Upon hearing that the Google data center in The Dalles, Ore. will take up as much electricity as Tacoma, Wash., a colleague of mine said: “I’ve been to Tacoma, Google’s a better use for it.”

There has been some hand-wringing, both in trade journals and the mainstream press, over Google building data centers here and there and everywhere. Every time Google is rumored to be building a new facility in Oregon, or Iowa, or wherever, the blogs go aflutter. And now there are some, such as Ginger Strand at Harper’s, who question whether the Google construction-mania is such a good thing. The blueprint for The Dalles data center is shown above.

The title of Strand’s little article, “Google’s addiction to cheap electricity,” had some at Slashdot a little nonplussed. “News at 11,” one poster sarcastically wrote, and another agreed:

Well, yes, and it’s a strange point of view to say that a company is “addicted” to one of its inputs. One may as well say that Google is addicted to CPUS, or to buildings, or to fiber optic cables, or to people.

Google and others addicted to people? Not so much

It was that last bullet item that caught my eye, because from reading Strand’s article, it seemed like Google wasn’t addicted to people as much as previous employers. While Google is promising to bring 100-200 employees to the region around The Dalles, two former aluminum smelters in the area employed 1,100. Now don’t get me wrong. A job at Google is probably a lot nicer than a job smelting aluminum. But if you’re one of the 1,000 or so local residents that once worked at the aluminum smelter but couldn’t land a job at Google, that doesn’t mean much.

(As a quick aside, another poster said if you’re looking for cheap electricity, look for aluminum smelters. As a second aside, while Google is addicted to cheap electricity, I think I’m addicted to the word “smelt.”)

Give us our tax breaks or else

Well so what, right? If Google wants to build their data center on the banks of the Columbia, and they meet local and state building codes to do so, they can employ as many people as they want. This is true, but Google and others also come looking for other breaks.

We did a recent story about how central Washington has become a hot data center location, in part because of dirt-cheap electricity rates. Sabey Corp., a Seattle-based commercial development company specializing in data center construction and leasing, said it would be paying 1.85 cents per kilowatt hour. The average industrial electric rate in the U.S. was 6.37 cents per kilowatt hour in November, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electric Power Monthly report.

Still, so what? If the electric utility is willing to grant them that bargain, they’re in their right to do that. But in addition, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a recent story saying that tech behemoths like Microsoft and Yahoo are on the verge of winning a $1 billion tax break from the state of Washington for building their data centers there. And they’re threatening to stop building in the state if they don’t get them. From the Post-Intelligencer story:

“States such as Iowa and others have come on board with very attractive tax incentive packages to get data centers to locate in their communities,” said DeLee Shoemaker, Microsoft’s state government affairs director. “These other states that are in tough economic times and are looking to attract new business and new investments … Washington state is no longer competitive for this type of business.”

Microsoft and Yahoo already have server farms in Eastern Washington and had planned to build more. But when the state Department of Revenue recently determined that the server farms aren’t eligible for an existing tax exemption for rural manufacturers, both companies halted new construction and began pushing for a new tax break.

Now there’s no doubt that the building of these facilities brings jobs and can help the local economy; according to the story, the “server farms generate many temporary construction jobs and a small number of full-time positions. They also reduce the tax burden on local communities by expanding the property tax base.”

At the same time, once the construction is done, you’re not going to have nearly as many permanent full-time jobs as you would if there was an aluminum smelter in town. In addition to that, Michael Mazerov of the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told the P-I that giving these companies millions of dollars in tax breaks could take funds away from education and economic improvement. Washington state Sen. Eric Oemig agreed:

“Right now we attract business because we have an excellent business climate,” Oemig said. “Part of doing business in the state is paying rent. These server farms kind of want to come in here and have a reduced rent and I fail to see what the extraordinary value is that they are creating for Washington state that we should discount their rent.”

So in the end, when all these data centers are built, there will still be plenty of people without full-time jobs. Some of them will be former aluminum smelters. Thankfully, though, they’ll have something to do, because the building of the data centers will help them to use search engines to more quickly see what Britney Spears is doing on a day-to-day basis, or who advanced in the latest round of American Idol.