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."

Wind power?

[Shuntros (1059306)]

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.

Re:Wind power?

[calebt3 (1098475)]

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

Re:Wind power?

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

Yes, and the advent of Global Warming Hysteria hasn't helped matters.
The sad truth that much of the exhaust labeled "hot air" was, in fact, methane, from flatus of the bull.
If word gets out, people might realize that real-world cowpies have more intrinsic value
than the Congressional variety [stephenbainbridge.com].
Please allow Congress the dignity "hot air".

Re:

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

Well, I don't think we need to take responsibility for the body chemistry of the likes of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_J._Kennedy [wikipedia.org]
However, the sage wisdom of Red Green does come to mind.
"Spare the duct tape, spoil the job"
http://www.redgreen.com/index.cfm?app=cart&a=view_episodes&seasonID=10 [redgreen.com]

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul (629286)]

Very true. However, their is a fair amount of Bullshit evenly mixed through out the hot air. It would not be financially feasible to separate the two. Apparently there are things even lawyers won't do.

Re:Wind power?

[The Second Horseman (121958)]

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.

Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses

[colinmcnamara (1152427)]

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.

Re:Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses

[dbIII (701233)]

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).

Re:

[VagaStorm (691999)]

dude, google is kind of an around the clock operation :p

Re:Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses

[Mike89 (1006497)]

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.

Re:Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses

[dbIII (701233)]

Dude, google is kind of an international operation :P

As the song says ...

A host is a host from coast to coast

But no one will talk to a host that's close

Unless of course the host that's close is busy, hung, or dead.

Re:

[johnpaul191 (240105)]

I *think* they meant that cooling will drawing more energy in the daytime, at least in a place when daytime temps are a good bit higher. the servers themselves, and general building uses, will be fairly even 24/7.

then again why not go even farther north and just open some windows? offsetting the air conditioning costs has to be appealing to the suits. maybe deep underground where the temperature is pretty even. a little geothermal technology has to help.

Re:Power and Cooling - the top DataCenter expenses

[arminw (717974)]

....to get 1 megawatt of power in downtown San Francisco it will take upwards of Three years for PG&E to deliver.....

It's a lot cheaper to ship bits than to ship the power to run a large server farm. Environmentalists and the NIMBY folks are also much less likely to complain about a little trench that is soon forgotten after the lines are buried. A 500KV power line raises a lot more opposition. The sites the old aluminum plants used to be already have the requisite power connections.

Re:

[drooling-dog (189103)]

The draw is a lot of extremely cheap electricity combined with cold outside air

It's a shame that the Buffalo/Niagara area is missing out on this, then. Lots of hydroelectric, plenty of cold air. They could use the business...

For Profit Company is Cost Conscious

[Protonk (599901)]

News at 11.

Re:For Profit Company is Cost Conscious

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

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.

Re:For Profit Company is Cost Conscious

[ibbey (27873)]

My thought exactly. Since she clearly thinks that Google needs to reduce its energy usage, perhaps she can suggest a way to do so? The really ironic part of the article was when she criticized Google for offsetting their energy use by generating green energy. Apparently the fact that Google's competitors might not do the same somehow reflects badly on Google. I don't quite get it...

Re:For Profit Company is Cost Conscious

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

You're not talking about COOKING that which you hunted and gathered, are you ? Cooking requires a fire, and fires cause pollution. No, you must eat everything raw.

Thats' not the point.

[nuckfuts (690967)]

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.

Thousands of servers require lots of electricity.

[The tECHIDNA (677584)]

Also at 11.

And before I get modded down: how exactly is Google supposed to get the power to run not just the servers, but the cooling, network switches, and other hardware that will keep it from the equivalent of being Slashdotted?
Considering that Google is one of the top sites on the Internet, I frankly have no problem with this, considering there aren't any viable solutions to produce power of that magnitude (though it'll be interesting if Google eventually just builds its own power plant -- GoogleVolts FTW!); and after all, they've got shareholders to look after...gotta keep the company profitable. Google (and the other companies on that will be on that river) will probably donate some of its funds to carbon offsets to shut everybody up and get good PR at the same time.

and how taxpayers are footing the bill for a lot of it.

This taxpayer says "better the funds go to Google (or other companies) rather than to a pointless war."
But I don't live in the town in question, so what I say is moot. But don't complain to Google...complain to the city for pimping themselves out to get the corps to build there. We've been down this road hundreds of times across the country with Wal-Mart.

