Quality Vs. Quantity
Even if Huber, Mills and Gilder are wrong about the quantity of power used by the Net, the debate they have spawned is long overdue, and the issues they raise are crucial for the Internet and those who use it.
The nation's ageing power grid is sagging under the strain of surging economic growth and the need for more reliable power. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, America's generating capacity has grown 30 percent over the past decade, but its transmission capacity grew just 15 percent. EPRI predicted that over the next 10 years generation will grow another 20 percent, but the infrastructure needed to deliver that power will grow by just 4 percent.
Nowhere are the problems of generation and transmission more evident than in California. "It's a dire situation," said Michelle Montague-Bruno, a spokeswoman at the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, which represents 190 companies in the region. To save power, members are turning off nonessential equipment, including some lights and computers. Electricity became a key issue for the group in June, when Pacific Gas & Electric was forced to cut power to about 100,000 customers after managers of California's power system warned that the San Francisco Bay area's power grid was near collapse. Those problems continued into December, when the problem was exacerbated by cold weather, power plants idled for maintenance and a shortage of electricity that can be imported.
"There's a perception that the high-tech industry is responsible for the boom in power consumption. That's not necessarily accurate," Montague-Bruno said. "It's due to the boom in construction and the overall growth in the economy and population in California."
Since 1998, California has licensed eight new power plants. But that new power won't begin coming online until next summer, which means the state's electricity woes are likely to continue for many months to come. Some companies have begun to look more closely at on-site generating equipment, including gas-fired turbines and fuel cells. Those technologies could be implemented at far lower cost than centralised power plants, and would obviate the need for big investments in new high-power transmission lines. In addition, on-site generation is more efficient - when electricity is transported long distances, significant amounts of power are lost due to resistance from the wires themselves.
Deregulation was supposed to lead to cheaper, more reliable power. But so far, deregulation, now under way in California and about two dozen other states, has only confused the nation's power picture. And all types of businesses - from manufacturers to dot-coms - are being forced to deal with questions about the availability, reliability and quality of electricity. America's power grid was "built on a 1950s and 1960s design that doesn't address the type of reliability that we need," said Karl Stahlkopf, vice president of power delivery at EPRI.
Stahlkopf, too, believes that Huber and Mills overstated the amount of power used by the Net. But he argued that much of the debate is over the wrong issue. Yes, the quantity of power used by the Net is important. But Stahlkopf said Huber and Mills have been prescient in their discussion of the reliability issue, which may be a longer-term problem than questions about availability. "The nature of power usage in America is changing, because all silicon-based equipment needs absolutely reliable power," he said. EPRI estimates that power interruptions - some lasting just one-sixtieth of a second - are costing American businesses some US$50 billion each year. Sun Microsystems has estimated each minute of power outage costs it $1 million, Stahlkopf said.
Power quality has become a white-hot topic in boardrooms and on Wall Street. Recent initial public offerings for flywheel-based uninterruptible power supply companies, such as Active Power and Beacon Power, and fuel cell makers, such as H Power and Proton Energy Systems, raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Companies of all kinds are spending billions of dollars per year on technologies, ranging from batteries and flywheels to diesel engines, to assure a constant flow of power to their factories, clean rooms and data centers. But that reliability has a cost: Much of the equipment consumes more electric power, which Mills said supports his contention that the Internet will increase power consumption.
"I don't believe for a second that electric power demand is going down," Mills said. "It hasn't for 100 years, and it won't go down now."
