Data Centers, Energy Utilities and Population Data

Want a staggering statistic to kick-off your day? 

According to GlobalWebIndex, the average internet user spends 6.5 hours online everyday. What's more, according to Statista there are a staggering 5.3 billion internet users the world over. Let's do the math on that one: 5.3 billion folks spending 6.5 hours per day equals.....let's just say that's a ton of internet comings and goings. 

None of this happens for free. Telecom, networking and other infrastructure takes responsibility for routing this extraordinary volume of global traffic. If you click on a YouTube video and it plays, thank your local telecom.

Closer is better when data are being exchanged. In very non-technical speak, the longer your data needs to stay on a 'road', the higher the risk of it getting into an accident, the longer it takes to arrive, etc. 

Data center providers try to get a jump on these dynamics by locating storage infrastructure close to population centers: the less distance between people (or companies) and their data, the better. And Population Explorer has some of the best demographic datasets the world over - our high-resolution demographic and income data gives about the clearest picture possible for existing and future population trends. 

But data centers need another piece of crucial information: utility locations and generation capacity. Data centers are power hungry, and so optimal locations will need to factor not only high-resolution population data, but proximal utility attributes as well. 

The PopEx GIS team put together this beautiful overlay, integrating energy utility catchments (source: US Energy Atlas) with PopEx demographic heat maps. The EIA atlas provides catchments for US providers and, for some utilities, seasonal peak capacity, gross and net generation values and other attributes. By loading these catchments and attributes in PopEx, you can see demographic/income data with associated utility and generation capacity detail in a singular mapping interface.

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