power feed running through thier area/property; at least not one that exists solely for commercial use. This issue is actually somewhat local to me; and the residents of the area have always been at odd with "big power"...simply because of the greed. What starts as a right-of-way for one power line soon becomes a single right of way for multiple lines; the property owners haven't been reimbursed for the now extra stuff on their property. Plus, as much as I'm not a person who says no to towers or utility lines...the situation they've got going on over there is getting pretty bad.
The biggest issue is it's going in to serve *one* customer; it has no overall benefit to the residents of the area; and this is after a power company already abusing exsiting contracts and promises. They've seen zero benefit from the result of this growth.
I can tell you this though; if the local electric co-op wanted to put the line in; there'd be almost no opposition. The co-op would also fairly compensate everyone while engineering the line to serve the demands of the customer; but as well as all the customers running along this new line.
But it's basically someone coming up to you "I'm putting a fence across your property so I can make more money. It doesn't benefit you in any way...and I will essentially have the land on the other side of the fence. I'm not going to pay you for it either." There's no middle ground, there's no working with them; it's "this is what we're putting in, you will have no input in to how it looks and we're not even going to compensate the piece of property we're over..and we'll probably force you to maintain the property around our equipment as well."
Community groups are using social media, blogs, research and media outreach to bring public attention to the process and voice their concerns
So they are utilizing services provided by data centers while protesting data centers. Brilliant.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The best use for Rearden Metal still remains to make clunky ugly bracelets.
I'm reasonably sure they didn't check to make sure their Facebook posts used "well-situated" data centers before posting them.
Yes, hypocrisy. The world is black and white, and people should avoid using something that's less than desirable, even when it's their only option currently, to advocate replacing that thing with a superior thing.
Advocates for eliminating wired networks for last mile should not use any; advocates for the telephone system should not have used the telegraph; advocates for reforming courts should not use them to effect change.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
I live 2 blocks from where the data center is going up, we dont have an issue with the data center itself but with the proposed power lines to power it. Dominion Power was ready to feed it power directly in front of our community along Rt 50. The towers are over 100 feet tall and will ruin both thr soft and hard landscape at the front of all 5 entrances also destroying our skyline that help with home prices and resale. There are 1000s of homes here and well most our power underground. So one power customer is worth destroying the property values of many? F' that.