According to George Gilder, “In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant – in order to save what is scarce.”  Stephen Young considers how bandwidth and electricity are trading places when it comes to scarcity and abundance – and what it might mean for the move to a dematerialised and decarbonised economy.

Viva Las Vegas

Some years ago I was driving at night along Highway 93 through the Nevada desert. Riding the dips and swells as the road sliced through the blackness, I crested a rise and suddenly beheld a vision, an unearthly glow on the horizon. Moving closer, the glow resolved into separate points of light as I realised I was approaching Las Vegas, neon epicentre of the planet and one of the world’s fastest growing metroplexes.  

That vision of Las Vegas, and what must have been its scary electricity bills, came back to me back in 2006 when reading an article by George Gilder in Wired. Now, with oil around $130 a barrel, Gilder’s words resonate again. Back in 2006 he noted that the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, were  building “the computer on a planet” - vast server farms linked by optic fibre networks to build a petascale operating system to support search, services, applications and videos, in a new computing architecture that cuts across continents.

Search is juicy

Gilder quoted the Operations VP of search company Ask.com as estimating that the five leading search companies together had around 2 million servers. Each sheds 300 watts of heat a year, totalling 600 megawatts, plus hard drives that throw off another gigawatt. Cooling this little lot was taking a total of 2.4 gigawatts. Electricity grid inefficiencies were losing a third of the incoming power, and half of what's left was lost to transformers and converters. This means that by 2006 the five major search engines were consuming around 5 gigawatts of juice: almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area on the hottest day of the year. By 2008 according to a recent article in The Economist, Google alone was using as much electricity as the city of Geneva.

Reading Gilder set me thinking about an Ovum report I wrote back in 2000. The report covered telecoms hotels and data centres, the buildings that were becoming the heart of the Internet. We know what happened next: dot com turned to dot bomb, the bandwidth boom turned to bust and many of the data centre providers had to face the same destructive forces as the bandwidth providers. Concentration and consolidation became the name of the game.

Fast forward to 2008. The bandwidth market is showing some signs of stability, and telecoms hotels and data centres are back in demand. But there’s a big difference. In 2000, there were three major constraints on finding sites for telecoms hotels:

• the right kind of building
• a location with sufficient bandwidth
• enough power to feed the servers and keep them cool

What we forecast was that, "Connectivity will play a decreasing role in telecoms hotel location as power requirements increase…" Not only the location, but also the size of telecoms hotels would be determined by the power available. "Large telecoms hotels will increasingly be developed in close proximity to significant power supplies..." and "there will be a trend to locate telecoms hotels away from the premium areas, in second tier cities and out of town sites linked by high bandwidth resilient backhaul..."

Bandwidth gets cheap, electricty gets expensive

We are currently in the era of abundant bandwidth, although as with all commodities, the balance between supply and demand is ever changing. Right now, companies like Google are getting competitive advantage by building their own facilities - two dozen data centres with upward of 450,000 servers in what Gilder calls the “Googleplex” - closer to the sources of the power that feeds the machines.

Google has announced that it will use design improvements and the adoption of power-saving technologies such as evaporative cooling, to increase efficiency at its data centres. Its aim was to be carbon neutral for 2007. Using solar panel installations at its headquarters certainly helped, but so did the fact that Google now builds its server farms in locations with plenty of bandwidth, but more importantly, cheap hydro electric power from sources like the Dulles Dam. The dam, which straddles the Columbia River along the Oregon-Washington border, was originally built to fuel a now-closed aluminium plant, but has attracted new businesses in the shape of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, who are building big data centres close to the source of the electricity they need.

Gilder’s maxim says not merely that it is possible, but that it is necessary to waste memory and bandwidth to dominate the petascale era. According to Gilder, “optical networks, which move data over vast distances without degradation, allow computing to migrate to wherever power is cheapest.”

Another Wired guru, Kevin Kelly, wrote in October 2007 that he saw the web, and the internet foundation it resides on, as One Machine: the biggest, most complex and most reliable machine we have ever built. Kelly calculated some of The Machine’s main attributes. Including data centres (with cooling), PCs and monitors, modems and routers, and the phone network he found that the global internet is now consuming 868 billion kilowatt hours of juice - about 5.3% of the world’s total electricity consumption (compare this with the oft-cited Gartner figure of ICT being responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions). 

So while the costs of shipping electrons on glass keep on falling, the costs of sending amps along cables is heading in the opposite direction. How ironic would it be if the promise of a de-carbonised and de-materialised economy, enabled by the One Machine, ends up being constrained by the price and availability of the electricity which feeds it.