The price and availability are critical for data centers to exist. The Economist has an article on Brazil's Electricity Tariff, and what caught my attention is the range of Electricity Tariffs.
How electricity tariffs are used in each country to tax consumption in industries and consumers has an interesting impact on where you will put your data center.
The cost of electricity is bumped up by 28 different taxes which together account for almost half the average bill, according to Acende Brasil, an energy-research institute. As a result, energy prices for industrial users are extraordinarily high (see chart). Ms Rousseff announced that from early next year two taxes will go altogether and a third one will be slashed by three-quarters. Officials say further savings will come from having driven a hard bargain with generating companies over extending contracts due to expire soon. All in all, residential bills will fall by an average of 16%, and industrial ones by 19-28%, they say.
Brazilians spend twice as much on the electricity costs built into other goods and services as on their own residential bills, calculates FIPE, a research institute at the University of São Paulo. High energy tariffs can be passed on to the consumer in this way partly because Brazil’s economy is fairly closed. This shows little sign of changing. On September 4th the government announced a year-long rise in import tariffs on 100 goods, ranging from tyres to medicines, to protect Brazilian manufacturers. Another 100 items may be added to the list next month.
I was reading an article the other day asking the question, “Whose data centers are more efficient? Facebook’s or Google’s?”, and I couldn’t help but be struck by the irrelevance of the entire premise for the average enterprise or service provider data center operator. Certainly there is a small curiosity factor here but isn’t this really just a more sophisticated way of asking: “Ginger or MaryAnn”? Interesting to ponder but is it going to change the way you operate your data center? Probably not.