A quick link before I head off for a week’s vacation: In the new issue of Time, Justin Fox looks at peer production, Yochai Benkler, and the Benkler-Carr wager. Fox comments further on his blog.

A new study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released today, reveals that the electricity used by server computers doubled between 2000 and 2005. The report, which appears to be the most definitive assessment of data center energy consumption yet produced, underscores the growing importance of energy efficiency in effective IT management. The report’s author, Jonathan Koomey, told Technology Review, “I was surprised by the doubling. I expected some growth, but not quite as large.”

The increase in power consumption is largely attributable to the proliferation of cheap servers, according to the study:

Almost all of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expensive servers, with only a small part of that growth being attributable to growth in the power use per unit.

Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.

The estimate that servers account for 1.2 percent of overall power consumption in the U.S. is, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, considerably lower than some previous estimates, which put data center power consumption as high as 13 percent of total U.S. consumption. It should be noted that the study, underwritten by AMD, looks only at power consumption attributable to servers, which represents about 60% to 80% of total data center power consumption. Electricity consumed by storage and networking gear is excluded. The study also excludes custom-built servers, such as the ones used by Google. The number of servers Google runs is unknown but is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Related posts:

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

Welcome back to frugal computing

There’s long been talk of what John Seely Brown dubs “ecological computing” and what others call “pervasive computing” – the use of a multitude of wireless sensors to hook the physical world up to the Internet – but not much has come of the idea to date. That may be about to change, though, as the cost of sensors falls, as scientists learn more deploying them in the environment, and as military and commercial applications proliferate.

The Associated Press today has an interesting article about the work going on at UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, which has a big grant from the National Science Foundation to pioneer the deployment of so-called “wireless motes” that can be used to monitor physical spaces. The center’s headquarters is covered with

dozens of miniature, low-resolution cameras and sensors. They’re wirelessly linked to computers throughout the 6,000-square-foot space, keeping tabs on traffic flow in public areas and monitoring temperature, humidity and acoustics. The building serves as a testing ground for developing and perfecting wireless sensing technology to connect major chunks of the real world to the Internet.

The technology is “quickly catching on,” says the article, “attracting the attention of the military, academics and corporations. Just as the Internet virtually connected people with personal computers, the prospect of wireless arrays sprinkled in buildings, farmland, forests and hospitals promise[s] to create unprecedented links between people and physical locations.

Such monitoring also, of course, raises a lot of security and privacy issues, which researchers are struggling to address. Another big obstacle is the lack of standards, as most of the systems built so far are incompatible with one another. Nevertheless, startups in this space, like Dust Networks and Arch Rock, may finally start reaping some big commerical rewards. The walls, it seems, will soon have eyes.

North Carolina’s Senate Finance Committee is hastily arranging hearings on the state’s use of tax incentives to lure businesses, as public outrage mounts over disclosures that Google was granted as much as a quarter billion dollars in secret tax breaks for a plant expected to employ approximately 200 workers. There’s no word yet on whether any Google officials will be asked to testify.

Meanwhile, the controversy in the state reached a fever pitch this weekend, as anti-Google rhetoric filled local papers. In today’s Charlotte Observer, columnist Tommy Tomlinson writes:

Google is being modest. For proof, just Google the phrase “unbelievably one-sided deal.” You’ll get links to the Kyoto environmental accords and a few terrible basketball trades. But what should really top the list, where unbelievably one-sided deals are concerned, is the monumental unarmed robbery that Google is putting on Caldwell County and the city of Lenoir …

Businesses have all the leverage. I understand politicians have to cut sweet deals. But sometimes the deal is so sweet it’ll rot your teeth. And you can bet that Google won’t be paying for the dental work.

Also in the Observer is another column, titled “Pop Goes Google’s Mystique,” by John McBride:

Bullying, like evil, is in the eye of the beholder. Government officials are used to giving orders, not taking them. Maybe some got hacked off when Google pulled rank. But check out this e-mail snippet from Google executive Rhett Weiss to Commerce Secretary Jim Fain: “This legislation has remained cursed with unfortunate and petty dickering from the legislative drafting side.”

Petty dickering? Well, yes. That’s the way our government by the people and for the people works. Not that Google seems to care. It demanded government officials sign nondisclosure agreements. Worse, many of them did … I’m not sure we have the right to get mad at Googlers for playing rough – just because they claim to be different than everybody else. Now we know they’re not.

In an editorial on Saturday, titled “Google’s Greed, Our Gullibility,” the Wilmington Morning Star writes:

North Carolina taxpayers could give $260 million to Google over 30 years – more than twice as much as first revealed. We’d pay more than $1 million apiece for 210 jobs, many of them offering middling pay at best. They’d be at a facility somewhat comparable to a power company substation: a bunch of equipment tended by a relatively few humans.

This super-secret giveaway “negotiated” by local officials and the Easley administration basically means that an international corporation that made $1 billion-plus in the last quarter of 2006 will never pay more than a fraction of its share of state and local taxes … Playing the role of gullible yokels to Google’s slick arm twisters, local officials did exactly what they were told – and kept it secret for months. Meanwhile, Google was bullying state officials, who also caved, though marginally less cravenly. We still may not know the full extent of this secret giveaway. Prudent parents may want to lock up their daughters.

