Subject: High-tech demands strain power grid
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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 08:59:00 -0700 (PDT)

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	Published Monday, October 2, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News 
	High-tech demands strain power grid
	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. 
	Blackout warnings 
	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. 
	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 in 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.'' 
	Contact Matt Marshall at [email-masked] or (408) 920-5920.