This story is a hack job. The reporter (James Glanz) is fascinated by quoting large numbers and pointing to the "waste". There are so many flaws in this piece

This story is a hack job. The reporter (James Glanz) is fascinated by quoting large numbers and pointing to the "waste". There are so many flaws in this piece I hardly know where to begin. From an economic argument, data center operators have a profit motive. A profitable enterprise consumes less "resource" than it consumes (as long as they are not subsidized by the government). So it's obvious that they are doing something valuable for the economy regardless of the residual "wasted" resources. Compare to other human activities, where "waste" can be identified. If you live in a home that has a bedroom that you only use 8 hours a day, do we decry the 66% of waste that the home represents? How about comparing the total energy costs of buying a physical book in a bookstore to downloading it to a Kindle? I have no doubt the new mode represents a savings of several orders of magnitude less energy consumed. But Mr. Glanz wants us to be outraged that the power distribution network wastes 30% of the minuscule amount of energy required to send it to me over the Internet. Had he not wanted to write a sensationalized piece, he could have been more helpful in explaining data centers on a human level. How many watts of electricity are being spent in data centers on my behalf? Rather than sensationalize a "300 million watts" number for Google data centers, he could have said Google expends 3 watts per US household...but that number is not going to scare anyone.