Submission + - Shortage of electricity drives data center siting
Engineer-Poet writes: "Per the San Jose Mercury News, competitors such as Google and Yahoo are meeting to discuss the issue of electricity in Silicon Valley. How much of the USA's 4038 billion kWh/year goes into data centers? Enough to make a difference. Data centers are moving out of California to spread the load and avoid a single-point-of-failure scenario. This is a serious matter; as Andrew Karsner (assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy for the Department of Energy) asked, "What happens to national productivity when Google goes down for 72 hours?" I'm sure nobody wants to know. (Though setting up to generate another 5000 billion kWh/year or so would put the issue off for at least a decade or three.)"
