At the Reno County Commission meeting on May 27, the anti-everything crowd was out in force and wanted data centers banned. I offer the following, from my FactualDataCenters.com website.
For the sake of argument, let’s say this group has ginned up enough anger and fear to pressure our leaders to ban data centers.
Here’s the problem.
First of all is the demand for the computing that data centers perform. In fact, with every Facebook post made against data centers, activists are driving demand. From banking to social media to your favorite streaming movie, we are all driving demand.
Secondly, there is money. Investors are clamoring to invest in tech, due to good returns.
And finally, tech folks are smart. Not evil, but smart. The world is demanding more computing, and they’ll find a way to deliver it.
Enter the tech company Span. They’re currently experimenting with putting mini data centers in people’s backyards. Instead of a building full of computers (data center), they will place a mini data center in a resident’s backyard, connected via high-speed fiber, to their neighbor’s mini data center in their backyard.
You see, there’s plenty of electrical capacity in most people’s breaker box. All Span has to do is dangle free (or greatly reduced) electricity and Internet to the homeowner, and they’re in.
Think about it. You’re offered free electricity and Internet to host a box in the backyard that you never have to worry about. Does it make noise? Sure, a little, but you can live with that.
So, Span gets 10 of these going in a city. Then 100, then 1,000, then 10,000. What do they have now? A full-blown distributed data center, with no way for the government to control it.
The Span distributed data center isn’t as efficient as a single-building data center would be, and Span has to worry about the maintenance, but because of local efforts to ban data centers, they couldn’t build a data center where they needed one, so they just built around the ban.
The city or county has now lost control, and tax money, although they will still get their 5% power franchise fee from the electric company for the power used by the backyard data centers.
But here is where it gets ugly. You see, if the data center was a single big building, in Kansas, it would have to pay for all the transmission and power station upgrades needed for the big power load it draws. But since it is distributed to homeowners, all the customers will need to pay for all the upgrades, as the breaker box in the home can handle the load, but not the current transmission lines and power generation facilities.
Again, every customer will foot the bill for the needed power upgrades…except the homeowners who signed up to get the free electricity and Internet for hosting the mini data center.
They will be just fine.
Casey Swarts, Hutchinson