Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy – New York Times

It looks like Google is getting serious about finding sources of renewable energy to power their datacenters. The financial sector has been predictably pessimistic. It’s really a wonder they don’t get it. Google consumes an enormous amount of power with it’s datacenters. It only makes sense that they would look to renewable sources of energy to both reduce their expenses and lessen their impact on the environment. As processors have grown more powerful, they’ve also grown more power hungry. One of the speakers at the Supercomputing ’07 conference (it may have been DOE undersecretary for science Raymond Orbach, but I can’t remember for sure…) pointed out how ironic it is that some of the systems currently in use for studying global climate change may actually be helping cause it. It’s likely much the same with Google’s massive datacenters.