Google's setbacks in green energy were even more embarrassing when the company also had to admit it couldn't even power its own data centers with the solar paneling it had installed. According to the company statement:

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Should have built a dam and reservoir, that's renewable as well and has the added benefit of actually working.

Here is a cool story about 'renewable' energy resources and tech companies.

I have a client who operates giant data centers, and these things get hot as hell and need to be cooled. For a long time, these data centers where located in the West in populated areas where there was 1) a distinct lack of cold weather and 2) skyrocketing power costs.

So they moved their data centers to the far upper midwest, specifically North Dakota. To cool their data center for 70% of the year all they have to do it literally open the doors. Yes it is more complicated than this but the architecture of the building allows for west and norther facing vents to capture cold and freezing air, move it through the building, capture the now warm air for heating the administrative areas, and pipe everything else out the east and south ends. Apparently, the east and south ends have become little micro climates with a lot of wildlife.

Of course, now they have a new problem. How do they recruit the knowledge they need to run the data centers to East Bumblefvck, North Dakota? This reality is actually hampering their ability to run and to sell and build new data centers....

(11-26-2014 11:32 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Here is a cool story about 'renewable' energy resources and tech companies.

I have a client who operates giant data centers, and these things get hot as hell and need to be cooled. For a long time, these data centers where located in the West in populated areas where there was 1) a distinct lack of cold weather and 2) skyrocketing power costs.

So they moved their data centers to the far upper midwest, specifically North Dakota. To cool their data center for 70% of the year all they have to do it literally open the doors. Yes it is more complicated than this but the architecture of the building allows for west and norther facing vents to capture cold and freezing air, move it through the building, capture the now warm air for heating the administrative areas, and pipe everything else out the east and south ends. Apparently, the east and south ends have become little micro climates with a lot of wildlife.

Of course, now they have a new problem. How do they recruit the knowledge they need to run the data centers to East Bumblefvck, North Dakota? This reality is actually hampering their ability to run and to sell and build new data centers....

Google, Facebook, and Apple have enormous data centers in NC about 40 minutes west of Charlotte.

(11-26-2014 11:32 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Of course, now they have a new problem. How do they recruit the knowledge they need to run the data centers to East Bumblefvck, North Dakota? This reality is actually hampering their ability to run and to sell and build new data centers....

$100K+/yr, benefits, and I get to keep making revenue from online ventures and I'll move.

(11-26-2014 11:32 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Here is a cool story about 'renewable' energy resources and tech companies.

I have a client who operates giant data centers, and these things get hot as hell and need to be cooled. For a long time, these data centers where located in the West in populated areas where there was 1) a distinct lack of cold weather and 2) skyrocketing power costs.

So they moved their data centers to the far upper midwest, specifically North Dakota. To cool their data center for 70% of the year all they have to do it literally open the doors. Yes it is more complicated than this but the architecture of the building allows for west and norther facing vents to capture cold and freezing air, move it through the building, capture the now warm air for heating the administrative areas, and pipe everything else out the east and south ends. Apparently, the east and south ends have become little micro climates with a lot of wildlife.

Of course, now they have a new problem. How do they recruit the knowledge they need to run the data centers to East Bumblefvck, North Dakota? This reality is actually hampering their ability to run and to sell and build new data centers....

To your larger point .... I think this will be less of an issue in another 3-6 years. If you pick up a new ultrabook right now, it has Intel's Broadwell architecture inside. Manufactured at 14nm. If you bin sort the silicon, you can get like 12 powerful x86 cores inside a single 140W (current high end desktop parts from Intel draw 140W for 8 cores ... and 140W for 4 cores just 5 years ago) thermal envelope. Granted, Intel is starting to slow down now, and 14nm was a difficult birth for their manufacturing process. Intel is starting to get slowed down by physics itself. But when you get down to like 8nm ... you'll be talking about a single, 400W, dual socket server having the same punch in 1U of space as a current blade cluster would.

The real issue in the future is going to be actual power density. The equipment I have housed to run this site draws 6 amps in 3U of space. Datacenters still to this day just aren't designed for a power draw density that high. That will have to change in the future as big big punch goes into little little space. Basically, the heat and per unit power are going down core for core. But core density is going up up up up. So you'll replace an entire aisle of machines with one rack. But the power draw will STILL BE THE SAME. The hosting provider for this site is nearly maxed out on their power delivery abilities and they are in downtown Atlanta.

On a related note: Hopefully AMD will be back in the game in 2016, as AMD Zen will come out then, which is a complete re-engineering of their architecture. It's being led by Jim Keller, who was in the AMD K7 team (original Athlon 64 and Opteron) and the IBM NexGen i586 team. AMD finally let a competent x86 engineer back to run the show.

(11-26-2014 12:10 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  $100K+/yr, benefits, and I get to keep making revenue from online ventures and I'll move.

To protect some privacy I won't give the exact towns, but they resemble towns and locations like Bowbells, ND.



http://binged.it/1y1MrCY

Still interested?

Though with $100k a year you could own the town pretty quickly. Run for Mayor, your wife works for the Sheriff, rehab downtown into sexy lofts......

Wow that is brutal. Nearest International Airport is Minot.... and I've NEVER HEARD OF MINOT.

