Longtime corporate-privilege apologist and recent Seattleite George Gilder starts out his latest Wired essay by mentioning the big “server farms” Google and Microsoft are putting up in the hydroelectrified rural Northwest. It’s nice to see some of the NW’s tech-boom giving employment to parts of Wash. and Ore. that had previously been left out of it, even if those jobs are largely confined to construction and hardware maintenance.

But buried in the story’s midsection, Gilder notes the resource cost of all these data centers that supply our online applications, search-engine results, YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, massively-multiplayer online games, and junk emails. Gilder estimates that the combined electricity consumption of all U.S. server complexes equals the electricity needed to supply Las Vegas on a really hot day.

As more and more networked apps and media files and other Internet “stuff” gets put up and transmitted about, where’s the energy going to come from to do it all? Gilder suggests nukes. I disagree, but don’t have a more feasible alternative other than newer, less-power-hoggin’ processors and routers, which will only slow down these plants’ thirst for juice.

Maybe we could take the content from some of the more salacious conservative blogs and attach them to wind-power generators.