Let's Move All The Datacenters to Canada

A couple of recent news items and the general feeling that the energy crisis is going to get worse long before it gets better, plus a bit of industry understanding and some hope lead me to propose the following scenario...

We'll keep to North of the equator and North America in general but you can apply this to other North-South slices of real estate where people live and energy is getting expensive. While we crank up the use of solar power in the Southern climates, let's move one of the most concentrated uses of power and producers of heat as a byproduct North - and use the excess heat to make life more liveable as well as to grow more food.

Take here in British Columbia for example. We have the Vancouver regional government recently winning jurisdiction over huge greenhouses' use of burning wood and wood waste for heat in the colder months. Wood!!! To grow tomatoes and peppers!

And we have the likes of Intel and other processor manufacturers working at using just air to cool tens of thousands of watts of server-farm servers.

We also have an incredible amount of fibre both in place and to be built, if recent announcements by various politicians are to be believed. But even if not, the cost to build such is miniscual compared to the ongoing gains by using synergistic energy use.

Take a heat (energy) producing process and move it close to a heat (energy) requiring process.

Put a refrigerator's heat transfer coils UNDER the stove - requires a bit of plumbing but could easily be mandated by government - and then it would be a STANDARD

Use the waste heat from making ice for the hockey arena to heat the swimming pool next door - would require planning committees to actually think about energy and synergies, a requirement in my eyes.

Use the heat given off by hundreds of high-power servers to heat greenhouses to grow food - OK - might involve a bit of fiber-optic plumbing and movement of some jobs across a border - but not much plubing and not really many jobs, and the mostly dull-technical ones that many in the US would love to "outsource" if it didn't mean moving the actual hardware too.

Today we build datacenters in 40' containers and ship them anywhere - and can move them almost at the drop of a hat. So build them to sit beside some of our thousands of acres of Northern greenhouses and we'll all benefit. We have green power here in BC already - mostly hydro - and we're building more. As your solar power comes online and you lose the load of your current server farms, your (US) power will become greener too.

Yes, there may be some "territorial" considerations with respect to such things as privacy laws and such but, as I've already found out through the use of a rented server in New York, these things can be dealt with. As far as the US is concerned, as long as I'm sitting in Canada working on the NY machine, I have no US business presence. I'm sure the bureaucrats who come up with ways to enable airport customs officers to steal my toenail clippers can come up with a way to allow data to cross the border without being molested as long as it does not interact with data here in Canada while it is here.

Hey, the energy savings are worth it - think about it.

richard