> Does anyone know about the Power Station that Tribe is connected to?
> Facebook?

Doesn't work that way. All power-plants feed the grid. All consumers connect to the grid to draw power. There is no *single* power-plant that delivers power to any particular customer(s), neither Tribe (or facebook) nor us at home. For marketing purposes, customers *ARE* allowed to declare that they want to preferentially buy from "premium" (usually eco-friendly) providers. However, that's merely a way of routing the dollars around: those "green" providers still just feed the grid, albeit at (hopefully) a lower "environmental" cost, though often a higher dollar-cost.

During high winds, a slightly-higher percentage of the total energy in the grid is likely to be coming from wind. After lots of rain, there's likely to be a fair bit of hydro pushing the electrons out to us folks at home. Solar feeds us during the day, but (obviously) not at night. Nuclear, gasoline, nat-gas, solar, coal, geothermal, and all the others also do their bits. But ALL of it is just electrons being pumped into the international web of power-lines (I know that Canada's power-grid is linked into the US's... dunno about Mexico).

In addition to the *servers* that run Tribe, FB, etc, there's also the huge *DATA* web, of hubs, routers, gateways, switches, etc; and various media (OC48's down to T1's, ISDN and cable modem and satellite, WiFi, maser/laser/radio links, and all the rest), which also all use lots of energy, and without which we couldn't connect to our favored websites.

In many ways, the data- and power-distribution networks are very similar (topologically). This makes sense, when you think about it:: anywhere you have data flowing, you need to have some sort of power on-hand to keep it going.

ANYHOW...

Valid questions DO include ones like this:

> How much energy do they use to allow us all to connect here,
> chat, post ads, post pics, scroll forums etc...???

I'd add: do they pay a premium for "green" energy? Do they use low-power servers (e.g. servers derived from "laptop" technologies, where low-power-consumption is key to extended battery life), or traditional high-power "Server Farm" technology (fast, high-powered disks connected to fast busses, to pump data out to us fast-fast-fast, etc.)?

Really, as consumers of the service they provide, it'd be most-useful to get a number stated as, for example, average watt-hours per hour of client connectivity. Note that, even when few users are connected, it still takes almost as much energy just keeping the servers up and running, so we cannot "limit" our energy-consumption by limiting our hours of connectivity: disconnecting from a website isn't the same as turning off a light.


- Steve