Imagine it. Every time you click on a Google search, your request is answered by huge banks of internet computers floating around Scotland’s coast, powered by the sea.
It may sound like science fiction, but it’s serious. The internet giant, Google, has filed a patent for boats packed full of mainframe servers, driven by electricity from wave power machines under development in Scotland.
And it’s just one of a raft of proposals by major companies which are set to make Scotland a global centre for the arrays of powerful computers that keep the internet going - and exploit the nation’s inexhaustible supplies of clean, renewable energy.
The rapid expansion of the internet, which is now accessed by 1.6 billion people across the world, is demanding ever more power. Despite the efficiency of computer “data centres” increasing by 30% a year, the total amount of electricity they demand is doubling every 5-8 years.
According to
Jonathan Koomey from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, 152 billion kilowatt hours of electricity were consumed by data centres in 2005. This was about one percent of the world total, more than that consumed by Sweden but less than that consumed by South Africa.
Koomey points out that the internet is also making major resource savings by reducing the need for printed publications or for people to travel for work or shopping. “Moving electrons is always less environmentally damaging than moving atoms,” he said.
But, in order for the internet to keep expanding, they will be a growing need for more major computer centres, and the power to feed them. That’s why the hunt is now on for the best and most climate-friendly places to site such data farms.
Google has
filed a patent in the US, complete with diagrams, for a ship packed with containers loaded full of computers to act as a “floating data centre”. It envisages a series of such ships between three and seven miles offshore, using sea water to cool the computers and snake-like ‘Pelamis’ devices bobbing alongside to tap the power of the waves.
Pelamis Wave Power in Leith, near Edinburgh, installed a wave machine off Portugal last year, and is now building a second generation device for the power company,
E.on. Google engineers estimate that an array of 40 Pelamis snakes over a square kilometre could produce enough to power a 30-megawatt data centre.
At the same time the US investment bank,
Morgan Stanley, and
Atlantis Resources Corporation in Singapore, have announced £300 million plans for a 150-megawatt data centre at Castle of Mey in Caithness. It will be powered by tidal turbines in the Pentland Firth, and aims to be up and running by 2011.
Alchemy Plus, which is a technology partner of the computer giant,
Microsoft, is planning a large, £20 million data centre in Inverness. The area’s relatively low temperatures will help reduce cooling costs, the company said.
There are also ambitious proposals for a data centre near Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway covering 250,000 square metres. According to the company behind the scheme,
Lockerbie Data Centres, it will rely on wind power and a biomass generator.
“The fact the Scotland has huge riches in renewable energy opens up new business opportunities for any big energy user conscious of their impact on the planet,” said the director of
WWF Scotland, Dr Richard Dixon.
“The internet service companies have become more and more aware of their climate change impact as computing power has increased. The combination of 100% clean energy and an IT-savvy workforce makes Scotland the ideal location to house Europe's growing number of data centres.”
Dixon called on the Scottish government to aggressively pursue the idea that Scotland is the place to site data centres. “The Pentland Firth proposals seem a bit whacky at first, but they are exactly the kind of new idea that could catch the IT industry's imagination,” he argued.
Google pointed out that it filed patent applications on a variety of ideas that its experts came up with. “Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't,” said a company spokeswoman. “Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”
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