As the price of electricity increases, water costs are sure to follow.  One visible area of the effects of water is in Australia which has been suffering through a severe drought. MSNBC has an article and video on the effects of higher water costs on the Australia Wine industry.

MELBOURNE - Australian grape growers reckon they are the canary in the coal mine of global warming, as a long drought forces winemakers to rethink the styles of wine they can produce and the regions they can grow in.

The three largest grape-growing regions in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, all depend on irrigation to survive. The high cost of water has made life tough for growers.

Some say they probably won't survive this year's harvest, because of the cost of keeping vines alive. Water prices have more than tripled.

"On the back of three very ordinary years, this year is probably the worst that could have occurred with the drought and the high costs of water," said Michael de Palma, a mid-sized grower in Redcliffe near Mildura in the Murray Valley, one of the country's three big wine regions.

Don't forget to think about water supplies and prices in your data center construction.

Found a Web site that is clearly sponsored by top coal producers and coal based utilities. They have enough money to make their own TV ads.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1258426564/bclid1264609443/bctid1243638288

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1274008754/bclid1264609443/bctid1281309647

And, here is another blogger's comments about this blog.

In the wake of setbacks to new coal powerplant construction in the face of likely carbon legislation, the coal industry has mounted a serious PR blitz, led by a group called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC).

ABEC is a national non-profit organization with a claimed membership of 150,000, whose acknowledged primary funding source is "America's coal-based electricity providers" -- including such big-boys as American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP), Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), First Energy (NYSE: FE) and Southern Company (NYSE: SO). Not to mention large coal companies such as Arch Coal (NYSE: ACI) and CONSOL (NYSE: CNX), and railroads such as Burlington Northern Sante Fe (NYSE: BNI) and CSX (NYSE: CSX).

Quite aptly, Sourcewatch refers to ABEC amusingly as an "astroturf" support organization: "apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms." Given the corporate interests listed on the ABEC website, it is hard to call ABEC a true grassroots organization.
Here in Ohio, ABEC has launched a series of billboards and newspaper advertisements promoting coal, implicitly at the expense of other energy alternatives. Particularly objectionable to me is the ad that illustrates (as if algebraically) "Coal = Ohio Jobs", suggesting not-so-subtly that a shift to other non-coal forms of energy will cause a loss of jobs. I was compelled to write a counter-response, which appeared last week as an editorial in The Plain-Dealer.

In today's print and web WSJ.com, Dell has an advertisement headlined Slash Energy Consumption up to  45%, Unlock your Hidden Data Center.  The url for the site is here. IBM and HP have been running multiple ads on Green Data Centers.

This is in direct contrast to my post on Going Green from an Architect's view.

Dell Power and Cooling Solutions

Stop compromising your capability just to cut costs. Dell can show you how to drive cost and complexity out of the data center to deliver more compute capacity for less than you’re probably spending right now. It’s like having a hidden data center, right inside your current space. Simplify IT with Dell by unlocking your hidden data center today:

• Slash energy consumption up to 45% or increase performance up to 97% by deploying a combination of Energy Smart technologies, services, virtualization, and cooling best practices.¹ Unlock Your Hidden Data Center
• Avoid building a new data center right away - Get more out of your existing facility
• No need for expensive, proprietary equipment or fighting with your local utility for more power

• Energy Smart products are available now for immediate business impact
• Dell Energy Smart Servers are up to 28% more efficient than our regular servers²
• Maximize performance for the energy used
• Utilize Dell blade systems that consume up to 19% less power than HP

• Deploy faster with less waste. Dell blade servers take 65% less time to set up and come in 97% fewer boxes than HP   Learn More
• Dell – Liebert Energy Smart advanced cooling solution enables up to a 250% performance gain with no increase in facility power requirements OR up to an 80% performance increase with a reduction in facility power by 42%   Learn More

• Dell’s virtualization-optimized servers and storage maximize performance and reduce wasted energy—and our Virtualization Assessment Services show you the most effective path to a virtualized infrastructure…One Dell customer used virtualization to save as much as $10,000 a month in power and cooling costs – an 80% reduction   Learn More
• Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 2950 offers better performance / watt:
  • 15% better performance / watt than HP ProLiant DL380 G5
  • 10% better performance / watt than IBM System x3650   Learn More
• OpenManage™ power monitoring and management features deliver operational improvements at no extra charge

• Build on an open architecture that scales to meet your business needs… A centralized, scalable solution helped one Dell customer cut IT administration time by up to 50%    Learn More
• Virtualize your servers to maximize performance and reduce wasted energy consumption…Real results include consolidation from 80 servers down to five, contributing to a 33% infrastructure reduction    Learn More

WSJ has summarized its ECO:nomics conference with multiple postings on its web site. On page one, ECO:nomics: Creating Environmental Capital, hits you with the hard core view.

