That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto. Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time. They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices.

That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before.

The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook.

The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup.

In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1] Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night.

I used to live within walking distance of there.

[1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumpin...

Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437905 - March 2019 (23 comments)

It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities.

(The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)

Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :)

It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load.

That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.