What happens in Vegas ... will probably go through the huge bit barn Google is building in Nevada Google has started building a new hyperscale data centre in Henderson, Nevada, expected to cost a cool $600m. The facility will provide a home for the new Google Cloud region serving the western US, and will come online in 2020. You might think that building data centres in the desert is unreasonable – the cooling costs would …
"The bloody assassin of the workers I presume?"
Given Googles neighbour is likely to be this, I'm not sure you can suggest what happens in Vegas will probably go through Google. It may go through Google but only after the NSA has had a good look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
>Part of the allure of the State is down to low taxes...
Imagine that. Low taxes is a reason for companies to build in specific locations and open for business. Even a highly principled lefty company like Google is still accountable to the bottom line & shareholders. There are a number of states that could take a lesson from that (but they won't).
And of course once they get a tax cut you can be sure that those companies will spend all that spare money in the local area, which is even better than getting the taxes right? (Of course they wouldn't just spend the money on something else!)
Plus there's the salaries of maybe even a whole dozen minimum wage security guards, that's nothing to be sneezed at eh?
Yes, there's absolutely no way that this could possibly go wrong.
Then they would have to spend much more money to buy the land for, build and maintain said plant. It's much cheaper and more efficient to grease a few palms in the state capitol and wave around the nebulous promise of "more jobs" to get hooked up to the local grid at a favorable rate.
As Amazon demonstrated with their attempted second headquarters scheme a few months back, a key part of these projects is squeezing the most one-sided deal out of the state they're building in before anyone realizes just how badly it's going to screw the average joe over in the long term.
Rooftop solar panels, while they can power a house, would not be at all powerful enough to take the load of a cloud provider's datacenter. They could put a bunch of solar panels on the ground elsewhere, but they probably won't. However, as such a sunny state, there are quite a few people with solar panels connected to the grid supplying solar power at certain points. Nevada is one of the best states in America for renewable energy.
For a source, see this chart with data from 2017 (it seems from a quick search that solar use has been climbing since then). While the sorting (I did the without hydro option) makes it look like Nevada is actually not as great, its proportion of solar/wind to total is about the same as most of the ones that look to be ranked higher. Depending on which column you use, it looks bad not because Nevada isn't working but because they don't have much hydroelectric power and they're not as big as some other sunny states like California.
I don't mean to assign any credit for this to Google, but if they're going to put a datacenter somewhere, this isn't the worst state from the perspective of environmental impact of attaching to the grid.
> You might think that building data centres in the desert is unreasonable – the cooling costs would be too high
The consistently low humidity actually makes cooling a huge volume of air to comfortable room temperature (~20C) very easy, if you've got an ample source of water to evaporate. It gets difficult and expensive if you need a temperature any lower than that.
> Tons of water in the desert.
Just because it doesn't fall from the sky very often, doesn't mean there isn't a lot of it. Lake Mead / Hoover Dam is right on the boarder of Nevada / California. Antarctica is a desert, too...
> import it from California - coastal state, they'll have loads of water right?
California does have lots of water, and more every year as they keep building reservoirs. Problem is they have a huge and growing population, and a huge farming industry, so per-capita there's a real crunch on the supplies. There's a much more serious water supply problem looming in the mid-west US, where the Ogalala aquifer is being drained quickly, and not replenished.
So I guess that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" no longer applies...
How about: "What happens in Vegas gets profiled, analysed and used to advertise shit to you, wherever you are?"
Or maybe: "What happens anywhere gets tracked and may end up in Vegas?"
I'm sure there's a wealth of other possibles, but right now I'm about two coffees away from that kind of capability...
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