Peter's Technology Trumpet

In the 18th century the city of Glasgow amassed great wealth through trade with the New World. Opinions abound in the history books of why the Glasgow Tobacco Lords achieved a virtual monopoly on the weed trade, but it came down to one fundamentals- the Clyde formed a safe West-facing port best placed to take advantage of the trade winds of the arduous Atlantic crossing.

Glasgow's Merchants were undoubtedly clever chaps, but the city became the 2nd city of the Empire largely due to Geographic fluke. It wasn't superior national intellectual horsepower which created Scotland's coal reserves which fuelled its Industrial revolution and drove the British Empire. Likewise, the discovery of recoverable oil in the North Sea was not the result of an economic development masterplan.

Let's face it - we're just jammy. It rains a bit, but look on the bright side - Scotland always seems to be in the right place to receive a disproportionate share of Europe's natural resources.

With the growth of investment in mega-datacenters, Scotland has yet another chance to create a successful industry by capitalising on its natural resources and geography.

This time the world order of the new industry is shaped by energy availability and security, availability of plentiful electricity generated from renewable sources, geopolitical issues of where to safely place important data, and of course proximity to dark fibre which connects the data and applications to the Internet peering points and population centres of the Eurasian land mass.

Europe's economic development authorities are quietly angling for this business by pitching potential datacenter sites to the likes of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Oracle and others closer to home such as BT and Fujitsu. In this competition the prizes are significant - with successful sites seeing many-year investments of $100 millions with benefits for the local economies involved, their power/communications infrastructure and to the ecosystem of companies involved in the creation and supply chain of these 100 acre, million server monsters. Switzerland, Iceland and most other continental European nations with energy independence and/or a reasonable renewable energy capacity are already making a strong play.

Scotland of course already has a long history of Hydro generation, relevant experience in North Sea exploration, and has a large share of Europe's wind, wave and tidal generation capacity.

In larger datacenter projects in North America, the appearance of a big name such as Microsoft has triggered the creation of a cluster of similar datacenter investments, sparking economic diversity and regeneration in some rural areas. Quincy, WA, now has Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit and others on the way. Likewise datacnters from Microsoft and IBM across Ireland have led inward investment of nearly €1 Billion. But unlike Washington state, Scotland doesn't have earthquakes, and unlike Ireland it does not have problems meeting the industries demand for electricity.

Just as West-facing trading ports flourished in the Age of Empire, there are specific sites in Scotland's which are set to flourish in the Software + Services,/Cloud Computing/Datacenter age. Ecclefechan & Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway is one such location. Scotland's roundwood forestry thinnings and sustainable crops of willow find their way to the largest Biomass power station in Europe, E-On Steven Croft  - visible from the M74 motorway. When Europe ultimately runs out of oil and gas, Scotland's forests will continue to provide a sustainable energy source.

As a bonus, the area has planning permission for around 200MWs of windmills, and the proposed site of the 300MW Solway tidal barrage is not far away. There are also multiple UK National Grid interconnects nearby. Put the Biomass and these interconnect assets together, and you have multiple redundant, always on (the last thing you want in the 24/7 datacenter industry is a power outage), power supplies with capacity in the 100MW region which are available today.

Coincidentally, the area is flooded with data fibre trunk routes due to the adjacency of power transmission rights of way, and the proximity of the West coast main train line.

So once again Scotland finds itself again in the enviable position of possessing all the natural and technological assets required to build a new industry.  Lets hope that it can prioritise the steps required to develop this new industry in the face of swift-moving competition...