Well, Google is considering to deploy data centres necessary to operate their search engine on barges powering and cooling computers…
Sounds strangely? Just read below!
Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away.
This text was somehow seen by The Times in this patent application written by Google… Rather interesting article is published at their site. As for me, I didn’t know that Microsoft is planning to build data centres in cold climes of Siberia or that Sun is going to place its supercomputers in abandoned coal (see cold) mine…
By the way all data centers around the world consumed about 1% of all electricity in 2005. How do you think, what would be in 2009? 
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Data Center Knowledge
Discussion at Slashdot
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Even though this sounds like a radical idea to reduce the power cost, the maintenance cost of such data centers may be very huge. This is definitely a very interesting concept.
Also, regarding your question: “How do you think, what would be in 2009?”, I would just quote the same article from timesonline:
“Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005. By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet will be larger than that of air travel, a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy firm, and the Uptime Institute, a think tank, predicted. ”
Ramesh
The Geek Stuff
What are the financial implications of moving into international waters?