Ouch.

In a column in today’s Greensboro News-Record, Ed Cone wonders why Google would put its sterling public image at risk to squeeze what for it is a relatively modest amount of money out of a state:

Google’s reputation is one of the keys to its financial success. People trust the company, which uses “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial corporate motto, to safeguard their privacy and provide accurate, unbiased information as they search the Web and use its other online services. If Google comes to be seen as just another soulless moneymaking machine, it might lose some of its competitive advantage.

And that’s what makes the California company’s behavior as it negotiated its Tar Heel deal so hard to understand. Google strong-armed the public partners with which it worked on the incentive package, in ways that would be unseemly even for a company that doesn’t publish a lengthy Code of Conduct that says things like, “Being a Googler means holding yourself to the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct. … When it comes to ethical conduct, we believe in erring on the side of caution.” Except, apparently, when an annualized amount equal to two-tenths of 1 percent of its profits for the trailing 12 months is on the line.

Others are defending the deal. In a letter appearing today in the Raleigh News Observer, James Fain, secretary of the state’s Department of Commerce, writes:

If Google does not locate in Lenoir, the county will have lost the opportunity for up to 210 new jobs at an estimated average wage of $48,000 and investment of $600 million. Without that investment in facilities, the county will not enjoy the economic impact of major construction activity, including the many construction jobs generated during the building phase. Grocery stores, barbers, laundries and other retailers would not enjoy the purchases of the new employees. And if Google does not locate in North Carolina, it will certainly pay no property taxes here …

We are pleased that Google will join the Caldwell County community, where its presence will make a positive economic and psychological impact. The company’s decision is affirming to a community which has suffered huge job losses and attendant despair. And that decision will not cost the state any money that it had before Google arrived.

The Googlegate controversy is unlikely to abate any time soon. Troubling new details of the secret deal-making continue to emerge. Today’s Charlotte Observer features a long article describing how public officials leaned on some local residents to sell their homes to make way for the Google plant. The mayor of the town of Lenoir, Davis Barlow, and the county commissioner, Tim Sanders, were among the officials who, according to the paper, went “door-to-door on behalf of the Internet giant Google. In some cases, officials returned to homes four or five times. Barlow and Sanders effectively used the personal touch, avoiding a drawn-out public debate that Google was secretly telling them would scuttle the deal. That personal touch enabled some residents to feel comfortable in selling their property.”

Among the people pushed to sell their homes was an elderly couple, Eugene and Violet Anderson. The mayor and other officials, under pressure from Google to secure the land quickly, told the couple that:

They wanted the Andersons’ property for a secret economic development project. And they delivered an unsettling message. They told the Andersons, both 86, that they didn’t have to sell but would risk being among the last holdouts in the changing neighborhood.

“I figured they’d take it if I didn’t sell it,” said Eugene Anderson, a retired upholsterer who was born in the neighborhood. “So, I made it easy on myself.”

An image is a fragile thing, as Ed Cone points out. In North Carolina, Google’s has been shattered.

UPDATE: Paul Teague, of the Caldwell County News-Topic, provides a good summary of the course of the Google negotiations: part 1 and part 2.

UPDATE: Under pressure from Google to finalize the deal quickly, local politicians never even bothered to complete an analysis of the economic impact of the tax incentives, reports the Associated Press.

Yesterday, I wrote about the influence of computer automation in widening America’s growing income gap. In today’s New York Times, Floyd Norris reports on a new government study that documents what’s been going on in the U.S. labor market over the past six years, since January 2001. It provides an eye-opening account of what happens when business, and in particular media, moves from the physical to the virtual world. For those who might be hoping that the decline in jobs in traditional media will be offset by growth in employment in digital media, the news is not good:

One chart shows the combined categories of publishing and broadcasting, both traditional and Internet-based. Over all, employment is down 11 percent. In those six years, employment in traditional paper-based publishing is down 13 percent. Broadcasting employment is off 3 percent. The traditional industries, between them, have shed 148,000 workers.

Did the Internet make up the difference? Just the opposite. Internet publishing and broadcasting now employs 36,600 people, and that figure is down 29 percent from six years ago. A larger Internet-related area covers Internet service providers, search portals and data processing. It now has 385,000 workers, down 25 percent over the last six years.

In the past information technology tended to reduce demand for low-skilled jobs but increase demand for higher-skilled specialists. Now, automation is moving up the skills ladder, as the Internet and sophisticated software combine to reduce the need for more categories of knowledge and creative workers. One has to wonder what new categories of employment will expand to absorb the losses.

Sun Microsystems has posted videos of its Analyst Day presentations from earlier this week. Following a tip from CEO Jonathan Schwartz, I watched CTO Greg Papadopoulos’s presentation on the future of computing demand (pdf of slides). It’s well worth a look.

Papadopoulos shows that the traditional big driver of computing demand – basic business computing – has lost its force. The growth in computing power through Moore’s Law now far outstrips the growth in demand from traditional business computing. That means, in essence, that businesses will need far fewer computers in the future to fulfill their demand – a fact already manifesting itself in IT departments’ emphasis on server consolidation and virtualization. The big opportunity here is simply to improve your utilization of existing capacity.

