It's known that processing information uses energy (well, strictly erasing bits uses energy), and your laptop may well be cooking your knees as you read this. The faster the clock speed, the hotter it gets. The roar of fans and forced air cooling are the first things that hit you when you enter a server room, and so-called "server farms", such as power the Google search engine, have to be located where power is cheap, and the fastest fibre-optic hubs are to hand. Few places meet both needs.
It is said that we have grown so accustomed to instantaneous response that a delay of 1/20 sec is now all we will tolerate. Next time you click, reflect on the extraordinary events that happen more-or-less instantaneously as your request flickers through an undersea cable, is switched, disassembled, routed to several servers, the responses assembled and back it comes.
But it comes at a cost - increasing electrical demand. It is said that "the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts" and that we are on track by the end of the decade to have the global computing machine consuming half of all the world's output of electricity.
Wind turbines are not going to solve this one!
Source: Wired Oct 2006 "Cloudware"
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