The real benefit to a 100F setpoint is the free cooling it allows. You can use filtered out door air or evaporatively cooled water from a cooling tower to keep a datacenter at 100F year round just about anywhere. This is a 90% reduction in cooling energy right there using decades old, mature HVAC tech.

The main benefit is that it allows free cooling, either bringing in filtered out door air directly or using a cooling tower to generate evaporatively cooled water for direct use in coils. At a space temperature of 100F, you could cut out 90% of the cooling - even in a full-time humid climate like Malaysia. In most US climes, you can do better.

This just is not true. I work in the industry, performing studies of this nature. The Uptime Institute, 24/7 Group, etc. are not enough to promote sharing of this data between rivals. In a similar arena (semiconductor cleanroom critical environments), I've been paid to do the same damn study three times - but the third and last time it was funded by the government (LBNL) and disseminated publicly (something industry groups, such as SEMATECH, do not do). That is efficiency that saves money on an industry wide scale (and I have plenty of work, I don't need to do the same thing over and over for every little group of companies out there). The government's investment saved industry ten, possibly a hundred fold, expenditure. That's good business on a national economy scale. Who else would be willing to invest in the economic commons?

The Energy Star program has proven across numerous fields the value of providing information to the market. Are you at all familiar with it's evaluated successes? How do you know the most efficient car to buy (government standardized test)? Most efficient refrigerator (government standardized test)? Most efficient hot water heater (government standardized test)? Or would you rather leave all those details in the hands of the lawyer-funded Consumer Reports or something?

Data center operators do not know what an efficient system is, just as you probably do not know how your house's energy use compares to similar houses in your climate (unless you utilized the government's "useless" Energy Star database that has led to no regulation).

Here's a clue: If you live in a first world country there's a 100% chance your economy is based directly on the laissez-faire model. Chances are also high that the areas the most screwed up (i.e. telecom monopolies, etc) are the areas with the most government regulation and meddling. Until you can point out a single thriving economy based on socialism, communism, or whatever it is you're advocating, please STFU about how laissez-faire doesn't work.

You express scorn for publicly funded research (what this entire thread is about) and call it worthless, "socialist," especially if it does not lead to regulation (odd emphasis for you to make, but so be it). Thriving economies that fall under your distorted definition of socialist (ie, government funding of basic research, the subject of this thread) include: The US, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Israel, Germany, France (OK, a bit of stretch there) - actually, can you give me a single country that DOES NOT fund basic research and provide data to the public that has a successful industry? Your absolutist vision of Laissez-faire does not work and has never been implemented (I would argue that based on his writings, Adam Smith clearly accepted the value of public investment in the commons and the extension of that to include intellectual development).