At Data Center Dynamics Seattle, Sabey presented in a session and had a booth for their facility in Wenatchee, WA.

Sabey is completing the construction of its new data center campus, Intergate.Columbia. It is located in North Central Washington, near East Wenatchee and the Columbia River - one of the nation's foremost hydroelectric generating rivers.

The site sits on 30 acres, and will accommodate two data center buildings, including one 205,000 square-foot structure and one of 188,000 square-feet. The buildings will be served by a new, redundant substation on site.  Each building will have the flexibility to house either a single tenant or multiple users.

The unlabeled Green space next to the Available (blue) area is the space taken up by VMware (NYSE: VMW). The other 200,000 sq ft build is occupied by T-Mobile.  These aren't bad neighbors to have, and Sabey has 2 anchor tenants as they continue their data center construction.

Sabey presented their strategy to build the greenest data centers, and how they are leveraging the hydroelectric power in Eastern Washington.

Totally unplanned Sabey's staff met Michael Tran from Digital Sense to discuss some ideas of a Virtual Data Center and join us for lunch. I forgot I had blogged about Sabey and Digital Sense in The Virtual Data Center post.

(FYI, VMWare - Sabey was totally appropriate and discussed no details about VMware being a tenant.)

I think I ended up having 12 high quality meetings during the day long event. Unfortunately, that meant I didn't go to many sessions, but I go to these events to network and I could always watch the sessions later when they are posted.

I've discussed water many times and it is good to hear other people recognizing water use as the next issue after electricity in a Green Data Center. When I wanted to learn more about water I actually went to a Ground Water Conference 2 years ago http://www.ngwa.org/.

The WSJ had an article about how the rich are drilling wells when local water municipalities have limited water use.

Where There's a Will,
There's a Well -- and Water

By ALYSSA ABKOWITZ
July 31, 2008; Page D1

Lawns are parched and brown across much of the Southeast, roasted by a 28-month-long drought and new policies restricting most watering to nighttime hours. But in Atlanta's tony Buckhead neighborhood, sprinklers were spurting energetically on a recent day across the verdant blanket of fescue grass in front of the home of James B. Williams, former chairman and chief executive of SunTrust Banks Inc. and a Coca-Cola Co. director.

Jaroslav Kanka/Getty Images for The Wall Street Journal

A faux rock hides the well in front of Sarah Courts's home in Atlanta.

Hidden behind nearby shrubbery on the four-acre estate is Mr. Williams's new toy -- a 400-foot-deep well. "Sprinkler System Not on City Water," declares a small white sign pitched at the entrance to Mr. Williams's driveway. Mr. Williams's landscaper placed the sign there to thwart neighborhood vigilantes from ratting him out to water authorities. "I didn't want to give the impression that we were doing something we weren't supposed to do," Mr. Williams says.

Metro Atlanta's midnight-to-10 a.m. watering restriction doesn't apply to well owners who pump less than 100,000 gallons a day -- way more than any homeowner would use. (It takes about 20,000 gallons to fill a swimming pool.) So Mr. Williams uses his well to water as often as he likes.

Mr. Williams is one of hundreds of wealthy homeowners in the Southeast who are skirting watering restrictions by tapping an ancient source to keep their lawns lush and pools full. In their eyes, there is no way to keep their grass green and flowers blooming without watering often -- or putting down hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace their landscaping every year. But the practice has enraged water conservationists and other less-well-heeled homeowners.

Water well drilling is easier in the SouthEast as water rights are different in the Western vs. Eastern US. In the East where there have not been water shortages in the past, you own the water rights as part of your land, Riparian water rights.  In the West water rights are usually Prior Appropriation water rights.

Prior appropriation water rights, sometimes known as the "Colorado Doctrine" in reference to the U.S. Supreme Court case Wyoming v. Colorado, is a system of allocating water rights from a water source that is markedly different from Riparian water rights. Water law in the western United States generally follows the appropriation doctrine which developed due to the scarcity of water in that area.

