Electricity as Strategic Advantage?

The Wall Street Journal is running an article today about how Internet firms are increasingly locating their facilities with electricity cost as a prime consideration ("Surge in Energy Use, Energy Costs Has Big Tech Firms Seeking Power" -- $$ Registration Required).  It's no surprise that the rising cost of energy is affecting firms that run tens and hundreds of thousands of machines.  What I found interesting is just how big this demand has gotten: the article mentions that Austin Energy attributes 8.5% of its total demand to data centers.  This, from an industry that was essentially nonexistent 10 years ago.  As the physical footprint of the Internet gets bigger, the incentive to fundamentally improve the power consumption of the machines will only grow.  Perhaps Sun is onto something with their "eco-friendly" campaign to increase power/watt using their CoolThreads technology.