Tech firms go mining for megawatts in Wash.

Companies rush to exploit region’s cheap electricity

QUINCY, Wash. – Microsoft is pouring concrete in a bean field on the west end of town. Yahoo is digging up a field of alfalfa out on the east end. Google, which declines to comment, is said to be sniffing around for its own field of dreams here in the semi-desert outback of eastern Washington.

This small farm town, population 5,300, has become the Klondike of the wildly competitive Internet era. The gold in Quincy is electricity, which technology heavyweights need to operate ever-larger data centers as they fight for world domination.

Their data centers — air-conditioned warehouses filled with thousands upon thousands of computer servers that talk to Internet users around the globe — are extraordinary power hogs. Microsoft says electricity consumption at its data centers doubled over the past four years and will triple over the next five.

There is cheap electricity here and lots of it. That is because the Columbia, the premier hydroelectric river in North America, flows nearby. Three publicly owned, local utilities own five large dams on the river, and they produce much more electricity than the sparse local population can use. With power prices soaring, the three utilities have become the hydroelectric emirates of the Pacific Northwest.

Washington Post