The Artic cold a green lining for social networks

The natural advantages of being located at, or near, the Arctic Circle is multiplying for the internet-based global economy of the 21^st Century. The countries straddling the Arctic Circle such as Norway, Sweden and Finland, as well as Iceland, Greenland and Canada are predicted to benefit from a rise of two to three degrees in temperature over coming decades providing net positive economic effects for farming, mining, transport and timber industries.

Sweden introduced a tax on carbon emissions of $150 per tonne of carbon in 1991 while simultaneously reducing the existing system of energy taxes by 50 per cent. As a result, multinational internet-based companies like Google and Facebook are spending their dollars on infrastructure investments in the cool and green regions of the world.

Facebook recently decided to establish its first server farm (i.e. a hangar full of computers to handle all the internet traffic generated by use of social computer networks) outside the U.S. in Arctic Sweden. There are several similar facilities located in the U.S. but the majority of Facebook user generated Internet traffic emanates from abroad.

When looking for a location for the first European-based facility it is reasonable to suppose one would look for sites that weren’t close to known earth quake zones or countries where severe weather events were likely to increase. Temperature rises resulting in long hot summers would rule out much of Southern Europe. The source of energy may also have been a factor in Facebook’s decision.

The massed computers in the server halls require a power source that is reliable and capable of sustaining power-supply to the tens of thousands of servers. One of the greenest sources of constant base-load energy is sustainable hydro power from the large rivers constantly fed by snow melt and rain fall which are found in Northern Europe, although Sweden also relies heavily on biomass and waste products from nearby forests.  

A basic requirement of the future server farm site is that itis close to a hydropower scheme capable of generating more electricity than the Hoover dam on the Colorado River in the U.S. state of Nevada. This power scheme is ,among other things, responsible for lighting up the nearby neon signs of all the casinos and gin joints in Las Vegas.

The decision taken by Facebook recently to place its first server hall outside the U.S. in Arctic Luleå, 1,000 km north of Stockholm, on the frigid shores of the Gulf of Bothnia and only 100 km south of the Arctic Circle, makes an interesting technologically motivated case for more such long term large infrastructure investments in the near Arctic.

There is plenty of cool air and chilly water to cool the server halls for most parts of the year. The average temperature during the peak summer month in July in Luleå is 19 C max/11C min and the yearly average is 5 C max/-2.5 C min.

The town itself supports a top Swedish Elite League ice hockey team and theLuleå University of Technology, which has studies of the Northern lights as one prominent field of investigation.

Luleå is also an export harbour for the iron ore dug up in the Swedish iron ore fields 400 km further north and linked by air, rail and road to Stockholm. In fact you can be in the newly opened Facebook server farm in Prineville, Oregon, on the U.S. west coast in 16 hours if you catch a flight from Luleå to Stockholm in the morning and onto Portland, Oregon by lunch time and in time for a 5 o’clock beer in Prineville, Oregon, local Pacific Daylight time. But of course it is simpler to communicate with Oregon via videoconference software freely available through the Internet.

The possible political repercussions of placing computer servers in Sweden, which allows tapping in on internet traffic if there is reasonable suspicion of illegal terrorist use of the internet for communication, has been raised by the Swedish Pirate Party whose policy is to protect the privacy of internet users from the prying eyes of Big Brother.

Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg had this to say about the privacy aspects of Facebook’s new server farm in Luleå, “Facebook isn't famous for caring about its users integrity, so they didn't care about it in this case either”. The Luleå server farm site is expected to open in 2014.

Another social networking organisation, with a slightly different outlook on its core business and probably a very different business model, is Wikileaks led by its enigmatic spokesperson, the Australian-born Julian Assange, who is facing extradition from England to Sweden to face questioning on charges of unwanted sex with two women.

The computer servers where Wikileaks kept its digital leaked documents were also located in Sweden but it’s safe to say for reasons other than those of Facebook. Wikileaks was hosted by a Swedish Internet company whose premises are a renovated bomb shelter, built during World War II. The facility is carved right into the cliff side of Södermalm south of Lake Mälaren, that bisects Stockholm, the Venice of the North.

The number of secure servers occupied by Wikileaks was only a fraction of the total number at the server facility in Stockholm and certainly handled only a minuscule volume of the internet traffic projected to be handled by the 10,000 plus servers in Facebook’s future Luleå server farm. The data contained within them has caused a lot of controversy and provided the nucleus for Internet based political activism.

Philip Dorling in the National Times of October 29 revealed that Assange is an enthusiastic supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement and that Wikileaks has provided moral support by tweeting Occupy Wall Street information early and thus encouraging those who wanted to see protests to spread and take off globally.

Dorling alsoreports that during the house arrest of Julian Assange in the U.K. there has been an exponential growth of Wikileaks' global support base. Followers of the website's Twitter account have increased tenfold to 1.2 million. It seems Wikileaks is tapping into another rich source of supporters through the use of social networking and becoming more than a drop-box for illicitly obtained secret material.

In light of the new age political activism sparked by Wikileaks the Swedish Pirate Party leader in the European Parliament, Rickard Falkvinge, had this to say about these new internet enabled organisations on his own website ''a swarm is a new kind of organisation, made possible by available and affordable mass communication,'' Falkvinge writes. ''Where it used to take hundreds of full-time employees to organise 100,000 people, today that can be done…by somebody in their spare time from their kitchen.''

The growth of social networks either for the personal gratification of narcissistic Facebook users with thousands of virtual friends or for political activism of thousands of real but loosely connected protesters will require servers where all the information is stored in cloud computing and located near the sustainable ice blue rivers of the Arctic.

Who would have thought this to be an outcome of the rise and rise of the use of social networks and cloud computing combined with global warming and trends towards using renewable energy?