[Carry_Okie]

It will be interesting to see what the heat island effect of these datacenters will be.

[Myrddin]

I worked at the Trade Street data center for PacBell in the 80s. The building had a co-generation plant that burned natural gas to generate electricity for the data center. Inside the data center, large battery backed UPS farms actually supplied the equipment. The co-gen plant had backup in the form for diesel generators. One morning the "grid" supplying Mira Mesa got disconnected from SDG&E "mains", but the co-gen plant was still connected to Mira Mesa. The gear boxes in the generators were almost destroyed with the load. Inside the data center, the "ops" staff was madly rushing to shutdown all the computers gracefully to shed the load and protect against a catastrophic sudden loss of power to the data center. SDG&E fixed their "oops" before all systems were powered down and the crisis averted.