Slog
News & ArtsTuesday, April 17, 2012
Enviro Clouds and Coal
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 8:24 AM
The future (our world) has yet to break with the deep past:
The Internet often cloaks itself in an image of environmental sensitivity. But some companies that essentially live on the Internet are moving facilities to North Carolina, Virginia, northeastern Illinois and other regions whose main sources of energy are coal and nuclear power, the report said. The report singles out Apple as one of the leaders of the charge to coal-fired energy.The sad poetry of coal powering clouds.
3
Less poetic but equally odious: data centers often sprawl across many acres of previously pristine land, and their flat roofs usually glint in the sun without the benefit of grid-tied solar panels.
5
Ebook pricing, factory conditions, coal, appstore control, and a charitable history dwarfed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why do people like Apple again?
6
41% of the electricity in the US is generated from coal and another 19% comes from nuclear. That means any industry that opens a new plant/office/server site will have a roughly 60% likelihood that they'll end up using energy that comes from these sources.
But the businesses aren't moving to those places for the energy costs - electricity from coal is more expensive than from cleaner natural gas plants or super-green hydroelectric. If all the rest were equal (hint: they're not!) from a straight business cost standpoint, all these companies would be fleeing from the coal fired electric regions. There must be other factors (inexpensive land, lower corp taxes, cheap union-less labor, etc) that are driving them there.
What and why those factors overlap so broadly with regions of dirty energy use would be more interesting and enlightening question to explore, Charles.
But the businesses aren't moving to those places for the energy costs - electricity from coal is more expensive than from cleaner natural gas plants or super-green hydroelectric. If all the rest were equal (hint: they're not!) from a straight business cost standpoint, all these companies would be fleeing from the coal fired electric regions. There must be other factors (inexpensive land, lower corp taxes, cheap union-less labor, etc) that are driving them there.
What and why those factors overlap so broadly with regions of dirty energy use would be more interesting and enlightening question to explore, Charles.
7
Data centers must be geographically close to the end user. Otherwise Amazon would have all of its DCs here and none in Virginia, New York, Dublin, Tokyo... This just points out we need a better electricity grid to move clean power to dirty regions.
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