And as an aside, I'm a little loath to quote that Harper's article as gospel considering that the server count in the article went from "1,000s" to "a thousand times more?! With no source?! I have to call shenanigans on that hand-waving, sorry.

(Full disclosure: I have a GMail account. But I would say the above if this was say, Wikipedia that's using that power.)

Re:They Could Buy Different Servers

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

Google does a lot of what mainframes do best

Not really. Mainframes do batch processing of predetermined non-interactive workloads best. Google does interactive database searches with a fraction of a second latency, serves up web ads, and is trying to host traditional desktop applications via a web browser.

Mainframes have really puny CPU horsepower relative to their size, cost and power consumption. Their OSes are tuned for batch processing. Almost every compromise in mainframe design is decided in favor of uptime and transactional integrity, things for which Google has almost no use at all. They would be throwing a lot of money at solving issues they don't have if they ran mainframes, and even if they did manage to buy enough mainframes to handle their particular workload, it would probably end up using more power than they're using now.

Re:

[TubeSteak (669689)]

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.

Sadly, that "three-word smartass comment" is right.
Go look into the politics behind any major construction project & you'll see tax breaks & special treatment.
The exact same thing is going on in Washington State [nwsource.com]

Or just ask your local sports nut about the tax breaks that go into building sports stadiums.
Taxpayers footing part of the bill is business as usual.

Tax Breaks

[mosb1000 (710161)]

This line of reasoning always confuses me. How is giving someone a tax break the same as giving them a subsidy? You imply that businesses in some way pay taxes. I know the tax rate on corporate profits is 35% in most places, but the reality is that these costs are simply passed on to consumers. It's the consumers who really pay the tax.

We should outlaw corporate taxes entirely, since all they do is hide the tax from the people who really pay it.

Re:Tax Breaks

[TubeSteak (669689)]

This line of reasoning always confuses me. How is giving someone a tax break the same as giving them a subsidy?

This isn't a difficult concept. Subsidies are not only cash.
Subsidies are any form of government granted (financial) benefit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy#Tax_Subsidy [wikipedia.org]
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".

Re:Google Environmental Conscience

[MightyYar (622222)]

never mind the salmon kills.

But the dam was built in '57! It's not like they are building a dam for Google, or even keeping one open longer because of Google. The salmon impact is completely independent of whether or not Google moves in. On the other hand, locating in Ohio and using 80+ MW would burn enough coal to provide 80+ MW... it's one-to-one.

I don't think that they deserve much heat over this.

Saskatchewan

[corychristison (951993)]

Come put one in Saskatchewan. It would benefit our economy and our (commercial) power rate is 0.0845-ish per kWh.

Re:Saskatchewan

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

That would be offset by the cost of having to learn a new language, new customs, etc. I mean, what's the exchange rate between a hockey goal and a touchdown nowadays? When do you append "eh" to the end of a sentence? How, exactly, are you supposed to say "schedule"? These are all serious barriers to companies relocating to Canada.

Re:

[corychristison (951993)]

Haha.

You use 'eh?' pretty much when you please. "How's it going, eh?" is a prime example.

I pronounce schedule as "skedual." Others in the area pronounce it as "shedule." Both are widely accepted.

As for the Hockey vs Football remark, I'm not sure. Considering the two dollars are pretty close at the moment, I'd have to say that would be a pretty good metric to go on.

NY's North Country

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

They should build a data center here in New York State's North Country. We have cheap and plentiful water power, plus its cold enough in the winter that cooling the data center is simple: just open a window.

The new industry

[im_thatoneguy (819432)]

50 years ago the Columbia river gorge was filled by the aluminum industry looking for cheap electricity to run their furnaces.

I guess Internet servers are the new fires of industry.

Google's new slogan:

[LM741N (258038)]

Download a file, kill a salmon.

As an Oregonian...

[rampant mac (561036)]

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."

Re:As an Oregonian...

[LM741N (258038)]

I was in a state office and blurted out "Oregon has much natural beauty, but as a state it sucks." I thought I committed a faux pas, but everyone started laughing.

Its true. We have a do nothing photo op governor who is a democrat, both houses of legislature are controlled by democrats, and nothing gets done despite all of that. We are the laughing stock of states in the union.

(oh, I forgot- "save the children," "pedophile related," and "meth laws" always pass) but thats the same anywhere

Re:As a Rhode Islander

[epine (68316)]

Funny that, I was looking at the US per-state GDP just last night.

