A disservice to the environment? (Energy).

Internet server "farms" fuel the high-tech industry by housing computer servers and networking equipment for businesses, both on- and offline, that require massive data processing. Server farms are measured in square feet; the total square footage of server farms increased ninefold in 2000. Today, in energy-starved California, 100 server farms in the Silicon Valley area consume more electricity than do a million families.

Proponents say server farms promote efficiency and cost savings for businesses by allowing them to outsource some of their data centers. Clinton Fein, president of the San Francisco-based ApolloMedia Corporation, which helps businesses develop Web sites, says server farms fulfill an existing need for the companies using them. If these locations did not exist, he says, the companies using them would be forced to provide these services for themselves. Fein believes the environmental impact of trucks driving to each of these individual locations to install computer lines and deliver equipment and generators, as well as the ongoing energy costs, should be weighed against the benefits of a centralized location where energy is more efficiently distributed on an as-needed basis.

But activist and community organizations such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) of San Jose, California, would like to see a moratorium on the construction of server farms. They charge that the farms devour energy and that the diesel-fueled generators powering them threaten air quality.

The SVTC currently opposes the construction of a server farm in Alviso, California, that would sit close to a river and a wildlife refuge. According to the SVTC, unspecified studies show that air pollution created by the Alviso plant would be 2-4 times over the air quality thresholds that the Bay Area Air Quality Management District has established. If constructed, the one Internet farm in Alviso would use as much energy annually as 180,000 local households.

Jay Mendoza, director of the SVTC's Health and Environmental Justice Project, explains that the diesel pollution and particulate matter generated by the generators powering the plant would add to the physical burden that children and adults endure daily. "Children's asthma rates are rising, and this is placing an additional health threat on the working people of Alviso, who are on the poor side of the `digital divide,'" he says.

Community leaders and activists in San Francisco's Mission District also have no doubt about the environmental health impact of server farms. They oppose the construction of a proposed 340,000-square-foot server farm, one of 16 in San Francisco operating or coming online soon. One of their biggest concerns is that residents will breathe in diesel fuel generator-produced pollutants such as dioxins, carbon monoxide by-products, sulfur oxide, and nitrous oxide, which mixes with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce ozone.

Server farms account for about 1.4 million square feet of San Francisco's commercial and industrial property. Their growth is unregulated, and that concerns city officials. "Technology is usually ahead of city planning codes, but we're moving to tighten the review process under which server farms are approved and constructed," says Greg Asay, a San Francisco city government official. The regulations, which the city government is expected to approve in January 2002, would tie the future operation of server farms to certain requirements, including the use of environmentally friendly back-up power systems and the creation of special buffer zones that separate residential areas from business zones.

At this point, however, there are no data on how server farms actually affect the environment; they are such a new phenomenon that no studies have yet begun. "We would be willing to act on the health issues [critics] talk about if the science was there," Fein says.

Meanwhile, in the high-tech boom area of Seattle, some two dozen server farms are in the works. That concerns the Portland, Oregon-based Northwest Power Planning Council, an interstate compact involved in the long-range planning for power needs of the Pacific Northwest. The council completed a study last year that predicted a 24% chance of winter power outages in the Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana region by 2003.

"In our planning, we've taken into account that server farms are going to be built in the region," says John Harrison, the council's information officer. One Internet server farm can consume a large portion of an area's power, he says--a serious problem in a region where power is scarce and expected to get scarcer in the future.