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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?
>> 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).
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.
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
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.
Yeah, bury your cables, don't put towers over people's houses, don't ask us for property for your data center ... not treating the people near you like shit isn't unreasonable at all.
Don't come in all secret like, hide who you really are, and choose a way to do it which impacts the people who live there any more than you need to.
When billion dollar corporations want to act like assholes to save a few bucks, they get no sympathy when people get pissed off at them. People don't want to be abused so multi-billion dollar corporations can do their data center as cheap as possible and piss off the neighbors.
Spinning this like "boo hoo, the poor companies can't build data centers" is complete bullshit. Stop treating neighborhoods like ugly industrial sites and have some respect. Maybe they'll even be supportive.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.