Make Data Centers Community Friendly

By: John Shepler

There is a huge tech standoff underway right now. It’s between the nearly insatiable demand for additional data centers and community refusals to allow them to be built. Is there any way to satisfy both groups? I think there is.

Why We Need More Data Centers
Why is there such a building frenzy for data centers all of a sudden? Most business IT and e-commerce is well established. What’s new is the recent introduction of powerful Artificial Intelligence or AI tools. AI, itself, isn’t all that new. It dates back to the 1950’s. Over the decades these software applications have been expanded to play chess, answer Jeopardy questions, scan medical images, and search data bases.

In the last few years, more powerful and general purpose applications like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot have been introduced and business has gone wild. Every company is afraid that every other company is going to gain a competitive edge by enhancing employee productivity or simply eliminating staff. So, just about everyone is trying their hand at using AI tools. Those tools are supported by powerful processors located in… you guessed it… data centers.

Is This Revolution for Real?
Like the Internet boom that really picked up steam in the 1990’s, AI is likely to transform how we work & live. Also, like the Internet, it isn’t going to happen suddenly and all at once. The Internet and e-commerce took a generation to fully develop. It’s likely AI will follow a similar path to widespread adoption.

What that means is that this immediate need for near-infinite new data centers is probably overblown. Once everyone has had a chance to play with the tools to see what they can do, businesses are going to reconsider how many tokens they really want to buy for experimentation. Some applications will show great promise. Others will turn out to be blind alleys with no return on investment.

In the long run we are going to live in a more technical world and data centers are going to power it. We've been through the massive buildout of factories and shopping centers. We’re now going to switch to data centers and have to figure out how to integrate them into our environment.

Why Are Data Centers a Problem?
Companies building new data centers are naturally trying to get the most benefit from the least cost. That means siting where power is readily available and taking advantage of where land is flat and cheap, especially if TIF (Tax Increment Financing) districts or other tax incentives are available. Communities anxious to bring in new tax revenue have jumped at the chance to get someone to build business infrastructure, only to have regrets later.

A data center isn’t like a factory or shopping center. Once construction is completed, it supports only a few of tech and maintenance jobs and doesn’t primarily serve the local community. Fiber optic Internet means data centers can serve customers anywhere.

What communities are disappointed with is the rise in electric bills for everyone as the massive power needs of the data center are supported, often with new power construction needed. Another complaint is noise. Giant fans for cooling and diesel generators or turbines for power are upsetting to residents in the countryside or subdivisions near where data centers are sited. The power is often needed to supplement limited utility sources as well as backup. Finally, cooling can mean a massive draw on local groundwater that threatens utility users.

How to Make Data Centers Community Friendly
The key to success here seems to mean structuring a deal where both sides benefit. The data center companies need to show a favorable return on their investment or it makes no sense to build, at least in that location. The communities need to be sure that benefits exceed the costs including financial, social, and environmental or they will reject the application.

First is the run-up in electricity rates. Electric bills have been steady for years as heavily using industries relocated overseas and energy saving from things like LED lights and TV sets replaced earlier power hogs in the home. Data center power demand has introduced a new upswing in the need for power generation. One solution is re-commissioning shutdown nuclear plants. New smaller and faster to bring on-line nuclear generators are nearing deployment but won’t be a big factor for years.

Coal plants get the thumbs down for environmental, but fuel cells using natural gas, like the ones from Bloom Energy, are quiet and more acceptable. Solar, wind and battery don’t cause environmental problems, but can still get objections depending on where sited. OK. Those data centers have enormous flat roofs that can be built to support significant solar power production during the day when demand is highest all-around. Data center companies can also fund off-site solar fields to the feed the grid. Construct extra capacity and utility prices for everyone else should come down, not go up.

Battery storage for overnight and inclement weather is quite practical. Tesla is deploying utility battery storage worldwide. Once again, if the data center funds more capacity than it needs, the community will benefit and should welcome the addition.

Siting is critical. You can’t stick a giant noisy facility near a high-end subdivision and not get serious blowback. Better to get way out in the countryside or in some undesirable area where abandoned factories are decaying or landfills are being reclaimed. Using closed-loop water or refrigerant for cooling limits the drain on well water. Heat dissipation will have to be done without roaring like a jet engine.

Now, forget trying to get tax incentives. Pony up the same taxes as anyone else and create a decommissioning escrow fund for when the facility has reached its useful life and everyone should be happy. Any extra contributions for local schools or roads just sweetens the pot.

If these data centers really are as valuable as promoted, there should be enough money to satisfy both shareholders and community stakeholders. You’ll know the tide has turned when people start requesting data centers be built nearby.

