The Cloud Would Like To Skip The Air

The cloud has discovered a shortcut around the power queue. Unfortunately, the shortcut runs through the air.

A data center needs electricity. Connecting to the grid takes time. Building generation on site can shorten the wait. The exhaust then enjoys a connection process so streamlined that the neighbors need not approve it, subscribe to it or even own a computer.

In the Texas Tribune’s account of new Houston Advanced Research Center modeling, the scale of the pollution depends heavily on how the planned data centers get their power. Gas-heavy development could undo years of air-quality progress. These are scenarios, not a report that every proposed facility has been built. Which is helpful: there is still time to choose something other than the scenario with the most enthusiastic smokestacks.

Texas already has a queue of proposed power demand that does not create electricity by being impressive. Now the industry’s impatience with that queue can become a reason to build its own combustion equipment. The delay is treated as the emergency. What comes out of the equipment gets the longer schedule.

This is the part where the word “digital” should be escorted away from the meeting. It has been giving the facility an undeserved air of weightlessness. There are servers. They get hot. Cooling them takes energy too. Some systems that economize on water require more electricity. A resource does not cease to be consumed because the presentation has advanced to the slide about a different resource.

Cleaner power has costs and reliability constraints; the report acknowledges them. Those are engineering problems worth solving. Declaring the timetable too urgent to solve them is a financing preference wearing a hard hat. The computers are being built to perform astonishing calculations. Surely one of the calculations can include what powers the computers.

The most revealing comparison in the reporting is not between computing and doing nothing. It is between ways of supplying the same demand. That takes away the comforting assumption that every objection is an objection to technology itself. You can ask how a server gets electricity without proposing that Texas communicate by waving towels.

Researchers credit pollution controls and changes in generation with earlier improvements. The proposed shortcut therefore has an odd destination: arrive at the next technological era by recovering some of the air problems of an earlier one. Very efficient. Normally, going backward requires an explanation.

The facility may escape the grid’s waiting list. Its emissions will not remain inside the facility. The cloud has found a way to expand its user base: breathing is the automatic sign-up.