Aug
13
WRITTEN BY:
Greg Goode
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Real-estate agents constantly chant the mantra ‘location, location, location’. Well, the data centre industry’s mantra is fast becoming ‘energy, energy, energy’.
The data centre industry is constantly being told that its fuel—that is, electricity—is going to become more costly over time. The industry has had a pretty cushy ride to date; cheap energy has abounded. To the credit of the industry, it hasn’t sat around on its laurels after being presented with such a prediction, and has launched itself into the forefront of energy conservation in the last few years.
The motive is primarily to reduce energy costs (which saves you money) by reducing or eliminating unnecessary energy use in the data centre throughout the entire power utilisation chain. The power utilisation efficiency (PUE) equation quite clearly spells out the components of this chain.
But what is the driver for the increase in the electricity cost? Is it demand exceeding supply? This is highly likely as most governments have been delinquent in failing to build new power plants to increase base load or to promote an investment culture that will have private companies build the plant. Is it the fact that there will be more alternative energy sources supplying the grid, like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal? All of these energy sources are nowhere as cost-effective as using good old hydrocarbons like coal to fuel a power plant, but they are being exploited. Then there is the emissions trading schemes that are mooted by government. Such schemes definitely add to the cost to supply electrical energy. A licence to pollute has to be recouped some way by the operator of the plant, so the consumer will bear the full brunt of this measure.
But wait, there’s more! Coming up fast is another cost driver in the form of the government’s push to have the power industry capture and store the main emission of coal-fired power generation: CO2. Greenhouse gas emissions have got many people running scared. If the heat cycle on this planet gets out of whack—and there is evidence it is occurring due to human activities—we may end up with a runaway global greenhouse event. Earth will become like the planet Venus which astronomers believe suffered this same fate billions of years ago. We’ll be toast baby!
So the carbon capture and storage (CCS) solution is gaining traction. It is seen as a viable way to prevent the atmospheric CO2 from increasing. But this idea, and its technology, comes at a high price and will add cost to the overall cost of power production. Nobody has actually applied it to a full-scale power station, though there are some pilot plants testing the idea, and CCS has occurred in the mining industry throughout the world, but for different reasons.
So, what is the current projection for cost increases given that all of these factors are driving up energy costs? Is it in the tens of percent? Highly unlikely. With so many cost drivers the likely outcome will be in the hundreds of percent.
The data centre industry had better keep on driving for greater energy efficiencies as the data centre users—finance, manufacturing, government, IT services, research, etc.—may one day find themselves priced out of running such facilities. It will become the IT haves and have-nots. Maybe some industries will have to close their data centres and go back to the early 20th century business model where enterprises had huge numbers of human number crunchers and pencil pushers moving data at a snails pace. Could you imagine requesting a data search which would probably be by snail mail to a corporation equivalent to, say, Google using such a structure? It’s back to the future, baby!