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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (28623)	11/22/2008 11:13:01 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

It hardly seems intuitive that electric power consumption today would fall victim to the boom-bust dynamic, but it apparently is, or at least showing the potential for trending that way. Obfuscated in this article is the distinction between residential and commercial, although in at least one instance households and businesses are mentioned in the same sentence. Regardless, I'm inclined to agree that the economic downturn is a principal driver behind this seeming oddity. Some WSJ readers' opinions too are interesting: tinyurl.com (BTW, I posted this paragraph (above) earlier to another forum, where I cited your last post as being a worthwhile read as well:) When I read a piece like this I tend to recall parallels from other eras when seemingly unintuitive manifestations have occurred. One case, in particular, stems from a data center site selection engagement for several brokerage firms back in the mid-Eighties. I recall visiting one over-sized installation near Princeton, NJ in '87 that was built to meet expectations prior to LANs and PCs becoming mainstays, similar to how today we might be viewing the disruptive effects of cloud computing environments. The main slab and floor plate supported by this one data center I'm referring to had a ceiling height and enough square footage to accommodate several soccer fields. To the best of my recollection it peaked at about forty-percent occupancy and stayed that way until the Internet bubble days. Looking towards the future, one can only guess that the continued emphasis on greenifying everything combined with the emergence of increased co-generation supply, which itself is being augmented by renewables, can result in a rather lumpy, if not increasingly volatile, overall power utilization profile. The dilemma now being faced by the powercos can, IMO, in a material way be understood by mapping the issues I raised in the foregoing paragraph to the top-down overall architectural design of generation plants --and, just as, if not more, importantly, the time required to build new plnats and how those map collectively to the larger system of interconnected grids (or simply, the national power grid). ------