Addressing the amount of power it takes to run data...

Blair Levin said it takes vast amounts of power to run the centers. Some estimate they account for 2 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption, Hundt said in a videotaped interview to be shown this weekend on C-SPAN’s The Communicators. The move by tech companies to put data centers in cold climates so it takes less electricity to cool them is a “stop-gap solution,” Hundt said. “In the long run, what we need is a clean-energy platform, which as the president says includes all of the above” in terms of different types of energy production, Hundt said in a discussion of The Politics of Abundance e-book by Hundt and Levin. Hundt is CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, and Levin is executive director of the Gig.U project to connect universities’ communities to ultra-fast broadband. The U.S. needs “much faster networks” for genomic medicine, 4K-resolution cameras and other newer technologies to be further deployed, Levin said. His work on the 2010 FCC National Broadband Plan found many companies were worried about the amount of power data centers use, which they deemed among the “potholes in the information highway,” he said. “It is green to deliver goods and services using bandwidth and chips instead of atoms,” Levin said. “We want to do it in a sustainable way, and the United States should want to lead in how we do that."