US Dataport wants to be the Johnny Appleseed of computers.
The company is roaming across the country in search of locations to plant huge "server farms" -- large complexes stacked to the hilt with machines that do the Internet's heavy lifting.
But one of the company's proposed farms, a 150-acre complex that the company says will be the world's second-largest server complex, is slated to be built in power-strapped San Jose, Calif. -- and environmentalists and some city council members there are none too pleased about it. They say the plant requires enough electricity to power 150,000 homes, and this is not the right time to build one of those.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, in Northern Virginia's Prince William County, US Dataport's plan to build an even bigger server farm is sailing through the local government. Two weeks ago, the county's board of supervisors unanimously approved the Disneyland-sized complex.
"You guys (in California) are having a lot bigger concerns (about power) there than we are on the East Coast," said a spokeswoman for the county, chuckling a bit.
She's right, of course, though that's not the quite the point.
It seems that the Dataport complex in Virginia would be able to produce about 250 megawatts of its own energy, all of it from clean, natural-gas powered steam-turbine generators. That 250 megawatts is more than the plant will require, so it won't be tapping into the Virginia power grid for its juice. Indeed, it might sell some of it back to the state.
The San Jose complex, on the other hand, is designed to produce only 30 megawatts of power on site -- and since the complex, at capacity, would require 180 megawatts of power, there's a possibility that the plant would tax the power grid for the other 150 megawatts.
But Lewis Shadle, a senior vice president at US Dataport, said press reports that imply the plant would use energy that would otherwise go to hundreds of thousands of California homes are "unfortunate."
He said the 30 megawatts that the San Jose location will produce will be enough for up to 300,000 square feet of data-center space, and that space wouldn't be occupied until at least a year after operations begin, at the start of 2002.
At least until 2003, then, the Dataport center wouldn't require any power from the grid. And then what? "By then we'll apply for more generating capacity," Shadle said.
The difference between the location in San Jose and the location in Virginia is one of red tape. "In California, in order to have a streamlined permitting process, you have to stay under a certain generating capacity -- that keeps it within the jurisdiction of the city of San Jose," Shadle said.
In other words, the plant can't generate more than 50 megawatts, or it would need approval from the state, "and that would add up to 18 months to the permit process," Shadle said. In Virginia, though, the company could go ahead and design a 250 megawatt plan while keeping the process relatively "streamlined."
Shadle said that by the time the San Jose plant needs more power, the Dataport center will be able to provide it -- and on that basis, he defends the plant as exemplifying "smart growth."
"We are not going to impact negatively the power situation," he said.
Environmental groups, though, don't seem to be mollified by this defense. Michael Stanley-Jones, of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, said that if Dataport is claiming it won't need to tap into the grid, "that argument contradicts what they said to the planning commission."
"OK, so they won't need to do it in the first phase of development," he concedes. "But after that, they'll need more power and they themselves said that they would need to tap into the PG&E facility that's located next door."
The Toxic's Coalition is proposing a moratorium on the development of all data centers in the Silicon Valley, Stanley-Jones said, "at least until there's a more sustainable power plan in the region. This particular facility would occupy more square feet than all the existing data centers here combined, after all."
And Stanley-Jones has more problems with what he calls Dataport's "mother of all data centers." The location will use more than 80 diesel-powered electricity generators as a source of backup power, and these emit tons of noxious gasses even if only sporadically used.
"Even if they don't have to use these generators, they'll still have to test them each month, and we don't think that such emissions should be acceptable here. There are cleaner-burning diesel engines that they could use."
But in the current lethargic economic atmosphere, putting a halt to lucrative new data centers in the area isn't something that leaders are very willing to do. Already, some members of the city council and San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales have praised the US Dataport center for the 700 jobs it would create and for the $70 million in taxes it would provide the city over the next 10 years.
And so, even though US Dataport's Shadle said he's confident the plan will receive city approval, it looks like the fight, in San Jose, will be between proponents of the economy and those of the environment.
But it doesn't have to be that way, said Dennis Church, the founding director of San Jose's Energy Office who now heads an environmental consulting firm in the area called EcoIQ.
"There's no logic to denying this kind of development because of the power problems," Church said, "because it wouldn't be operational until a time when, really, we ought to have this solved."
"I think that what we're trying to do in California is maintain an economy, and everyone wants that. We shouldn't let the short-term urgency (of the power crisis) affect that," he added.
Church said the state ought to create an economic environment where renewable energy -- such as solar and wind power -- is encouraged, and right now, "they just can't exist in the California marketplace. One of the most disappointing things about the current problem is that most of the alternative suppliers have pulled out of the market here."
But Church also said that most tech firms in the area aren't yet convinced that acquiring renewable energy is in their best interests. "They expect high return on investment, quickly," he said. "Certainly they have opportunity to do something like installing photo-voltaic cells to get solar energy; but something that will take a few years to pay off might not appeal to them very much."
The Toxics Coalition's Stanley-Jones agrees with the call to install photo-voltaic cells, and, he said, "they should also look to require other sources of green energy."
But US Dataport's Shadle said that while his company was always looking for alternative sources of energy, most renewable energy isn't "technologically or economically feasible yet."
He did say, however, that the power plants that would be located at his company's data centers are among the world's most efficient: In addition to electricity, they also provide chilled water to cool the center's computers.
