Rural areas with less expensive electricity might attract large digital companies that run large “server farms” requiring high loads of electricity to operate. As more and more of our computing goes online, the server and storage space required to meet growing computing demand will result in increased electricity demand on the part of the sever providers
Energy costs have turned into the driving force behind site selection decisions by Google, Yahoo and other Internet operations. They’re eyeing rural areas with plentiful and cheap power. These cyber giants process massive amounts of information through server farms spread throughout the globe…
Relocating server farms to rural locations shaves pennies per kilowatt-hour. But because server farms can consume as much power as a city of some 35,000 people, even modest reductions in electricity rates can save millions of dollars a year.
My hometown in Northwest Iowa (Laurens) has quite low electricity rates due in large part to a share in a hydroelectricity dam that was purchased decades ago by the municipal power provider. For years the low electricity rates kept a large grocery distributor (Scrivener then Fleming) in town despite being 60 miles from the nearest four lane highway. Low electricity rates made running their cooling units cheap enough to make up for the extra driving their trucks had to do on rural two lane blacktops. They left town anyway in 1999 and took a couple of hundred jobs with them.
The electricity is still cheap in Laurens. Perhaps this largely farming based economy can attract some new farms—server farms.