Use your power don’t export it.

I read an article today on the BBC website, regarding a comment by UK energy minister Lord Hunt. He was responding to call from the Scottish government stating that the costs for putting electricity into the national grid are unfair towards them. The charge is calculated based on the size of the power station and the distance from large populated areas.
Scotland has a long history of using renewable energy to drive its industry, dating back to the days of pre-electricity hydro powered textile mills. I feel that there is an opportunity here, why don’t they make use of their surplus instead of being penalised by the cost of exporting it to the south. I think this is a great opportunity to incentify the development and operation of green data centres. I understand that it’s cheaper supplying bandwidth to a data centre located in Scotland than to supply Scottish power to a green data centre in London.

Renewable energy in the data centre

Making use of renewable energy to power the data centre is something I have been thinking of for a while but only recently have I started to dig deeper. It has been hard to juggle the commercial feasibility vs. the moral and environmental arguments. So as someone on the fence I have done nothing.
A friend is starting an interesting business in financial structuring and securitising of renewable energy and green technology. We had a chat around the dynamics of renewable power demand and supply and this started me thinking of how one could with minimal economic impact bring renewable energy into the data centre.
I have come across a very interesting and informative blog maintained by Dave Ohara, it is an aggregation of interesting news, articles and opinions mostly around the topic of the green data centre.
I am not aware of any alternative investment or finance companies in general that have clear strategies on reducing their carbon footprint and general environmental impact of their data centre. I wonder how long before these will form part of an investor mandate for a hedge fund?