California, the Y2K crisis has come a year later

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Power Hungry By Dale Dougherty

For those of us in California, the Y2K crisis has come a year later, proof that the new millennium really did begin in 2001. This 21st century crisis, however, is not technological; it's legal and political. As of this writing, we're in a Stage 3 power alert. The most prosperous and populous state in the U.S. is struggling to ensure that there's enough electrical power to go around.

An early conference sponsored by the Internet Society concerned the spread of the Internet to developing countries. I recall a speaker saying that the initial problem in developing countries wasn't telecommunications, but having stable, affordable electricity.

Riding to work, I monitor the news for predictions of power outages, just as I listen to the weather report when a bad storm is on the way. Stage 3 alerts are very unsettling. I now know that ISO means Independent System Operator. At O'Reilly, our CIO sent out the message: "As of 11:45 a.m. this morning, the California ISO has instituted a series of rolling blackouts across the northern and central parts of the state. As such, it's highly likely that we will sustain a blackout sometime during the afternoon hours if the shortage continues. Please save your work on our servers." If the power goes out, our computers are down, and so are we. This is like being a trucker during a gas shortage.

It's easier to accept people going offline at work than it is having Web servers go down. Fortunately, our servers are located off-site for just such reasons. I talked to Dane Jasper, who runs the ISP Sonic.net in Santa Rosa, where our Web servers are located. "Customers are asking for assurances," he said. His building is located near the telephone company in a grid segment that isn't subject to rolling blackouts. Jasper added, "We recently conducted our first power drill. This gave us the chance to test our emergency preparedness plan, which we've had in place but never actually tested." He was satisfied that the plan worked, running everything—air conditioners, computers, switches, and routers—on diesel. He admitted he was relieved to know that his business was prepared for such an emergency. He said that Sonic.net could run indefinitely on diesel power. Isn't this Y2K planning all over again?

While Sonic.net wasn't subject to blackouts, some of its customers were offline. Dane noticed that customer utilization was down 15 to 20 percent during periods of rolling blackouts. Without electricity, people can't use the service. With Stage 3 alerts, people may also be turning off their computers just in case power goes out, and others may be trying to conserve energy.

Today, for increasing numbers of users, the Internet is always on and we're becoming dependent on it. Years ago, when AOL switched to flat-rates, the first wave of home users began to indulge in unlimited Internet usage—as most of us experience the Internet at work. Now, with DSL and other options available to home users, the Internet is essentially always there, like the dial tone. The current trouble is that the phones are working, but the power is out.

In a January 18 Salon article, "Turn off the Internet," Katharine Mieszkowski examines the argument that the growth in power consumption by high technology companies, fueled by the Internet, is to blame for the power crisis (www.salon.com/tech/letters/2001/01/18/tech_letters). