February 12, 2009
Google and GE – a power play sitting in your house
Google’s power hungry
data centers
Credit: Portfolio.com
As if Google wasn’t doing good enough already with their East Coast data center here in Goose Creek, yesterday’s news of the two new nuclear reactors in S.C. being built should make them smile even more.
With the tax breaks they received already, and the fact that they’ll never have to worry about energy spikes in S.C., it makes their choice to build here look like some serious ‘card reading’ if you ask me.
But the real news today is that Google & GE – and probably a lot of other companies – are looking for a way to update the energy grid across the U.S. Google envisions having everything programmed together so that sensors will turn off your appliances etc. when there are spikes in the grid. It’s those spikes that wind up costing us billions every year.
If you do this right, it sure sounds a lot like the internet: a set of cooperating networks where the traffic and power flow, where people can connect with anything they want. They can be consumers as well as producers.” – Eric Schmidt, Google CEO on a better energy grid across America.
“I’ve never seen a company in my career do as many things well as quickly as Google has done,” – Jeff Imelt, GE CEO.
With GE’s stronghold in electrical appliances and their network of relationships, it sounds like a perfect match, and now that checks are being written across the land thanks to Pres. Obama’s recovery plan, hopefully it will come true soon.
There haven’t been any hard numbers from Goose Creek on what the electricity usage from Google’s data center will look like, but with new reactors coming online and an upgraded energy grid across S.C., hopefully we will have lower electrical costs in the future – although they have warned it will be slightly more expensive initially.
President Obama at the DOE
Credit: Whitehouse.gov
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