Facebook's Green Idea Saves Them Money

A few years ago, Greenpeace did some research that showed that data centres (The places that hold all that web data we store in the 'cloud' or make our searches over) used 2% of world's demand for electric.

Think about it: 2% of all the electric we use globally goes to running these huge server farms. Mind-boggling.

And that percentage has probably increased since that research was done!

The big problem with servers is that they need loads of power to both run and keep cool.

Facebook's big idea is to reduce both it's energy bill and carbon footprint by building it's latest data centre in the sub-Arctic town of Lulea, Sweden - It's first ever outside the U.S.

Why Sweden? Well, Sweden has some of the cheapest electric in the world, thanks to it's abundance of hydro-electric, and Lulea is one of the cheapest places in Sweden. This is why Facebook's new data centre is just the latest in the town.

And because the power comes from hydro, it has no carbon footprint.

The bonus for Facebook is that they can use the sub-arctic outside air to cool their servers to cut their energy bill even more.

Green and cheap. Now there's a concept!

More here.