New Energy Sources Don’t Compute

On April 19th of this year, Facebook launched its second American data center, choosing Forest City, North Carolina, as the site of its 300,000 square-foot server warehouse. The center is critical to creating the ‘cloud’ that powers connectivity and convenience for users around the globe, facilitating leisure and commerce and enabling digital worlds once only imagined in science fiction. And it uses lots of power.

Along with its counterpart in Prineville, Oregon, Facebook’s new data center is among the world’s most energy efficient. But that’s where any semblance of ‘green’ stops. The new data center is estimated to require 40 megawatts of continuous power, or enough to power about 40,000 homes. Where does that power come from? Mostly coal.

When power is your largest recurring cost, low electricity prices are paramount. That’s why North Carolina, like other states around the Southeast, is attractive to large industrial power users like Facebook. It’s power prices remain well below the national average, mainly because of the state’s reliance on inexpensive coal-fired power production. North Carolina’s marketing outreach to data center owners, in fact, explicitly advertises that the state’s coal-fired power generation provides exactly what these massive facilities demand: reliability and affordability. That’s something the new, politically popular sources of power can’t offer.

Facebook is far from alone. One source estimates Apple’s billion-dollar data center in North Carolina to gobble up 100 megawatts, while Google’s data center in that state will require between 60-100 megawatts when fully complete. Just how big of an impact are these types of facilities having on power demand? In July of last year, one EPA estimate suggested that data center power consumption in the United States soon would grow to 12 gigawatts. Or, in the words of Greenpeace, “If the cloud were a country, it would have the fifth largest electricity demand in the world.”

Groups like Greenpeace, of course, loathe this market decision. Apparently, they would rather data centers use more expensive, less reliable forms of power. Their report from last year, entitled ‘How Clean is Your Cloud?’, calls for cleaner sources of energy for data centers and greater energy efficiency. Facebook, by the way, earned near-failing grades from Greenpeace for the powering of its massive servers. Twitter totally flunked. #epicfail

Like it or not, new media is running on old energy sources. Technology platforms we know and love – Facebook, Google, Twitter – could not run without reliable power at a low price. Whether it is a mother in New Hampshire connecting with her son, an activist in California tweeting about the promise of solar power, or citizens in Egypt using social media to foment a social and political revolution, the so-called ‘cloud’ that makes this possible runs on energy from mostly underground. Something to think about next time you see an organization launch a social media campaign to shut down power plants.