Oregon is a nice place. I was through Portland many years ago after biking from Port Angeles around the mountainous backside of Washington, then back inland along the Columbia River through to Portland (elevation 60 feet IIRC) where we visited Peter Norton's alma mater, the west again to the Oregon coast along the Van Duzer corridor, a rather wussy pass through the Rockies as these things go, but we happened to buck the headwind of all time. On a Ferry, I would have been looking for spray. One of those days where you crest a false flat, then gear *down* for the descent.

Portland reminded me of Vancouver, minus East Hastings, but also minus the international food scene. Mother-earth Birkenstocks, check. Birkenstocks with purple daisies, check. Birkenstocks with bike cleats, check. What's not to like?

Let's take a GDP stroll mostly along the Appalachians, the one region of the US I've never visited (unless you count Pittsburgh).

44 Kentucky 29,842
45 Alabama 29,697
46 South Carolina 29,642
47 Oklahoma 29,545
48 Montana 27,942
49 Arkansas 27,875
50 West Virginia 24,748
51 Mississippi 24,062


The only reason Oregon looks bad by any measure is having done so little with so much. Reminiscent of the Hudson's Bay Company [wikipedia.org], the oldest commercial corporation in North America. Sold off more assets than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined (fur trade, oil and gas, trans-continental railway rights, etc.) but always kept its eye on the prize: $10 dress shirts. With a competent management team, a business plan, a vast supply-chain infrastructure, a will to succeed, a grasp on reality, and lots of immigrant labour, it could have been Walmart. Who knew?

If you want a cheap cooling bill at the site of massive Hydro infrastructure, check out Cold [ec.gc.ca] and colder [ec.gc.ca].

Kitimat would need undersea cables tapping into the Pacific grid, but if you wanted your data center to resemble Cheyenne Mountain, that could be arranged. In Sept-Iles you would enjoy the language laws and two layers of Federal government. In both locations you would enjoy Canadian privacy laws we have passed, and the DMCA we haven't yet passed. 30 annual days with a high above 20 degrees C (68 F). 100MW there would barely ripple the meters.

You'd end up with higher latencies, and less routing redundancy. The ports and heavy infrastructure would be world class, but you might also discover that Fedex doesn't guarantee same week delivery for six months out of the year.

The one concession I would have demanded from Google at Dulles is an Enron-esque contract to shed load during a grid crisis. Should be no problem for Google to design the data center to shed load a a MW/minute for half an hour. The spiders, for example, can tolerate a little downtime. Plus Google has the capacity to load-balance globally.

Not many people realize this, but the phone companies in the 1970s routinely routed long distance calls from Boston to Tampa through western time zone

Re:As an Oregonian...

[SendBot (29932)]

I don't mind the inbound people as much as their attitudes in the non-summer seasons. I live in Oregon *because* I love the weather and environment year-round. Sucks every time I hear some whiner complain about how much they hate "days like this" if it's not 65 and sunny.

Re:As an Oregonian...

[mxs (42717)]

So if you're thinking of moving to Oregon, remember: It rains here ALL THE TIME.

So let's recap. You are on slashdot, home of the nerds. The nerds who sometimes need an excuse not to go out. Rain is a perfect excuse. It raining all the time makes it a perpetual excuse. That's one crowd you'll attract.

There's hippies everywhere.

Perfect ! Police are going to be busy busting people for pot possession, thus way too busy to bow to the MAFIAAs each and every demand. Therefore you just attracted all the pirates of the interwebs. Well, ok, many of them are potheads, but not to worry -- many hippies means a steady supply of pot. You just got yourself another crowd ready to move to Oregon.

Nearly half the women in Portland are lesbians too!

This is what nerds and pirates consider entertainment. (ding, ding, more incentive !) Also, seeing as how half the women in Portland are eligible, you just attracted a drove of lesbians looking for partners. Maybe they'll even "convert" some. Yippeeh ! More entertainment !

Actually, I didn't make that last line up. :(

No, you just grabbed it out of your ... err ... well. Sure, there is a higher concentration (particularly in Portland), but honestly, half ? To quote Mr. Cosby : Riiiiiight.

*sigh* Ever our governor once said "Oregon: a nice place to visit, but please don't stay."

Tourists = $$$.

Re:As an Oregonian...

[mysticgoat (582871)]

Nearly half the women in Portland are lesbians too!
Actually, I didn't make that last line up. :(

Actually, Portland is also home to one of the largest populations of persons who are in the process of altering their gender. At Saturday Market, First Thursday in the Pearl or Last Thursday on Alberta Street, or any afternoon on NW 23rd Avenue or SE Hawthorn, you can count several representatives of more than half a dozen distinctly different genders in fifteen minutes.