The legal details vary from state to state; however, the general principle is that water rights are unconnected to land ownership, and can be sold or mortgaged like other property. The first person to use a quantity of water from a water source for a beneficial use has the right to continue to use that quantity of water for that purpose. Subsequent users can use the remaining water for their own beneficial purposes provided that they do not impinge on the rights of previous users.

Beneficial use is commonly defined as agricultural, industrial or household use. Ecological purposes, such as maintaining a natural body of water and the wildlife that depends on it, were not initially deemed as beneficial uses in some Western states but have been accepted in some jurisdictions. The extent to which private parties may own such rights varies among the states.

Water shortages will continue to increase in the world, and will become in a new factor in a Green Data Center.

Digital Sense's Michael Tran is building a water neutral data center in Brisbane Australia as the country is in a severe water shortage. Water is not used in the cooling systems as they would not get the building permits to build a typical data center cooling system with water cooled chillers.

DataCenterKnowledge has a post on how a Data Centres are adapting to power shortages.

Power Shortages Constrict UK Data Centers

Several recent stories from the UK highlight how power availability has become a critical issue in some areas, which is affecting decisions about what kind of data center to build, and where to build it.

• A power shortage in Manchester has prompted data center operator UK Grid to develop plans to generate its own electricity. The company may invest at least £4.5 million (about $9 million) in combined heat and power plants for a new facility. The company said that if it didn't build its own generating capacity, its growth would soon be hindered by electric supply problems. UK Grid has two existing facilities on Manchester Science Park, which it expects to fill within nine months. Power capacity restricts further growth in the area.
• Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort is relocating its London data center from the Docklands, citing the cost and availability of power at the city's data center hub. The bank will move its data centre operations to a new Tier IV facility in Watford. Rising energy bills certainly influenced our plans. "There is a shortage of power and we have planned the new datacentre so it is not only efficient, but resilient when it comes to power consumption," John Bratkovics, Dresdner Kleinwort’s global head of networks, told Computing. The availability of power in London is also being influenced by construction of facilities for the 2012 Olympics.

This type of news will start to be more common as other areas of the world run into power shortages and electricity prices increase.

HP has a press release on a Defense Department project.

HP today announced that it will be supplying the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) with scalable technology to enable its Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to deploy a cloud computing infrastructure.

The shared, flexible infrastructure will allow DISA to remotely provision its test and development systems through a single, secure interface. DISA provides processing capability, systems management, communications and storage to support DoD services, agencies and combatant commands.

HP’s offerings will enable DISA to build an adaptable cloud computing infrastructure it calls RACE (or, Rapid Access Computing Environment), which is designed to reduce costs, consolidate applications, shorten delivery times and simplify the user experience. According to a DISA official, RACE represents an unprecedented capability for the DoD, offering the speed and agility comparable to the commercial marketplace.

Users of the RACE cloud infrastructure will avoid capital costs for hardware or software licenses and instead pay for computing resources with operations and maintenance budgets on an as-needed basis. When a compute-intensive cycle is complete, resources will be returned to the cloud, ensuring that the user pays only for the resources required.

The Green Data Center part is

In addition, the responsive, HP-powered solution will automate management tasks, dynamically allocating server resources where they are needed, thereby optimizing efficiency, saving energy and minimizing the need for personnel oversight.

Note this test and development environment, but the next step is production.

DataCenterKnowledge has more information on this.

Garing said implementing a cloud architecture will help DISA better serve its DoD users around the globe. "The challenge is to make us relevant to them so they want to use our services," he said, adding that many military users tend to be conservative about change. "Some say 'I've got to have my own box, under my desk. I don't trust the cloud.' There's something about this box-hugging syndrome that will be a challenge for us. We feel that if we don't get a cloud-like system in DISO, we'll become less relevant."

This joins the efforts by Google and Amazon to provide a cloud computing infrastructure, but it is meant as an internal service model.  SkyTap is another company providing test and dev cloud computing infrastructure.