Dotster Eco-Friendly Hosting Commitment

Anyone doing business on the Internet in the last 10 years has heard of Dotster, and the Dotster family of companies including Domain.com. When you think of Dotster, you probably think of domain name registration services. Dotster is also a hosting company offering everything from basic email hosing service for under a dollar a month all the way up to enterprise level website hosting. What I’ll bet you didn’t know is that Dotster is a major player in the realm of eco-friendly hosting.


Eco-Friendly or “green” hosting is growing in popularity among individuals and organizations that want to contribute to a better environment. The conventional wisdom is that green means more expensive when the term is applied to just about anything. That’s not true anymore. You can have Dotster eco-friendly hosting for just $5.75 a month with no long term commitment. Sign up for longer term plans and it gets even cheaper.

Dotster has a multifaceted approach to their eco-friendly hosting initiative. It starts with buying wind energy to power their web hosting servers. What they do is purchase enough renewable energy credits to offset all the power used for their hosting and even more. The commitment is 150% renewable energy offset for all Dotster web hosting servers.

Dotster buys its renewable energy credits from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization. The revenues they receive from selling their BEF carbon offsets or renewable energy credits is used to support building new renewable energy projects that include solar, wind and biomass power sources. Socially responsible companies and individuals can both buy these energy credits from various organizations nationwide who fund sustainable energy projects.

Substituting wind energy for coal, natural gas or even nuclear power is a good idea. An even better idea is to find ways to use less energy to get the same job done. Dotster does this by constantly upgrading their hosting infrastructure to improve both reliability and energy efficiency. They buy less power, which reduces the amount they have to charge their customers. Less power means less demand from the grid, so that those new wind generators can handle other loads and further reduce the need for carbon-based energy sources.

This attitude of ecologically responsible behavior is infused throughout the Dotster corporate culture. They donate their used computer equipment to programs for recycling and technology education for the disadvantaged rather than dumping it in a landfill to slowly leach out toxic substances. The office staff is encouraged to reduce printing, use paperless billing, recycle batteries and ditch paper cups in favor of Dotster reusable bottles.

As the icing on the cake, Dotster will plant a tree for you when you become a new Dotster web hosting company. The trees come from Trees for the Future, an organization dedicated to sustainable agroforestry that has already planted 50 million trees worldwide.

If you are on the lookout for web hosting that is more in tune with your personal philosophy as well as reliable, feature rich and an excellent deal, take a closer look at Dotster.com Web Hosting and Domain Name Registration services.

Even If There Is No Global Warming

Global warming is heating up. Regardless of what the atmosphere is doing at the moment, the rhetoric on climate change is getting hot and proponents on both sides of the issue are getting really hot... under the collar. The irony is that green energy makes sense regardless of whether we’re about to boil over or freeze our toes off.

To be sure, the consensus among the most respected scientific minds worldwide is that the average temperature of the planet is increasing and our industrial age emissions of carbon dioxide are causing it. But for the sake of discussion, let’s say it isn’t so. Let’s say that we’re just riding natural changes in the climate that are driven by subtle variations in the sun’s energy output, wobbles in the Earth’s orbit, a rash of volcanic eruptions or whatever. What if any or all of these influences are really what we’re observing?

The best answer might be: “So what?”

There are really good reasons for us to behave like CO2 is bringing disaster upon our heads, regardless of the scientific connection. We need to change our relationship with energy or disaster will come down upon us and likely sooner rather than later. In fact, we could be in deep trouble long before Florida slips below the waves and it will have nothing to do with carbon-anything.

We are currently in the midst of one nasty recession that has had the side effect of buying us valuable time on both the climate and energy fronts. All those tankers parked in the Persian Gulf and the dearth of oil exploration are evidence that we’re not consuming energy, especially oil energy, at anything like the rate we expected a few years ago. Before people started throwing punches over global warming, the big fight was over peak oil. That’s the prediction that we’re draining old oil wells faster than we’re finding new ones to replace them. The forecaster was M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil researcher, who had the gall to announce in 1957 that U.S. oil production would peak in the late 60’s to early 70’s. A lot of well meaning dissenters thought he was nuts until, right on schedule, our production topped out in 1970.

Well, guess what? There is also a peak oil prediction for global oil production. By some expectations we should have already passed it. Most likely we’ve been spared by those nasty recessions that followed the bursting of the tech bubble and now the housing bubble. It’s just a short term reprieve, however. As soon as business starts kicking back into high gear we’re going to realize that we’re strapped for oil and those $4 and $5 a gallon gas prices will be back in no time. Perhaps worse, as we’re doing nothing to increase the supply at the moment.

