Data Centres Forced to Leave UK by CRC ?

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/government-energy-plans-could-prompt-data-centre-exodus-8772#comment-17417


This is an interesting article. Now I dont believe that any organisation would necessarily upsticks because of CRC, it might, and I stress might make some organisations think twice about locating a new data centre in the UK, but the complexity and potential problems that could be caused by moving a data centre would be, for some, too risky.


That said, the Department for Energy and Climate Change has offered a CCA (Climate Change Agreement) to the Data Centre industry if it can provide a useful productivity metric, that is to measure what a Data Centre does and how much energy it takes to do it, and then take steps to reduce the amount of energy but keep the same productivity in future years.

Because the IT equipment put into Data Centres is getting more efficient as each year goes by, it could be argued that this will happen by default, however how long is a piece of string? Business growth usually means more servers, which in turn need more energy, more servers would mean more productivity, so we have a classic vicious circle.
We've seen the vicious circle in computing somewhere else have we not? Oh Yes, that would be the software/hardware vicious circle described in one of my earlier posts.

So, is the vicious circle a required component within computing? it seems like it but the question is, do we need to break it in order to reduce our industries total reliance on electrical energy, a resource in the UK that unless something is done pretty quickly will see our little green, amber, blue and red lights flicker out.