Sunday, March 16, 2008

Renewable Energy

I ran across two articles this evening, that....well, let's just say they are post-worthy.

The first one is not necessarily data center related - except in the renewable energy realm.....and the "I got a kick out of it" realm. A frequent topic in the books I select to read is economics. I throughly enjoyed The World Is Flat, and Freakonomics. A recent post on the Business Facilities blog talks about how the ethanol industry is wreaking havoc on the chicken industry. Apparently the fact that so much corn is going towards ethanol production has driven the price of chicken-feed up. The World's largest poultry processor, Pilgrim's Pride has announced facility closings and 1,100 jobs cut as a result. This one will surely end up in economic studies in some book in the future. Check out the post here.

The second one is also from the Business Facilities blog and is about wind turbines bound to the ocean floor. It has something to do with tapping the ocean currents, but it sounds like there is a lot left to research and test for this potential use. The reason I thought this one was interesting, was combining recent news we have heard in the industry. We've heard about Google investing in undersea cable; and we have heard about data center containers being used aboard ships, so why not use undersea turbines to supplement power to the ship and the undersea fiber to get connectivity and setup your own floating data center fleet! Better yet -- how long until we read the headline "Google to build data center (Googlantis) on the Atlantic Ocean floor". Maybe there is a use for those cars that convert from cars to mini submarines yet! :)
Check out the turbines post here

The picture below is my attempt at a joke -- based on how much I like James Bond movies. If I had bonus points, I would give them out to anyone able to name the bad guy in the movie that this picture comes from.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Karl Stromberg!

John said...

Correct!!

1 million bonus points!