The push to curb global-warming emissions is starting to redraw the industrial landscape, and in doing so it has already begun to create new winners and losers. Job One for a CEO: Exploit the opportunities and shift the costs to someone else.

Some players -- like wind-turbine makers and venture capitalists -- stand to gain from the drive to reduce fossil-fuel use. Some -- like auto makers and oil producers -- stand to pay. All face a dilemma: The rules of the green game have yet to be written, but to remain competitive, companies must bet big today on how the rules will shake out.

These bets, and the battle over the coming rules, were a recurring topic of discussion at ECO:nomics, The Wall Street Journal's first annual conference on the business of the environment. In this report, we offer some of the highlights of that discussion.

You'll read, for instance, why executives from major multinationals are calling on the U.S. government to impose a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. As Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric Co.'s CEO, explained, because regulation is coming, "I'd just as soon have a seat at that table than have it pushed down my throat."

And spins this as the beginning.

Winners and losers. Opportunities and risks. The fault lines in this new-energy landscape are only just emerging.

Here are links to more content.

THE JOURNAL REPORT

• Green thinking is at the core of thousands of new communities. Here's a look at some of the approaches. Video | Interactive Map

• Governments and companies are on a quest to turn trash into power.

• How to safely dispose of products that are potentially harmful to the environment is a growing concern. Podcast

• Global Warming: Who said what -- and when

• The environmental movement almost killed Hayfork, Calif. Now, it's the town's main hope.

• Why is a U.S. ambassador helping foreign companies raise money?

• See the complete Environment report.

Businessweek wrote an article about energy consumption in the data centers, starting the article off by drawing attention to the big data center operators all visiting Iceland. But, behind the scenes it looks like there were multiple vendors positioning to get in the article as HP, Sun, Intel, VMWare, IBM, Cassatt were all researched and/or interviewed. There is not necessarily anything new for those who follow data centers, but interesting BusinessWeek chose this as a subject.

It's a testament to the challenges companies face in operating data centers that Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), and Microsoft (MSFT) have all checked out this remote corner of the world (although none has made a commitment so far). The reason: Iceland has a rare combination of vacant land, cheap geothermal energy, and chilly climate that makes cooling a data center nearly free.

The writer chose to emphasize the strategic battle of Green Data Centers between Google and Microsoft, as well as other industry players, Sun, IBM, HP.

So intense is the competition among tech companies to lower their costs of processing data that some treat information about their energy use like state secrets. When Google built a data center along the Columbia River in Oregon a few years ago, it bought the land through a third party so its involvement was hidden, and the city manager had to sign a confidentiality agreement. In North Carolina, the state's sunshine laws forced it to disclose the incentive package it offered Google to locate a data center there, but the company's plans for power consumption were redacted as trade secrets.

Little wonder, perhaps: In the future, the competition between Google and Microsoft in the Web search business might be determined as much by data center energy efficiency as by which company writes the best search algorithm.

And provides a short history of Microsoft's transition to a player in data center design.

Three years ago, Microsoft began to tackle the energy issue in earnest. CEO Steve Ballmer and other top executives had decided to greatly expand the services offered over the Web to consumers and businesses, including e-mail and instant messaging, to parry threats from Google. So a group of about 20 people gathered at an off-site meeting at the Salish Lodge in Redmond, Wash., with a view of a waterfall out the window, to hash out a forecast of data center needs. "We decided to take the most aggressive, craziest plan we could come up with," says Michael Manos, senior director of data center services. "In hindsight, we were conservative."

Since then, Microsoft has spent more than $2 billion building four gigantic facilities—in Chicago, Dublin, San Antonio, and Quincy, Wash. Now it's looking at locations overseas, including Iceland and Siberia. Its computing needs have doubled each year for the past three years, and Microsoft expects them to continue doubling each year for the foreseeable future.

Energy consumption is a major factor in Microsoft's planning. The company has created what it calls a "heat map" of the globe that takes into account 35 factors in site selection, including cost and availability of power. A group of scientists studies the latest advances in data center design and computing efficiency. And Manos looks for local resources he can take advantage of—such as water from a waste-treatment system that cools computers at the new data center in San Antonio. As a result of all of this effort, Manos believes his 20 data centers are 30% to 50% more efficient than the industry average.