What a disappointment, and embarrassment, to the climate community
From Bill St. Arnaud at CANARIE
NCAR’s new data center – an embarrassment to the climate community
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/nwsc/
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and its managing organization, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), is building a new supercomputing center in Wyoming. The current NCAR data center in Mesa has outgrown the facility’s capacity, and a new facility that can accommodate future expansion is needed. The Wyoming facility will contain some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers dedicated to improving scientific understanding of climate change, severe weather, air quality, and other vital atmospheric science and geoscience topics. The center will also house a premier data storage and archival facility that holds irreplaceable historical climate records and other information.
NCAR is probably the world’s premier research facility for undertaking climate modeling and research. So it is very bizarre that such an organization would undertake to build a new data center in a state where almost 100% of the electricity comes from coal fired generating plants. What is ever more outrageous is that one of the principal partners in the project, Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power is
leading a campaign to stop cap and trade – http://www.cheyennelight.com/cap-and-trade/NCAR’s strategy to build a data center in Wyoming also highlights the ridiculousness and absurdity of claims to build an energy efficient data center with a low PUE in a LEED qualified building. These claims are meaningless when all of the electricity is coal generated. If NCAR was genuinely concerned about the environment a much smarter move would have been to locate the data center a few hundred kilometers west to Idaho where almost of the electricity is generated from hydro. Relocating to Idaho would do more for the environment than even the most stringent energy efficiency and LEED qualified buildings. It would also send an important message that new jobs and business opportunities are only going to occur in those jurisdictions that provide clean, renewable energy.
I suspect NCAR is being seduced to locate its new data center in Wyoming because of the low price of electricity that comes from coal fired plants. But that strategy may backfire on them as Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power claims that their electricity prices will increase 73% with cap and trade.
I am dumbfounded – what an incredibly stupid, moronic, ignorant decision. It defies all common sense for an organization like that. When Bill first brought this to my attention this morning I told him the guy setting this up from NCAR must be a Bush appointee but alas it isn’t so -at least if he was then it would be “understandable”. How on earth (ironic that) can they do this and still promote the cause of global warming – the hypocrisy is overwhelming. In terms of gC02eq/Kwh Wyoming is 47th highest out of 50 states at 1027 gCO@eq/Kwh whereas Idaho, right next door as Bill says, is the second lowest in the US at 118g CO2eq/Kwh.
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