ANCHORAGE — A newly formed company hopes to tap what Alaska's North Slope has in abundance--isolation, cold temperatures and natural gas--to create a huge Internet data storage center.
Not quite Silicon Valley on the tundra, the proposal by Netricity LLC could create a new market for Alaska's North Slope gas and help Internet companies searching for a reliable source of power to keep their data flowing.
The project would include construction of a 1 million-square-foot building to house at least half a million computer servers. It would also include construction of a 400-megawatt, gas-fueled electric plant to power the center. The operation would be linked to the Internet via the existing North Slope fiber-optic line, which connects with the North Pacific fiber-optic cable.
"We could provide a rock-solid level of reliability, not subject to brownouts like California is facing," said Jim Dodson, an executive vice president with Andex Resources of Houston, one of the investors in Netricity. "All of our turbines would be spinning 24-7 to serve nothing but the needs of the data center."
Netricity was formed earlier this year by privately held Andex and MDU Resources Group Inc., the parent company of Montana-Dakota Utilities. Billionaire financier George Soros is one of Andex's principal shareholders.
Hundreds of similar data centers--also known as Internet hotels or server farms--exist in and around major metropolitan areas throughout the country.
With the mushrooming growth of the Internet, the need for new data centers is exploding. Yankee Group, an Internet industry research firm, estimates that the data center business generated $9 billion in revenue last year and projects that will grow to more than $47 billion by 2003.
"They're a relatively recent phenomenon with the growth of the digital information society," said Karl Stahlkopf, who analyzes energy issues affecting the high-tech industry for the Electric Power Research Institute. "The whole thing about these is they can be stuck absolutely anywhere you have a confluence of fiber-optic line and power."
But because the centers are such enormous consumers of electricity, utility companies in the Lower 48 states are worried about the increasing demand on power systems that are already at or nearing capacity.
Much of the energy consumed by data centers is needed to cool the buildings to keep the equipment from overheating.
