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D

Worldwide Electricity

Costs for IT with

Projections

“Green is not simply a new form of generating
electric power. It is a new form of generating
national power—period.”

—Thomas L. Friedman, author of Hot, Flat, and
Crowded

ptg
Electricity costs have a significant impact on the location of new data
centers. This appendix gives information on how the cost of electricity
varies around the world and within countries such as the United States.
Of course, the cost of electricity goes beyond the data center in its
impact on green IT. Thomas Friedman, in his book Hot, Flat, and
Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America,
sees the fusion of IT and energy technologies, envisioning all the power
systems in your home as communicating with all the information sys-
tems in your home and that they had all merged into one big seamless
platform for using, storing, generating, and even buying and selling
clean electronics. Friedman sees the need to have information technology
and energy technology, IT and ET, merged into a single system that he
calls an Energy Internet (ET). He envisions how professionals with IT
skills will be needed to build integral components of this clean-energy
Web.
Getting back to data centers, here’s an example of how the cost of
electricity can have an impact on the location of data centers. If the cost
of electricity is 22 cents/KWH in New York City and only 4.5
cents/KWH in Charleston, West Virginia, the location of a large, new
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