Oregon has places that everyone should visit. Such as Seaside (ask about the exploding whale). The Falls at Oregon City (stay upwind of the paper factory). The Interstate Highways through Portland and Eugene are always good for hours of radio entertainment during the weekday commuting times. So do bring your tourist dollars. But you will want to leave before the rains set in, because it takes years to learn how to manage your personal crop of bodily mildew, and that learning experience is not pleasant for the student or anyone in proximity with a working nose.

The Columbia flows from BC thru WA/ID and WA/OR

[WillAffleckUW (858324)]

I don't know for sure about the other states/province but they've been trying to get tax writeoffs (aka bribes of tax dollars) to build more server farms here in Washington State.

And supposedly, the other states - Oregon and Idaho.

British Columbia, which has most of the dams (and is building two Columbia River treaty dams now near Revelstoke BC and Trail BC) provides most of the power, so I presume they may also be included in these attempts to get tax subsidies plus cheap power.

what we lost

[sohp (22984)]

At The Dalles is one of the many dams along the Columbia River that supply all that electricity. But before the dam was completed in 1957, it had been one of the most important places in North America for the indigenous people. On March 10, 1957, hundreds of observers looked on as a rising Lake Celilo rapidly silenced the falls, submerged fishing platforms, and consumed the village of Celilo, ending an age-old existence for those who lived there. [wikipedia.org]

If Google really wanted to save electricity...

[captzoden (1230806)]

They should do this [blackle.com]. ;)

Re:Connection...

[mrxak (727974)]

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

Re:I thought they were going green?

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

The sun goes down at night (you need to get out more), and the wind stops. Water, on the other hand, doesn't stop falling.

Re:

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

You, too, need to get outside more. Sometimes water falls from the sky (that's the blue dome overhead) and gets everything wet. It doesn't just fall in your glass. It falls on EVERYTHING and gets it all wet. Not like in Return to Castle Wolfenstein where the rain falls and falls and nothing gets wet.

Re:

[gotzero (1177159)]

They have the mobile google-boxes all over the place, but there are still a number of purposes for a static, secure, and reliable data center. I think a combination of the two makes the most effective system. High speed coupled with high reliability, with everything able to reroute in real time.

Re:I dont understand this "cheap electricity" thin

[hidden (135234)]

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.

Re:I dont understand this "cheap electricity" thin

[evanbd (210358)]

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.

Re:

[Jeffrey Baker (6191)]

Not from around here, I take it? We have an entire department of uneconomical projects. We call it the Bureau of Reclamation. Their job is to build vast, expensive capital projects and subsequently give the benefits to select landowners for a pittance. For example, the Bureau will build a dam and sell the electricity to nearby farmers well below the market price of electricity, sometimes even below the cost of generation. The Bureau will then also sell the water from the dam to the same farmers at a fix

Because Transmitting Data is SO much Cheaper

[Mal Reynolds (676267)]

Because transporting information is a hell of a lot cheaper than transporting electricity.

The only product Google sells is digital information. Transporting data is dirt cheap. So Google could care less where the data is, as long as they can access it quickly.

Transporting electricity requires big cables made of very expensive metals. Power transmission systems are massive and require a lot of maintenance. They are affected by wind, ice, and lightening. The amount of power Google uses is not at all trivial to have run into urban or suburban areas. Worse yet, when electricity is transmitted, a lot of it leaks out along the way.

Compared to electricity, transporting information is dirt cheap. Data can be transported by much less expensive and much smaller fiber optic cables. Fiber optics require a lot less maintenance than power lines. Lightening strikes, ice, and high winds don't usually have any impact on fiber backbones. Better still, comparatively tiny amounts of electricity are needed to maintain data integrity over long distances. And unlike power transmission, the valuable stuff being transmitted doesn't leak out along the way.

All Google cares about is getting the information back and forth between its users. So it really doesn't matter where the data center is. Electricity is even cheaper at places like Canada's James Bay project. I suspect the only reason Google doesn't go to places like that is the difficulty in getting quality staff to work so far north and so far from "civilization".

Re:500 w/sf "industry standard"???

[wwwillem (253720)]

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.

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 :) 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.....

Re:

[chromatic (9471)]

Just out of curiosity, what kind of pollution do you expect a data center to produce?

Heat. Living things grow in the Columbia River.