Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: energy

Google Picks Iowa – Goodbye ‘MinneGOOG’

June 21, 2007 / / 6 Comments

It became official a couple days ago: Google has chosen Iowa as a site for a data center, dashing the hopes of us Minnesotans for the Big Guys to come to our state. Oh, the pain of it all! Losing again to the Hawkeyes…. My heart sank when I saw the news on CNet. Another story had appeared earlier, I learned, from my old buddies at Byte & Switch.

Mapiacolor

This news was especially painful in light of the post I did a while back, called Minne-GOOG?, in which I related a case that had been made by a fellow Minnesota blogger about why Google should buy the St. Paul Ford plant, which had just announced it was closing.

For a little perspective on this revolting development for Gopher fans, I asked Matt Bauer, the founder of Mosquito Mole Multiworks in Minneapolis, for some background on how such a thing could happen. MMMultiworks specializes in Rails development and hosting for startups. Matt’s a smart guy, and we were just talking about this very subject at lunch the week before this news broke.

“Google’s choice not to build a datacenter in Minnesota doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me,” he said. “This state doesn’t have cheap fiber connections — we’re just a spur off of Chicago for the most part. With its dark-fiber reserves, Google could probably overcome this, but they can’t overcome Minnesota’s energy problem.” He thus hit on the what would appear to be the real reason Google shunned the Gopher state.

“The biggest difficulty in building a datacenter is power — period,” Bauer continued. “That’s why Google buys more land than it needs for its data centers — so no one else can build nearby and take power. Minnesota has a good amount of power, but legislation put into law this February probably likely took Minnesota out of the running.” That legislation requires 25% of the state’s energy to come from next generation power sources. “I’m sure Google saw this and quickly became concerned about the quality of these new power sources and the associated costs. Iowa doesn’t have such legislation and gets its electricity from MidAmerican Energy, which hasn’t raised its prices since 1995. In fact, they’ve promised not to raise prices until 2010! Additionally, their new coal-fueled power plants operate very efficiently and predictably,” said Bauer.

Then there was the take of Ed Kohler, master blogger over at Minnesota’s own Technology Evangelist — the source of that great post I referred to above. He said, “Maybe it’s just there to speed up Warren Buffet’s searches?” Old-Mr.-Money-Bags Buffet lives just across the river from Council Bluffs in Omaha, Nebraska.

Bill Joy: Quackery Alert

March 18, 2006 / / 0 Comments

On Tuesday morning at PC Forum, the kickoff session was Esther Dyson’s interview with Bill Joy, one of the legendary founders of Sun Microsystems and longtime CTO there. “Big Swings at Big Problems” is how the session was advertised. Esther said the last time Bill spoke at PC Forum was 1995, and she 031406billjoy_1 wore the sweatshirt from that event in honor of the occasion. A lot has certainly changed in those 11 years, for Sun and everyone else. In recent years, Bill made the move to VC-land and joined Kleiner Perkins — where his former Sun colleague, Vinod Khosla, has been a partner for many years.

Bill said there are still 15 years left on Moore’s Law, and that the smaller devices that will result from these contunuing technology advancements “will enable many more people to have computers and get educated — if they can figure out how to get courseware on those things.”

But what else is Bill focusing on at KP these days? “We’re looking for innovators who can get more clean water and better energy — and get everyone driving efficient cars. And I mean electric cars, not just hybrids.” [Just an aside: Bill, please call me when the torque on those things equals that of my Turbo Passat, would ya?]

Asked about recent investments KP is making, Joy said “it’s a wonderful time to be working with innovators.” One example, he said, is a still-stealth company KP has backed that’s “putting everything needed for a cheap (computing) device onto one chip.” And [yawn] they also recently did two public company investments (PIPEs). “How much is KP leaving the Valley behind?” asked Esther. “We’ve always had a life sciences group. We still have an IT group, including green tech. Vinod just announced a new fund yesterday. He’s a big ethanol advocate. And I’m working with him on biofuels initiatives.”

Joy continued: “Nanoscale technology is driving the development of new materials. The breadth of proposals is very wide these days. The great stuff always sounds like quakery. I get all those.” Bill also said that a lot of what’s happening today reminds him of 1999, except “there are bigger opportunities worldwide.”

Why haven’t there been many of these new investments yet by KP? “We’ve been looking to invest in a water technology,” Joy said, implying he and his partners just haven’t seen a good candidate yet. “We need ones with little or no maintenance.” For example, no filters to change, he said. “Clean water is the best enabler of good health (in the third world). And electricity is an enabler of many things.”

What about the “laptop for every child” program? asked an audience member. “I’d like to see a ten-dollar computer,” Joy said, “with a roll-up display.”

Esther’s closing comment was, “Bill, you were so gloomy five years ago…” (referring to his now infamous Wired article, “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” a line of thinking he’s since moved away from). “You just have to keep your eyes on what needs to be done,” Joy said. “It’s an incredibly exciting time.”

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