But, argues Papadopoulos, there are three new drivers of computing demand that far outstrip the expansion in supply guaranteed by Moore’s Law:

1. Rich multimedia content delivered through the broadband Internet (think YouTube and VOIP).

2. High-performance supercomputing (think weather modeling and drug development).

3. Software as a service (think Salesforce.com, Webex and Office Live).

In combination, these three sources will produce an exponential leap in demand for computing – Papadopoulos calls it the “Redshift” – that will far outstrip the increase in supply produced by Moore’s Law alone. In other words, you’re going to need a lot more computers (or at least a lot more computing cycles). Whereas the focus of those organizations running traditional business-computing operations is cost cutting through consolidation, the focus of those operating the new mega computing operations (like Google, say) is achieving efficiency at massive computing scale (through, for instance, reducing electricity consumption). There’s a fundamental split opening up in the market, in other words: two very different sets of customers (one with stagnant demand and one with burgeoning demand) with very different needs.

So how will the new sources of demand be fulfilled? Papadopoulos offers two scenarios, which might be labeled “Sun’s nightmare” and “Sun’s dream.” Under Sun’s nightmare, the new mega-scale computing operations follow the Google model and “disintermediate” traditional computer companies. They build their own systems from scratch. The old enterprise computer business turns into a “commodity parts market,” as Papadopoulos puts it.

Under Sun’s dream, the mega-scale computing giants continue to look to outside suppliers to provide the sophisticated computing systems they need. Google, in this scenario, is an early pioneer of the engineering of mega-scale computing but it is not a model for the future supply of such computing. (A historical analogue for Sun’s dream is mega-scale electricity production a hundred years ago – the big utilities didn’t all build their own generating systems; they bought them from GE and Westinghouse.)

In Sun’s dream, computing (like electric current) becomes a commodity but computers (like electric generators) don’t. Those who dominate the computer business of the future, under this scenario, would be the engineering giants, not the assemblers. The winners would not be those who pump out generic cheap boxes but those who are able to build highly efficient mega-scale machines. In some ways, that would mean the future of the computer industry would look more like the mainframe era than the PC era.

More details are emerging about the deal Google was able to get to set up a data center in Lenoir, North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer yesterday reported that the total amount of the tax breaks and other economic incentives granted Google may be far higher than the $100 million previously reported:

The cost of wooing Google to the state’s foothills could far exceed initial estimates, with tax breaks and other public incentives potentially reaching $260 million. That makes it one of the richest packages of recruiting perks ever offered in North Carolina, and one negotiated in strict secrecy.

Today, the paper reports that Google was able to get the breaks without actually having to guarantee much in return:

You can find almost anything on Google, but in its deal to build a computer center in Lenoir you won’t find a guarantee to create jobs in exchange for local tax breaks.

City and county governments agreed to give up tens of millions of dollars in potential tax payments to help lure the $600 million project to Caldwell County. But the governments set no job-creation or investment requirements, unlike most similar economic development deals, officials said Thursday. City and county boards in December agreed to waive 100 percent of Google’s personal property taxes and 80 percent of its real estate taxes for 30 years, which could be worth up to $165 million. Google said it will create 200 jobs by 2012. And local officials will just have to trust them.

Meanwhile, in a letter to the paper, Google’s Director of Global Operations, Lloyd Taylor, defends the deal and counters the criticism:

My job is to build and run Google’s data centers, and I’m very happy that we’ve found a new home for our infrastructure in Lenoir. I’d like to thank everyone who helped to make this possible … I’d like to briefly touch on two issues about which I’ve heard a lot of questions and comments recently.

First, I’d like to ask for your understanding. We waited so long to “go public” with our plans both for competitive reasons and because we don’t want to create a stir during the early phases of a site selection projects where many sites don’t end up panning out.

Second, you’ve probably read about Google getting “$100 million” in incentives to locate in Lenoir. That entire hypothetical 30-year figure consists of tax reductions that put North Carolina on par with other states. That is, those incentives come from reductions in property and sales taxes which don’t exist at all in many other states …

Even with the reductions, we’ll be among the largest taxpayers in Caldwell County. Just this year alone, we’ll pay millions of dollars of sales taxes on materials and services needed for construction. Plus, we already have paid over $4 million to Lenoir and Caldwell County to cover expenses and community infrastructure improvements.

But, back to our project. Despite the rains, we’ve made good progress on preparing the site, and we’ll soon start with the construction of the first building. We’ll regularly update you on our progress in the coming months.

Google seems to be learning that secrecy may not always be the best policy.

UPDATE: Also today, the Raleigh News & Observer published an editorial blasting the secrecy surrounding the Google negotiations and the complicity of government officials. It begins:

What must Google executives have thought when they reviewed the incentives offered by the state of North Carolina and Caldwell County last year in exchange for the company bringing a data center to Lenoir? That reaction must have been something like an after-Christmas sale when shoppers are standing outside a department store awaiting the opening and one declares, “You know, they’re practically giving the stuff away!”