Cheap, clean electricity is putting the city of Holyoke on the map.
Holyoke, one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, hasn’t attracted any significant business development in a long time. But companies are starting to show interest in the old mill town because its municipal utility has something they want: electricity that—because it’s predominantly hydro and nuclear—is the cheapest in New England and largely carbon-free.
A consortium of high-profile universities and companies is planning to open an $80 million high-performance computing center in downtown Holyoke in late 2012 that will connect to the campuses using existing fiber optic lines. The center is expected to use 7.5 megawatts of electricity initially, growing to 15 megawatts after five years, or nearly a quarter of the existing electricity load of the city of 40,000 people.
James Lavelle, general manager of the city-owned Holyoke Gas & Electric, said he can meet the computing center’s initial needs with hydroelectricity from a dam and a series of locks on the Connecticut River, purchases from the Seabrook and Millstone nuclear power plants, and an existing power plant that can run on either oil or gas. To meet the center’s future power needs, Lavelle said he will have to expand the city’s hydroelectric capacity and probably bring on some wind power.
The computing center itself will produce relatively few jobs beyond the initial construction work, but city officials hope its location in downtown Holyoke will spur additional development in the area and attract additional companies interested in low-cost power.
“We’re looking at it as a catalyst for attracting jobs and investment,” says Kathleen Anderson, director of planning and development for Holyoke. “People want to be part of that.”
Eric Nakajima, the state’s senior innovation advisor, said the mere fact that big-name universities like MIT, the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Northeastern, and Harvard want to locate an important facility in Holyoke is creating a lot of positive buzz about the city and its officials. “Let’s face it,” he says. “For major institutions in Boston and elsewhere, [Holyoke] wasn’t even on the radar screen before.”
Lavelle said Holyoke will sell power to the computing center at the industrial rate of 8.4 cents per kilowatt hour, the lowest in New England and less than half of what it would cost in Boston and Cambridge. Price is not the only selling point. Lavelle says the municipal utility produces on average 100 pounds of carbon dioxide for every megawatt hour of electricity it generates; the New England average is 10 times as much, or 1,000 pounds per megawatt, he says.
The high-performance computing center is designed to help researchers who need massive computing power to do complex calculations, like modeling climate change. Universities across the state are facing growing demand from more and more academic disciplines for powerful computing capability at a time when the cost of providing that capability is rising quickly.
Claude Canizares, vice president for research at MIT, said the university was starting to run out of computing space two years ago when it began reviewing its options. It came across Holyoke and liked the fact that the city offered cheap, clean power, had access to fiber optic lines, and was located at a New England crossroads, the intersection of the Massachusetts Turnpike and I-91.
When the economy went south, MIT’s computing center almost went with it. But MIT began talking to other universities and the state and what started out as a single-university effort quickly grew into a joint venture of five universities, two companies (EMC and Cisco), and the state. Each university is contributing $10 million, the two companies are chipping in a total of $5 million, and the state is adding $25 million. The group has established a nonprofit called the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center and is recruiting an executive director.
Canizares said the universities are looking at ways to configure their computers at the center so they consume less energy. They are also trying to find ways to have the computers work together, an academic version of what he called cloud computing.
The university collaboration in connection with the center is now expanding into other areas. MIT and UMass, for example, worked together on an application for a major Department of Energy grant and other joint projects are in the works.
“They’re learning how to work together,” Nakajima says. “If we get it right here, then it gives us the possibility for much greater endeavors down the road.”
Bill Ennen, program director for development assistance at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, another state agency working on the project, said the computing center should pay big dividends for Holyoke. But he said it also represents a big opportunity for the universities and the state to do a better job of competing for federal research grants that have become the lifeblood of the economy.
“This is one of the best economic development stories we’ve run into,” he says.