To be sure, we’re not on the verge of running out of oil anytime soon. What we’re on the verge of is running out of the cheap, sweet, light crude that we’ve all come to know and love. Half of it is still in the ground, but there are a lot more of us who want it and the price is going to spiral upward as we try to outbid and perhaps out shoot each other to get it. What’s in plentiful supply are the gooey tar sands and other thick sulfur-laden muck that cost a fortune to turn into the nice sweet light gasoline and diesel that won’t clog up your injectors.

The choice we’re facing is to persist in slugging it out over the remaining oil reserves and keep coming up with more and more money to get it one way or the other, or break the cycle by moving off oil and onto something more promising before the situation is totally hopeless. That something is green energy. A generation ago, solar panels and wind generators were scientific curiosities that only made economic sense in unique situations. Now they’re in mass production with costs that can be easily be paid back within the lifetime of the equipment. Are green sources as cost effective as coal, oil and natural gas? Wind is almost at parity, with solar not that far behind. We haven’t even started to tap wave and tidal energy for coastal cities, nor geothermal for areas where it’s boiling hot close to the surface.

Even if all we do is keep squabbling, the production learning curve will continue to reduce the cost of green energy until it becomes the obvious choice. Wouldn’t it be smarter to embrace the change now and gain the advantages sooner? Green energy gives us an unlimited source of power with energy that is naturally provided by the Sun (solar and wind) and the Moon (tidal). There’s no worry about investing in “dry holes.” It gives us national security in that no other country can take away our sunshine and breezes. Any money we invest in the generating equipment and maintenance, we could be paying to ourselves. That’s domestic security, a reduction in the portion of our national debt that comes from paying for foreign oil, and employment that is easy to keep on-shore.

Green technology and manufacturing practices also give us efficiency improvements that result in less energy needed for a given process and lower costs through recycling, rather than always starting with mining raw minerals and ending with paying to bury perfectly good processed materials when we’re done with the product.

Green energy production and green product technology complement each other. From an efficiency standpoint, they “pull in the same direction” and accelerate the cost and supply advantages we’d gain over industrial-age technologies based on fossil fuels. It’s a win-win situation and, if we’re smart about it, we’ll be the winners.

Why Alternative Energy Makes Sense for Technology Companies

Energy and information. They are inexorably linked in our virtualized business world. In fact, our ability to provide enough energy may be the undoing of the cyber world as surely as the byproducts of energy production may be the undoing of our modern physical world. Think global warming has nothing to do with Business 2.0? Think again.

We tend to think of energy limitations and dirty, smelly, messy, polluting energy sources as legacies of the industrial age. Now that we have entered the information age, the seamy side of business and consumer life should be abating. This should be especially true in the online world. It seems so pristine and post-industrial. Just click open your browser and you have instant transportation to anywhere in the world to communicate, observe and transact business. How can a world of belching smokestacks and filthy rivers be in any way related to this?

Our online world is a world of illusion. It's not just virtual spaces that are created as alternate universes. It's everything. We think in terms of PCs, wireless access points, fiber optic strands stretching around the world with occasional routers directing traffic, and Web servers somewhere out there. In the privacy of our offices, or while immersed in notebook computers on restaurant table tops, it all seems so highly efficient and low energy. Efficient? Perhaps in the organizational sense. Low energy? Not a chance.

In order for us to visit a museum in Paris or get stock quotes from New York using nothing but battery power, Gigawatts are being expended on our behalf. The WiFi hot spot we're connected to needs at least a few watts to transmit and receive. It is fed by a router that uses more electricity. All those routers, and there are many, between source and destination are each sucking fractional kilowatts from the grid. At the far end, a Web server or server farm processes our request and responds with the data files we're seeking. Ever catch a chill in a server room? Probably not unless you've had a power failure in January.

But that's just a part of the picture. There are more servers. Lots and lots of servers that help us find what we're looking for in the first place. Google is a multi-Megawatt power sink, with most of it being lost to heat rejection. All that heat needs an equally powerful cooling system to ensure that the waste BTUs are ejected from the building before they melt the processors.

Add to this the industrial world of manufacturing that actually makes all those computers, servers, displays and batteries, and you've got a huge energy requirement for technology that seems low energy when you only look at one piece of the system at a time. Where does all that energy come from? Belching smokestacks mostly. Perhaps not so visibly belching smoke these days. The EPA has done a good job in cleaning up the smelly and acidic atmospheric emissions. The Cuyahoga River hasn't caught fire in decades. In fact, most of our waterways look pretty clean at a glance. But we're still burning coal and most of our electronic waste is still being tossed in landfills for future generations to deal with.

The majority of us don't come home from work with grimy faces anymore, so we don't feel dirty. The pollution we're creating is more insidious. Carbon Dioxide is replacing smog as the instrument of our demise, if we choose to simply ignore it and continue as-is. A few decades from now we might just be asking why it's so hot outside the server room.

