Davos Money Makeover hots up while South Island Rivers cool Banking Circuits
The World Economic Forum’s cryptocurrency priority as the centrepiece of its “internet of value” explains the intensity of the interest now by the global technology community in New Zealand providing the two essential components for this development.
One of these is mechanical. The other is ethical.
The mechanical component is the provision of the enhanced cooling required by the server farms hosting the accelerated technology.
The guiltless component is that the power driving the cooling systems is itself derived from renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.
The internet technology majors often infer that the server farms driving their networks have surpassed the mechanical world and operate neurally i.e. like the human brain – in waves.
Not so. They are still mechanical and need cooling.
The refrigerant has to be boosted for cryptocurrency because the process needs additional levels of circuitry density and usage just because the mathematical formula under process is so complex that the intensified binary activity generates the extra heat.
The south of New Zealand’s South Island is the ideal location for the cryptocurrency server farms because it is cool in those latitudes due to the region’s proximity to the Antarctic.
Another benefit is that the alpine refrigeration cannot be traced to oil, gas or coal. It is guilt-free.
A little-understood power usage effectiveness covenant requires the key players not only to sidestep fossil fuelled energy but to ensure also that a minimum proportion of operating costs is consumed by the approved renewable variety.
This is why there is so much activity now in calibrating server farm cooling energy sources in places like Clyde, Roxburgh, Makarewa, and Monowai and other places where snow and ice fed rivers run through them
Taxpayer commitment or “collaboration” in these schemes remains to be defined.
It is now 40 years since Gordon Hogg the founding chief executive of New Zealand’s Databank the world’s first trading bank information sharing cooperative saw the future in positioning the era’s air conditioned mainframe data centres where it was already cold.
He foresaw data centres installed in caverns in the Southern Alps (pictured.)
There the concept rested until the internet and social media sector in its virtuous search to distance itself from fossil fuels only quite recently revisited the economic and ethical blend in the rivers sourced in these same Southern Alps.
This in turn becomes a confluence with the evolving cryptocurrency movement advocated by the World Economic Forum of Davos fame as “revolutionizing the exchange of value – as the internet did for the exchange of information.” The WEF views it as the new “model for ownership.”
The WEF views cryptocurrency as the conduit for the “unbanked” to participate in the global economy. Something it claims that the existing global banking hegemony fails to enable
This fits neatly into the great re-set WEF makeover philosophy of which New Zealand’s Labour government is a stand-out cheerleader.
Alpine-grade cooling is required for cryptocurrency hosting because of the new currency’s customer technique known as data mining. This is the disintermediated user buy-in system, a do-it-yourself one, which needs very heavy duty binary crunching capacity.
The word mining is designed to conjure up gold rush images. It also indicates the heavy mathematical lifting in order for myriad formulae routines to squeeze through the binary bottleneck at ever greater speed to emerge as recognisable data and do so instantly.
Just as a motor vehicle under high revs requires more cooling so does a server farm at full load.
The World Economic Forum views the global banking hegemony as an impediment to the equitable global re-distribution of wealth.
The internet and social media technology leaders in their role as intermediary processors see this Davos-inspired levelling up as an opportunity to signal that they are on the same blameless path by putting distance between their operations and fossil energy sources.
Given the New Zealand government’s activist role in the WEF franchise the question arises if the alpine cooling for the server farms is economically as well as morally feasible.
The alpine cooling plan has the logic of using existing resources i.e. the alpine rivers in establishing a new industry without obliterating high value existing ones.
It compares with the drive to carpet over with solar hardware dairy farms situated on the outskirts of tourist townships.
It compares too with the foresting over of New Zealand’s prime farmland in order to allow foreign owners to make messes in their own countries.
Meanwhile in the Davos/WEF global context there will be interest by the technical community in the Clyde server scheme which blends electro-environmental and mechanical imperatives.
The scheme aligns in close proximity the temperature managed power source on the river, with the mechanical server farm itself. This means using Direct Current only and by-passing conversion into AC. This clean electricity is an extra environmental safety factor in containing radiation fallout.