Rumor is another “data center” is going to be coming to the area soon. The next one to be in Platte County, as Clay County is the home of the most recent additions to our new reality of needing huge areas to simply store the world’s data. As the data centers for Facebook and Google are underway near Smithville and the Ford Plant in Kansas City, plans for another are rumored to be in play for Platte County and electric companies better strap on their big boy pants, ’cause these things are going to change things in terms of demand.
Insert “our engineers have planned for the increased demand” press release here.
If you’re trusting of government and utilities, then you think this is a great thing. If you’re a bit more skeptical, then this should concern you. We don’t know much about brown outs in this part of the world, but you might hear that term as these data centers continue to locate in our neighborhoods. My skepticism says that if someone gets chosen to have a “planned brown out,” I suspect it will be John and Jane Doe living in a split level home in Platte County before they shut down Google, Meta or any of the other data divas that rule our lives, but maybe that’s just me being negative.
Stay tuned.
If you want to impress your relatives during the holidays, throw out this stat. 99% of all data that currently exists is estimated to have been created within the last decade.
Think that through; data is going to change our lives.
Probably don’t need to save all those screenshots for eternity, but you do you.
Pack rats of the future won’t be old grandmas with cats and old newspapers stacked in their houses, it’ll be social media influencers that can’t delete 30-year-old photos of themselves from their Instagram accounts and have sections of data centers cordoned off for their lifetimes of self-adulation.
The world currently creates approximately 149 zettabytes of data annually. That is predicted to be 394 zettabytes in 2028. I guess this is mostly medical records, can’t have too many photos of those colon polyps you had removed back in ’08, I suppose.
If you want to know why Data Centers are locating here, just look to California. In many areas they now consume 60% of the electrical use. Pacific Gas and Energy has reported that there are more than 24 proposed data centers to be constructed that would require 3.5 gigawatts of power. That’s the output of three nuclear reactors, for those of you that think windmills can solve this.
(Guy Speckman can be reached deleting old screen shots in an effort to save the planet)
