I stopped in at the Uptime Institute Symposium this week in Santa Clara and visited the Sabey booth in the exposition hall (Sabey received a GEIT award at the event). I was impressed by the fact that they touted the energy efficient design and operation of their colocation data centers alongside notes on how cheap the power is feeding the ones in Washington State.
For example, their data center under development in Quincy is fed with hydroelectric power from the adjacent Columbia River, at the stunningly low cost of 2.25 cents per kWh. That's wholly clean power that is less expensive than the lowest prices I've seen quoted in the South (just over three cents per kWh, and mostly sourced from coal-fired plants).
The Quincy data center uses air-side free cooling with evaporative back-up, and you have to praise a company for making that investment when the power prices are so very low.
I thought Quincy took the cake and may very well meet Sabey's claim of the lowest energy price anywhere in the world, but their own information on their Columbia data center in central Washington beats it at 1.96 cents per kWh! The LEED Gold-certified 438,000 square foot facility features free cooling that operates over ninety percent of the year.
Most of Sabey's data centers are in Washington State, but their latest is the conversion of the old Verizon switching center in Manhattan, a high rise with 40 megawatts of power coming from redundant transmission voltage feeds from Consolidated Edison.
Sabey doesn't make any claims for low energy prices in New York, but says that they get a "25% to 30% discount" from ConEd. Utilities generally offer lower rates for customers who take primary or transmission voltage service, but I've never seen discounts that high, so I wonder what the deal is.
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