What?  Is this possible?  Green, renewable energy is great but it needs to get to the people and businesses that need power.  Electricity transmission can be very costly.  Are there alternatives to transmitting electricity?  Could we possibly transmit it over our existing telecommunications infrastructure—can you say fiber optics for a much lower price?

Hmmm…OK, I didn’t come up with some new funky physics but as I was running around the Weddington High School track this beautiful Sunday afternoon this thought occurred to me.  Computers (specifically data centers) are one of the biggest consumers of electricity.  What if we could power our data centers with green, renewable energy?  How about hydroelectricity?  Niagara Falls is the #1 producer of hydro electric power in the US.  Rather than transmit electricity that was generated from Niagara Falls to Charlotte, NC which would prove to be very costly and impractical, why don’t I find a data center in the Buffalo/Niagara area that buys its electricity from the New York Power Authority?  With my data center in Buffalo, I can now transmit the OUTPUT of computer systems over a telecommunications network.  On top of that, the artificial cooling (i.e. air conditioning) is needed MUCH less in Buffalo given the cold, outside temperatures most of the year--just pipe in that free, cold air.  The more I look at it; I am digging a Buffalo data center.

Check out the facts on how power is generated by the mechanical energy of Niagara Falls, http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/niagara.htm.    

This is not an original idea as Google employs this strategy—kinda.  Google seeks out CHEAP electricity from all over the place in order to build their data centers.  Sometimes that cheap electricity is from renewable sources, sometimes not.  I found a cloud-computing provider in Buffalo that not only owns a data center powered by hydroelectric power, they offer “private cloud computing” services that allows businesses to put their servers AND workstations into a private cloud.

So maybe I can’t transmit raw electricity from Buffalo to power my residence in Waxhaw, NC, but I can house the biggest, power hungry servers there and transmit their information anywhere I need it.