Data Center Knowledge recently wrote a response article to a New York Times story that questioned whether data centers should be regulated similar to the power industry. Coy Stine, Director of Data Center Engineering for Bluestone Energy, was interviewed for the response. From the article:
In its story last week, The New York Times took a critical look at power provisioning in data centers. “Electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary,” the Times wrote. “A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a purveyor of space to an energy broker — making tremendous profits by reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power utility.”
The paper added that “the capacity pricing by data centers …. appears not to have registered with utility regulators.”
Regulating data centers as utilities “doesn’t seem plausible to me,” said Coy Stine, Director of Data Center Services at Bluestone Energy, which works with utilities on energy efficiency incentives. “Data centers provide the service of a highly conditioned and very reliable power source. Customers can’t get that by plugging their services into the utility power plug in the wall. Comparing a data center to a utility is similar to saying a car manufacturer is a provider of sheet metal. The automobile has metal as a component, but there’s much more to it. The data center provider is playing the same role.”
Read the full article here at Data Center Knowledge.
