San Franciscans Protest as ‘Server Farms’ Sprout
Each evening, construction worker Tony Xu parks his weathered white van in the driveway of his impeccable two-story townhouse. But something has changed since his family moved in four years ago.
Less than five feet away, the massive concrete frame of a new quarter-million-square-foot building towers over Xu’s home and backyard garden.
“It’s too high,” said Xu, waving an arm at the 65-foot-tall structure. “The morning sun is no more.”
His new neighbor is a telecommunications facility, one of more than a dozen data centers springing up in this densely developed city.
These centers, and their computer “server farms,” are the heart of the Internet. When people surf the World Wide Web, they typically connect to one of these huge farms, named for the row upon row of computer servers, switches and other equipment they house.
Although they provide the infrastructure for conducting business over the Internet, their proliferation has caught even this tech-savvy town by surprise and left some San Franciscans dismayed.
Data centers have come to other technology hubs, from New York and Texas to Seattle and Los Angeles, but their arrival here has generated a convergence of highly charged urban issues and the state’s energy crisis.
During a recent standing-room-only hearing at City Hall, the farms were cast in alarming terms--as huge energy consumers that would use as much power as the entire municipal government, and as potential polluters whose backup diesel generators would spew soot rivaling a fleet of buses.
But they also were lauded and defended--as a magnet for jobs in a technology sector that already employs more than 60,000, and as a relatively clean industry that provides an essential service to many important corporate citizens.
“ ‘Internet server farms’ was not in our vocabulary 10 years ago, or even six months ago,” Francesca Vietor, director of the city’s Department of the Environment, said later. “And all of a sudden these interests are converging . . . talking about their concerns and hopes.”
The municipal debate is resonating strongly with residents who resent the high-tech industry’s ever-deeper reach into neighborhoods beyond Multimedia Gulch in the South of Market area.
Many server farms are concentrated in minority communities where residents often say government has not always served them well. High-tech gentrification is a burning concern in the heavily Latino Potrero and Mission districts. And there are deep suspicions in Bayview-Hunters Point, a predominantly African American district, about possible links between illnesses and a polluted former Navy shipyard.
The district’s newly elected county supervisor, Sophie Maxwell, who called the hearing, said she believes the concentration of industry has caused elevated rates of asthma and cancer, including her 28-year-old son’s lymphoma. “We have kind of been the dumping ground,” Maxwell said in an interview. “I came to the conclusion we have to be very careful . . . about anything that goes on here.”
The growth of data centers in the last two years has left city officials scrambling to answer elementary questions: How many already exist in San Francisco? How much power do they use?
The Planning Department says there are at least 16 operating or in the pipeline: One farm is being built in a former World War II weapons warehouse, another in a brick-turreted former National Guard armory. A data facility is up and running where the late impresario Bill Graham’s Winterland Productions churned out rock paraphernalia.
It’s no accident that many of the centers are in virtually bombproof structures, old or new, and that they are secured like bank vaults. Theft of trade secrets and earthquake damage are real concerns.
At the heart of the data centers are hundreds of servers--the computers on which companies host their Web pages--racked like pizza boxes in locked cages. Massive air-conditioning systems keep the computers cool--and that’s where most power is consumed.
Debate Over Energy Use
Depending on who is talking, energy use by server farms is a looming disaster or a high-tech urban legend.
“The businesses are transferring [their] energy demands to the farms,” said Elaine Forbes, the county Board of Supervisors’ legislative analyst. “They may be importing energy demands from other regions and placing strain on [our] energy needs.”
Data centers use about four times the wattage per square foot that office buildings do, and often more than manufacturing plants, city officials said. They estimated that the farms collectively would use at least 100 megawatts, or 10% of San Francisco’s peak power demand. That is enough to run all municipal facilities, including the transit system.
Keith Reed, senior corporate account manager for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., said the utility has requests for hookups from about 100 server farms, the majority in Silicon Valley.
But their power use, though substantial, appears to be far less than advertised, Reed said.
A recent study for PG&E;, he said, showed that server farms are projecting use at 100 to 150 watts per square foot but are actually consuming about 40.
“Our study may help reduce the concern that cities have in places like San Francisco,” he said. Reed said some server farm owners may be claiming higher numbers for marketing purposes, to assure customers that they have adequate capacity for expansion.
Pollution Fears
On Paul Avenue in the Bayview, down the street from row houses and playing children, there’s a new look to a former Macy’s warehouse. Antennas and satellite dishes poke from the roof of this 2-year-old telecommunications data center. And alongside are backup generators that can produce enough power to supply hundreds of homes.
Horace Au, 24, lives on neighboring Exeter Street with his family. He said he had no idea there were generators. “They should not burn diesel in my neighborhood,” he said. “They should move that and their company.”
Though decidedly low-tech, diesel generators are critical to server farms and other high-tech facilities. They keep equipment running and protect it from damage during power outages.
“I have seen contracts where, if the power goes out, the owner of a building provides penalties of $1 million per minute for downtime,” said Tim Tosta, a lawyer who represents developers of three farms in San Francisco.
Godsend that generators can be, city officials say they pose potential environmental hazards, because diesel exhaust is known to cause cancer.
The generators are typically fired up half an hour a week for testing, said Vietor, the city’s environmental director. The resulting emissions, she said, are equivalent to those of 80 diesel buses running for one year.
The owners of the Paul Avenue facility say they are unaware of any such concerns and have complied with all regulations.
Bay Area air-quality officials say they do not know how many backup generators exist at server farms, because the generators do not require operating permits.
Two residential streets adjoin an imposing structure framed in concrete and steel. “New San Francisco Telecom Center,” reads a banner on the building next to the Xu home.
Family members say they probably would not have bought their house had they known it would be cast in a shadow, though they acknowledge they later were notified that a building was going up.
“Because our English is not good, we did not go to City Hall to say we don’t want this building,” said Tony Xu’s wife, Ena Chen, using a nephew as a translator.
Officials say building codes did not require the developer to provide space between the house and the center.
John Mason, president of Cardiff Mason Development of Danville, Calif., said that residents were notified by mail about the project and that the contractor went door to door. “I consider the building a huge improvement,” he said, noting that it replaced an abandoned sausage factory.
Sue Hestor, an attorney who represents neighborhood groups, calls the building “an abomination.”
“No one should have allowed a building of any use to hover over houses and take all their light,” she said. “Shame on the Planning Department.”
Land Use Debate
Since conducting the City Hall hearing, Supervisor Maxwell has proposed legislation that would force planning officials to assess the effects of data centers on neighborhood character, energy use and the environment.
The industry has urged city officials to tread softly. “They are the utility installations of the new industry,” said Brett Gladstone, a land-use lawyer from the Information Technology Coalition.
In the Mission district, the former armory is a graffiti-marred eyesore with people sleeping in the doorways. A developer hopes to convert the cavernous structure into a high-tech facility, but activists won further city review.
“The main objection is the assumption that everything that is high-tech is good,” said Eric Quezada, a member of the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. “The blue-collar jobs we lost . . . are just as important.”
Jobs also are an issue across town on 3rd Street, where a warehouse is becoming a server farm and the developer has agreed to provide residents with employment and computer training.
Tosta, the project’s attorney, said the center and other farms “are just as necessary as telephone poles and switching stations were in the last century. Just as people were spooked by electrical lights and telephones, they are spooked by these.”
*
PLAYING POWER POLICE
Law enforcement agencies are divided on citing firms that don’t reduce energy use. B1
