Server Farms are cropping up across the country. Google has a few farms along the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon. Upstream in Quincy, Microsoft has opened its first of six planned server farms, a mammoth 474,000 square feet and surrounded on three sides by fields of potatoes, beans and broccoli. The mighty Columbia has been a source of cheap electricity for decades and it isn't any wonder why this area was chosen.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Cisco are investigating the possibility of establishing server farms in Iceland powered fully by renewable energy. The power comes from both geothermal and hydroelectric sources and is so cheap that in the wintertime some sidewalks in Reykjavík and Akureyri are heated.
Google is also building a massive server farm near Eemshaven in the Netherlands, where 100,000 servers will have access to 30 megawatts of power, some of which will be delivered by windmills.
And what if you cant find cheap electricity? Then you have the Iowa State Senate pass a bill that gave Google a tax break on the sales tax from utility bills and a property tax break for the site of the center itself.
There is not just the cost of electricity that is an issue here. Larry Page cares about the polluting effect that Google may have. Apparantly the Internet is not a very clean industry, and mega-coms like eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google are partly responsible for global warming for the server farms are hardly "carbon neutral". Here we go again ... Google is evil, bad Google.
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