If you are an advocate of solar energy, then one of the biggest debates that you are likely to get into is around the question of Grid Parity. If you carry out some simple sums, then in terms of the cost to build a new power plant, we are already there. The supporting evidence is the number of new base load solar plants that are springing up, like this one in Arizona. But the phrase that has captured my interest is that of a Solar Continent. Australia is, like much of the US, very well positioned to capture a great deal of energy from the sun. With the falling prices of PhotoVoltaic (PV) panels, it is very likely that in the next ten to twenty years much of the western world will be powered with some form of distributed energy (DE). So how does this affect our data centres?
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