A couple of months ago, a client brought to my attention an article about Microsoft building a new server farm. That news in itself was mildly interesting, especially the sheer scope of the project: a 1,400,000 square foot facility, roughly the size of 10 Costco warehouse stores. That and the location itself: a little "two-stoplight" town by the name of Quincy, Washington, population 5200.

To be honest, the facts aren't quite certain. Fortune magazine reported the 1.4 million square foot figure, while one regional newspaper mentions 450,000 square feet, and another talks about three buildings; it's possible that someone thought there were three 450,000 square foot building for a total of 1.35 million, rounded it up to 1.4 million, and there you have it. No matter which end of the spectrum reality falls into, though, it's still a lot of square feet.

And the story becomes even more interesting with more recent events: As Microsoft pours concrete on the west side of Quincy, Yahoo is working on its own facility on the east side of town, and reportedly even Google is nosing around. Of course, Google already has one facility a bit farther downstream in Oregon. So why is everyone coming here? The aerial map in Figure 1 shows that I'm really not kidding: There aren't a lot of stop lights in Quincy because there aren't a lot of streets.

Figure 1: This is the beautiful city of Quincy, Washington.

What the figure doesn't show is that if you pulled back a little bit, you would see that Quincy is nestled in the upper northwest corner of a spit of land that butts right up against the Cascade Mountains. And there's a method to this particular madness. About 20 miles to the northwest is one of the largest concrete structures in North America, the Grand Coulee Dam. More importantly, Grand Coulee is the third largest hydroelectric power plant in the world, supplying 61 terawatt/hours of power a year (roughly equivalent to 100 million barrels of oil). Nearly two-thirds of our electric power is generated by fossil fuels—primarily coal—but a hefty 10% comes from hydroelectric power. The Grand Coulee Dam accounts for 18% of that total, or nearly 2% of our total electricity supply.

Why am I barking about this? Well, some other interesting numbers come up in all of this. Reportedly, Microsoft will be getting its energy for less than 2 cents per kilowatt/hour (KWh). That's about one-third the price that industries pay nationwide, and one-fifth of the price residential customers pay (yeah, we pay nearly double what the big boys pay). And why does this matter to you and me? Because I fear it is just the start of a trend, a trend that will eventually mean a lot more cost to us: the trend of corporations sucking up all the cheap energy and leaving the consumers holding the bag.

Let's take a look at the economics of the situation. How many servers fit in 1.4 million square feet? If we say that just a quarter of the space is actually occupied by servers and that an ultra-dense rack can fit 200 blades in 3 square feet, then you quickly get a capacity of over 20 million servers. At a very modest 5W per server, you're talking about a draw of over 100MW, or roughly 2% of the capacity of the entire dam. And while my numbers may be a bit exaggerated (some observers think the Microsoft campus will only house a million or so servers), Yahoo and Google are already building facilities, and lots of other companies are looking to do so. And my calculations don't even take into account the energy for the HVAC systems that will be required to cool these massive server farms!

So how many new data centers do you expect to see as the demands of SaaS heat up? 10? 100? 1000? Because if just a couple of dozen new data centers are built in the Grand Coulee area, a significant percentage of the dam's supply will be dedicated to these facilities. If the owners of these server farms also manage to broker sweetheart cost deals with the power companies, then the consumers (who have been protected by federal price controls that are just about to end) will get hit with big rises in energy costs. And this is for what is one of the cheapest power sources available; it's not like Quincy can turn to some cheap alternative (can you say $3 a gallon for gas?). The West is in for a nasty power surprise in the next decade.

And it's not just the West. One of the things about these server farms is that they can be built just about anywhere that can provide two basic essentials: lots of electricity and high-speed Internet access. And I don't mean DSL, either... we're talking fiber-optic access direct to the backbone. But those literally are the only requirements, especially because of one other fact: Server farms employ almost nobody. Unlike corporate IT departments, which seem to have one high-paid technician per Wintel server, because of the commodity nature of the hardware and software on these boxes, a million servers can be supported by a hundred people. (I'm still unsure how that works; if you have to replace a server every three years, that still means 300,000 servers a year, which means 1,000 a day. With 100 people working eight-hour shifts, that's a server an hour every day, but I guess it's just plug and play, right?)

This means that these server farms can be placed in nasty, ugly places that aren't suited for anything else besides sewage treatment plants and refineries, so they can end up in garbage dumps in New Jersey and near strip mines in Illinois and even in the desert, provided the infrastructure is in place to provide the electricity and the Internet connectivity. At first glance, this looks like a pretty good deal: a new industry adding to the tax base of the community by using land that's not doing much else.

But check the numbers. With the addition of the Microsoft plant, the lovely little town of Quincy is going to go from, say, 1000 homes and roughly 5000 MWh per year (5 GWh) to hundreds of GWh. You might think that this is going to be a benefit for the community because of the extra workers and the extra taxes, but in reality the extra workers aren't going to do a lot for the community. One hundred new faces will add something, but not a lot. And at two cents a KWh, Microsoft is only going to pay a few million a year for energy; how much of that do you think will go back to the community? Even if Quincy manages to tack a 1% surcharge on the energy costs (and don't think that won't be fought tooth and nail), they'll make less than $100,000 a year. At the same time, their residential energy costs are likely to skyrocket, especially if the corporate deals include rate ceilings. Instead, the only way for the power companies to get more money will be to hit the consumer, and in Quincy a rate hike of just two cents a KWh will cost the community over $100,000 a year and wipe out any tax benefits they might have gotten.

I don't know. My figures may be off, but as far as I can tell, these server farms are unlikely to provide any benefits for any community. Instead, because they can be placed in areas where they can siphon off large amounts of cheap electricity, they may cost all of us in the long run. I don't know what can be done, but it seems to me that making sure that this new generation of energy-hungry corporate profit centers can't sit like leeches on our country's largest renewable power source might be something to consider.

Joe Pluta is the founder and chief architect of Pluta Brothers Design, Inc. and has been extending the IBM midrange since the days of the IBM System/3. Joe uses WebSphere extensively, especially as the base for PSC/400, the only product that can move your legacy systems to the Web using simple green-screen commands. He has written several books including E-Deployment: The Fastest Path to the Web, Eclipse: Step by Step, and WDSC: Step by Step. Joe performs onsite mentoring and speaks at user groups around the country. You can reach him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..