They aren't even close to I-94 or I-29???

(11-26-2014 12:48 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Wow that is brutal. Nearest International Airport is Minot.... and I've NEVER HEARD OF MINOT.

They aren't even close to I-94 or I-29???

Minot is an old USAF - SAC big base place. It's so remote and cold the slang expression got to be, "Why not, Minot", when people were reassigned there.

It's cold as hell in winter and prone to flooding in spring/summer.

(11-26-2014 12:48 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Wow that is brutal. Nearest International Airport is Minot.... and I've NEVER HEARD OF MINOT.

They aren't even close to I-94 or I-29???

It's all about cheap land, cheap adminstrative labor, and open fields to collect the wind. I also wonder why they are often not closer to civilization but each location has a reason I guess. And there are some located by big cities...

We were once asked to schedule a trip to one of these locations in Canada, based 3 hours west of Regina, SK. Go pull up a map and look out that way - there is nothing but rapeseed fields and scrub. We sort of let that request to visit hang out their long enough that it disappeared.

These aren't anti-green right wing wonks, these are pro-green energy scientists:

from the OP-referenced article:

"Google CEO Larry Page has decided that the grandiose program called Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) can't make renewable energy cheaper than coal.

The fact that the price of natural gas has fallen by more than half because of cheap and abundant shale gas hasn't helped the economics of wind and solar either.

But the most remarkable admission from Google is that the (green) technology just doesn't work — at least not now. Two of the lead scientists on the RE<C project, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, both with Stanford, wrote the following devastating critique of the future of green energy in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum: 'At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today's renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope, but that doesn't mean the planet is doomed.'

Sorry, Sierra Club and Al Gore. You can't pin this on 'climate change deniers.' These scientists are trying to fight global warming....

The green movement has responded that Google's problem was it wasn't 'ambitious enough,' that it should have poured more resources into the renewable energy fad. But unlike governments, private companies don't have unlimited budgets. They have to turn a profit at some point....

Well, maybe the second half of the 21st century. For now, we need coal and gas and nuclear power for reliable electric power production.

If Google can't make renewable energy work, does anyone really think Washington can?"

Glad Google finally decided to embrace reality...too bad they threw away so much money before they did. Wish the left would also embrace scientific reality instead of believing in unicorns and spirits. Funny how many lefties bring up science to argue against religion, but ignore science in matters like green energy. Weird.

(11-26-2014 11:32 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Here is a cool story about 'renewable' energy resources and tech companies.

I have a client who operates giant data centers, and these things get hot as hell and need to be cooled. For a long time, these data centers where located in the West in populated areas where there was 1) a distinct lack of cold weather and 2) skyrocketing power costs.

So they moved their data centers to the far upper midwest, specifically North Dakota. To cool their data center for 70% of the year all they have to do it literally open the doors. Yes it is more complicated than this but the architecture of the building allows for west and norther facing vents to capture cold and freezing air, move it through the building, capture the now warm air for heating the administrative areas, and pipe everything else out the east and south ends. Apparently, the east and south ends have become little micro climates with a lot of wildlife.

Of course, now they have a new problem. How do they recruit the knowledge they need to run the data centers to East Bumblefvck, North Dakota? This reality is actually hampering their ability to run and to sell and build new data centers....

You'd figure they would locate such facilities in populated northern outposts like Fargo, Madison or Green Bay. The US Gov't has a massive data facility in Salt Lake City. The cheap land still doesn't justify setting up shop in places you can't convince people to move to.

(11-26-2014 01:02 PM)tigertom Wrote:  

(11-26-2014 12:48 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Wow that is brutal. Nearest International Airport is Minot.... and I've NEVER HEARD OF MINOT.

They aren't even close to I-94 or I-29???

Minot is an old USAF - SAC big base place. It's so remote and cold the slang expression got to be, "Why not, Minot", when people were reassigned there.

It's cold as hell in winter and prone to flooding in spring/summer.

The perfect place to exile the King and his sheeple

(11-26-2014 12:10 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(11-26-2014 11:32 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Of course, now they have a new problem. How do they recruit the knowledge they need to run the data centers to East Bumblefvck, North Dakota? This reality is actually hampering their ability to run and to sell and build new data centers....

$100K+/yr, benefits, and I get to keep making revenue from online ventures and I'll move.

You can do that in regular cities all over the west. Why go to North Dakota?

(11-30-2014 10:57 PM)Claw Wrote:  You can do that in regular cities all over the west. Why go to North Dakota?

The problem is the potential conflict of interest of keeping online revenue streams from a facility that serves as infrastructure from online revenue streams. I've had several offers from Google already but all come with total abstinence of *ALL* revenue from *ALL* forms of advertising.

You can do 100K+ in any number of vertical markets that don't give a damn what your web business is.

(11-26-2014 01:02 PM)tigertom Wrote:  

(11-26-2014 12:48 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Wow that is brutal. Nearest International Airport is Minot.... and I've NEVER HEARD OF MINOT.

They aren't even close to I-94 or I-29???

Minot is an old USAF - SAC big base place. It's so remote and cold the slang expression got to be, "Why not, Minot", when people were reassigned there.

It's cold as hell in winter and prone to flooding in spring/summer.

i was born at the air force base! we even had a minor league baseball team