enlarge The Associated Press

Data centers like this, with banks of computers that physically process our keystrokes and make the World Wide Web a reality, could be based in several Maine communities.

This week, when Americans go to their computers and type "turkey stuffing recipe" into a Google search, they'll take for granted the more than 10 million places on the Web they can go for help with a holiday meal.

We tend to see such wonders of the Internet as a "virtual" gift, something that appears from the ether, an act beyond the bounds of a physical space.

But in the back of our minds, we know that somewhere, perhaps in California or maybe just outside of Boston, there are machines that physically process our keystrokes and make the miracle of the Web a reality.

Because the Internet lets us be connected everywhere at once, we forget that it is a physical thing. It takes computers, lots of big ones that eat up power and generate heat, to process data and send it on its way through the World Wide Web.

All sorts of information – corporate data, health records, government records, e-mail, news, NASA images from space, even turkey stuffing recipes – must be stored and processed somewhere.

It takes a number of inputs to make a large data processing center function well, and it might surprise you to know that Maine is especially well positioned to host that industry if – and it's a big "if" – we are able to invest in some missing infrastructure.

The first ingredient in the data center recipe is energy.

Power is needed to light up the circuits of the computers and to cool them. Maine is ahead of a lot of other places in that regard.

Maine's abundant renewable power resources, including biomass, hydro, wind and, perhaps soon, tidal, can be attractive to data processing entities.

Imagine a company leveraging the Maine brand and saying its data is processed using 100 percent renewable sources.

Another need is physical space, and again Maine has an advantage.

Our forest products mills, or perhaps our former shoe and textile mills, offer very affordable real estate, especially when compared with rents in places like Silicon Valley in California and the Route 128 corridor around Boston.

Many of Maine's forest product mills have tens of megawatts of electrical generation on site, often driven by green energy sources such as biomass, chemical recovery boilers or hydro dams. They can offer highly reliable, low-cost, local power sources, with the utility grid providing backup power.

Many mill locations are permitted to draw river water that can be used to make a cooling system more efficient, and Maine's cooler climate is a head start on keeping a roomful of computers at the right temperature.

Such "green data mills" would bring jobs and investment to Maine, and when co-located with paper mills or other traditional industries, they would spread overhead costs and make the traditional mills more viable.

So what's the catch?

The final ingredient in our data mill recipe is connectivity. That request for a turkey stuffing recipe needs a way to get to a computer in Maine, and the response that goes out a fraction of a second later has to find its way back to the holiday chef's laptop.

Maine is lagging in its investment in high-capacity fiber-optic infrastructure.

That has been in the news lately, with businesses and residential users complaining about how hard it is to get high-speed Internet in many rural areas. Lack of affordable broadband certainly makes Maine less desirable for businesses.

But realizing the full potential of the 21st century economy requires more than broadband at more doorsteps. Maine needs an open access, high performance data highway system. Such a highway would help deliver high-speed Internet to homes and businesses, and serve large institutions and companies with a high demand for bandwidth.

Wireless connections can't fill the niche. Only a high-capacity fiber-optic network can provide the level of connectivity required by the green data mill recipe.

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