High-tech demands strain power grid
Posted at 9:52 p.m. PDT Sunday, October 1, 2000
BY MATT MARSHALL
Mercury News
During a summer of rolling blackouts and rising power rates, one silent culprit is adding unexpectedly to the shortages: the new, spreading e-world of networked computers.
E, after all, means e-lectricity, as well as electronic.
Over the past three years alone, U.S. corporations have spent $1 trillion installing a vast world of wiring used now for everything from e-mail to e-business, and it all depends on -- surprise, surprise -- a constant, reliable flow of electricity.
``Every single piece of it gets plugged into a wall somewhere,'' said Mark Mills, an energy consultant and co-author of the Digital Power Report.
Experts differ on how much the needs of high-tech equipment, as well as the economic expansion that it has spurred, have boosted the demand for electricity. But according to the Edison Electric Institute in Washington, D.C., they've added about one percentage point per year to the growing demand for power nationally since 1990.
In California, the high-tech revolution has consumed even more electricity -- an extra two to four percentage points each year of power over the amount originally predicted, the institute says. In 1988, the California Energy Commission believed the state would need 54,000 megawatts of power by 2000, partly to accommodate robust economic growth. But this year California actually required 56,000 megawatts.
That difference is enough to power about 2 million homes. ``There's no getting around it,'' Mills said. ``Cyberspace, far from virtual, is very real and anchored in electrons.''
Depending on whom you believe, high technology consumes from 3 percent to 20 percent of the nation's total power generation, and some expect that number to rise to as high as 40 percent by 2010. ``Whether that number is 5, 10, 30 or 40 percent, is open to question,'' says Jim Owen, spokesman of the Edison Electric Institute.
The added demand from the e-world couldn't come at a worse time. California is now caught in a serious electricity shortfall for various reasons: an unexpectedly hot summer, aging power plants that are prone to break down, years of poor investment in new plants and the new efforts at deregulation in the state.
Imbalance since 1995
For the past five years, the supply of electricity statewide has grown much more slowly than the demand for it from companies and residents. Supply and demand were in balance until about 1995. Since then, supply has grown only 1 percent, while demand has expanded by 11.5 percent, according to the California Energy Commission.
For the Bay Area, state officials say there exists a shortfall of around 900 megawatts, or enough electricity to power about 900,000 homes. ``You guys in California are the biggest energy hogs around,'' says Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering, who has studied power consumption. ``Take a house with three teenagers. You have six phone lines, recharged cellulars, car phones and computers.''
San Jose, for example, sucks up about 2,535 megawatts from outside the city and produces only 165 for itself, according to Stephanie McCorkle, spokeswoman at the state's Independent System Operator, which controls the purchasing of much of California's power. To make up the difference, the city needs to draw on outside sources that are limited themselves, since they come from other areas that are also growing quickly.
With the state running beyond capacity, local power officials are warning of blackouts in the summer.
When a rolling blackout hit Silicon Valley on June 14, several companies were alarmed. They stepped up talks within a task force of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group about ways to conserve energy use and to minimize the burden on the local power grid.
Expensive outages
Sun Microsystems Inc. has estimated that a blackout costs up to $1 million per minute, according to Larry Owens, division manager of customer services for Silicon Valley Power, the utility that manages power for many large companies in Santa Clara County.
Chuck Mulloy, spokesman for Intel Corp., said that if one of its fabrication plants shuts down, ``it could cost millions, depending on the circumstances.''
Nevertheless, many computer companies are reluctant to talk about their power needs, saying that it will alert competitors about their cost structures.
Some say they're confident the Bay Area shortfall can be patched up over the next couple of years through a variety of measures, including building local power plants and transmission stations. Local generation is important, experts say, because it prevents voltage instability, which can seriously harm high-tech computer servers that require high reliability.
For some of their most precise equipment, Internet economy companies need what's called ``five 9s'' -- or 99.999 percent reliability -- to ``nine 9s'' or 99.9999999 percent reliability.
This, in turn, requires backup hardware, backup generators, backup batteries, switches and software, said Mills, the energy consultant. The need for local power is one of the issues in the debate surrounding the proposed Calpine plant for Coyote Valley, which, if approved, would go online by 2003.
Cisco Systems Inc., which is proposing to build a campus in the area, has opposed the plant for health and safety reasons. Cisco's officials say that a patchwork of other plans already in place -- including building two power plants in Pittsburg, and others San Francisco, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties -- will eventually generate enough electricity to avoid building another plant.
In high demand
Meanwhile, many of the new e-businesses have a voracious appetite for electricity. Exodus Communications Inc., Intel and Inktomi Corp., for example, have erected massive Web-hosting and data centers that use about 10 times the amount of electricity per square foot of a typical commercial building. For example, a 100,000-square-foot Web-hosting center built by Exodus consumes enough electricity to power 100,000 homes, estimated Ed Quiroz, regulatory analyst at the Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco.
``They've completely caught projections off guard,'' he says. ``It's a huge growth industry. The limiting factor is going to be the reliability of electricity.''
And there's no sign that the demand for power in Silicon Valley will slow any time soon.
Mills said the amount of electricity consumed by watching a movie by video-streaming over the Internet is 20 times more than that used to watch the same movie on television.
Mobile phones, he said, use about three times the amount of electricity that normal phone lines do because they operate by bouncing signals off of base stations. All of these will be on the rise, he pointed out, especially in Silicon Valley.
``The buildup of the Internet has just begun,'' he says. ``And in the valley, there's a shadow of electricity growing behind it.'' |
