Some of you may have noticed the my site silvermakersmarks.co.uk is not working. It went down about 1900 GMT yesterday. My ISP tells me it is a problem at the data centre where they host the server and that it is affecting numerous sites. They are hoping that the outage will not last too much longer but can give no estimates for restoration of service.
Phil
Fingers crossed, Phil. Everything will be fine!
This is a problem which is only going to get worse as the world goes “on the Cloud”.
Up to half of the world’s data centers may be delayed this year | Latitude Media.
These data centres employ almost nobody, use vast amounts of electricity and are visually unattractive because of the cooling devices required.
The arguments against them by local governments are oddly reminiscent of the arguments against cotton mills in the18th century. Except that cotton mills at least provided employment on the looms.
The logical thing to do is build them where there is plenty of cheap power and nobody lives.
Cheap power, since Trump decided to make fossil fuel expensive enough so we in Canada could make a great deal of money selling it to the US and China, means hydro or solar power. Only trouble with that is you need to string electrical power lines and that is even more expensive.
Unfortunately hydro power means dams which means destroyed farmland in valleys and solar power means an array of panels which people find ugly too. It took my company a week to get permission to build the first 120 acres of solar power in Brooks AB, it took us four years and millions in fees to get the second 160 acres approved.
People thought bitcoin production was bad. Data storage is far worse. Fortunes are now be assembled by developers who can get local landowners and their governments to approve sites near power sources.
Unfortunately the end result is higher electricity costs for the domestic consumer. When we put the James Bay hydro project in in Quebec we could sell power to the US for 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Today the average consumer in this country pays 13 cent pkh and some as high as your rates in the UK.
The interim solution may be finding cheaper sources of power but the long term solution is better data storage systems that don’t require massive cooling devices and don’t use so much generated power to run the banks.
Failing this its back to geese. You will recall they were raised for two purposes, one was the Yuletide feast, but more important was tail-feathers for quill pens.
CRWW