Before the Industrial Revolution, the only power available to mankind, beyond his own and his animals' muscle, was wind or water. Thus geography figured large in the economy of regions. If there were large rivers with fast-flowing water, mills of all types could be powered and people brought their corn, wood, linen or whatever for processing and the region got richer.
After the Industrial Revolution, coal-fired steam power killed the dependence and wealth was able to spread out from the deep river valleys and on to the plains and river deltas to make the cities of today.
The valleys were converted to make chea
p hydro-electric power. Some they used to smelt metals like Aluminium, whose ores can only be processed by electro-chemistry. Some was used to bolster the steam-powered electricity grids.
Some might remember the bauxite (aluminium ore) mining on the eastern coast of Antrim and the sending of the refined ore to the Highlands of Scotland for hydro-electric processing. Later we would get the benefits of hydro to our grid with the inter-connector.
The increased use of the worldwide web, the costs of electricity and the desire to use less carbon are causing a new economic resurgence in the valleys of fast-flowing rivers.
The internet is a remarkably power-hungry beast. Despite advances in design and technology, the charging and discharging of the little capacitors inside the silicon circuits makes heat, fundamentally and unavoidably.
You might have noticed how hot your current laptop gets. Server racks today may consume as much as 40kWatts, 400 old light bulbs or half a small car equivalent.
The result is that companies like Google are putting their data centres in places like The Dalles on the Columbia River in Oregon, formerly home to the aluminium smelters who gave the world soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops. According to the Economist, Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google’s plant alone consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people.
What then does this say about our economy? We are in a great position to service the industrial world through the internet.
Look at a globe and put your eye just above Belfast. Far from being at the edge of things, that eye-view shows we’re in the centre. Oceans are no barrier to fibre optics but we’ll have to consider the price of electricity to compete effectively.
The full article contains 414 words and appears in News Letter newspaper.
