Power Costs Pinch Internet Companies

From today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Some Internet executives say electricity has become a closely watched expense and can even be a factor when they consider rolling out new services, While always a concern, the cost of power has become more important amid a recent run-up in energy prices and increased use at data centers.

To satisfy their power needs, Internet companies are exploring options ranging from building facilities in former defense bunkers -- which already have rugged grid connections -- to plunking themselves near hydroelectric plants to get a slice of inexpensive power. Anticipating demand a decade from now, some executives are mulling whether proximity to nuclear power plants could be a plus.

An item like this isn't news to our readers here at NEI Nuclear Notes. This past December, we pointed to a study that appeared in ACM's Queue, which included the following projection made by the folks at Google:

"If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin," Luiz Andre Barroso, who previously designed processors for Digital Equipment Corp., said in a September paper published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Queue. "The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."

(snip)

If server power consumption grows 20 percent per year, the four-year cost of a server's electricity bill will be larger than the $3,000 initial price of a typical low-end server with x86 processors. Google's data center is populated chiefly with such machines. But if power consumption grows at 50 percent per year, "power costs by the end of the decade would dwarf server prices," even without power increasing beyond its current 9 cents per kilowatt-hour cost, Barroso said.

The WSJ reports on how a number of companies are expanding their operations in the Pacific Northwest to position themselves to purchase power from hydroelectric plants, however, as our readers know, there are practical limits to that course, as hydroelectric capacity in North America is beginning to reach its practical limits.

In other words, there aren't a whole lot of sources left to dam. From the Wikipedia:

Apart from a few countries with an abundance of it, hydro power is normally applied to peak-load demand, because it is readily stopped and started. Nevertheless, hydroelectric power is probably not a major option for the future of energy production in the developed nations because most major sites within these nations with the potential for harnessing gravity in this way are either already being exploited or are unavailable for other reasons such as environmental considerations.

Which is why locating near a nuclear power plant might be the next option.

If I were a local politician concerned with economic development, I'd be paying close attention. Support jobs at data centers pay well, and attract a well-educated and affluent taxpayer to a local community.

Technorati tags: Environment, Energy, Technology, Economics, Electricity, Microprocessors, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Hydroelectric