What we want from business today is speed. We want instant transactions, instant access to the World's library of everything ever written, and high definition video downloaded as fast as possible. That speed comes at the price of power. Power itself comes at a price, and it's going up. Nuclear power was first promoted as too cheap to meter. Now we're wondering if we can afford to build any more reactors and deal with their radioactive waste products. Fusion power was 50 years away fifty years ago. It still is. There's still coal, oil and natural gas, at least for awhile. Sequestering their carbon emissions may prove so expensive we'll quickly become energy limited or take our chances on a toasty future.

Another approach is to face the music and begin generating the increasing levels of power we need from non-polluting resources. This should be a national and worldwide agenda, but companies can go ahead and get control of their power supplies before the politicians stop bickering. The best prospects are wind, water and solar. The best of these for most companies is solar. That nice big flat roof on your building is perfect for a solar panel farm. By connecting it to the grid, you don't have to worry about local energy storage and your peak power production will be during the mid-day, which is normally the time of peak power consumption. Google has "seen the light" already and is installing solar panels at their facility in Mountain View, California.

Colocation facilities seem like a natural match for alternative energy sources of all types. They are electricity intensive, already have backup batteries and inverters to deal with momentary grid interruptions, and require diesel generators to pick up the load during catastrophic power failures. But site such a facility near a hydro dam, especially a private one, or with enough land to support windmills, plus the solar arrays, and a colo might become energy independent. Perhaps even to the point of not needing diesel backup at all.

Far from being independent of the limitations of industrial age power sources and their environmental effects, higher technology companies are exacerbating the problem. We'll have to start thinking in terms of contributing to the energy demands of the coming decades if we don't want to find ourselves stifled by limited power availability or damaging the world we want to live in.

IT Departments are Wearin' the Green

It takes more these days that mere luck o' the Irish to keep information technology costs under control. Many companies are finding that going green can help them keep more green in their coffers. In this case green means environmentally friendly, things that help keep the Earth nice and green as well as help businesses save money.

The first to look for the proverbial pot of gold is in the power being pulled from the grid. What's insidious about power consumption is that it consists of dribs and drabs almost everywhere. All those desktop PCs quietly sitting on desks are fractional amperes each. Watts become Watt-Hours and then Kilowatt-Hours of consumption. If all of that electricity was going into productive activities the cost would easily be swamped out by the profits gained. But it's not. Much of the time computers are idle, people are away from their desks. But the electrons still flow from the wall and you pay for every one of them.

Many companies decided long ago that turning off idle computers and monitors overnight and letting them sleep during the day saved far more money than it cost in shortening the life of the equipment. Truth be told, it's hard to cycle a PC enough to destroy it before it becomes obsolete. Most go to the recycler still working just fine. You do call the recycler when you want to get rid of old PCs and other electronics, don't you? Those circuit boards and CRTs are chock full of toxic substances that can be reclaimed and reused before they escape to poison the water table.

Back to power consumption. In turning off equipment when it is not being used, preferably with a mechanical switch that interrupts the phantom or standby power that nearly everything electronic draws, has a double benefit. It reduces power drawn by the device and also the need to get rid of heat that it generates. Nothing is 100% efficient. When power is brought in, most is used to do important work but some just goes up in heat. Even LCD monitors that don't have fans still run slightly warm to the touch. Incandescent lights are the worst offenders of all. All those lumens of light you want are accompanied by BTUs of heat that you don't. Some office buildings never need to run their furnaces during the work day. They get their heating the expensive way, as a byproduct of electricity consumption.

Nowhere is the heat issue more obvious that in the server room. As more and more cores are packed into less and less space, the heat load of equipment racks goes up and up. More and more air conditioning is needed to deal with the heat rejection. It's a viscious circle. The problem has gotten so intense, so to speak, that equipment designers are starting to focus on higher efficiency power supplies and even things like DC power distribution.

Perhaps you don't need a server room at all. Heresy? Actually it may be more cost effective to locate your equipment at a colocation facility where the cost of power and environmental control can be amortized over many users. An additional benefit of colo facilities is that you may also find much better deals on bandwidth.

Still can't get power consumption low enough? Perhaps you should be generating some of your own. Those big flat empty office building and factory roofs are perfect for rows of solar cells. With a PV array powering a grid connected inverter, you'll be using less grid power during the heat (and light) of the day when it is most expensive. Google is just one of a growing number of companies that is supplementing it's electricity needs with solar power.

Is it time to upgrade your facilities with more efficient computing equipment? Let our network of value added resellers help you find the best deals on servers and network devices that can also help you save the green in more than one way.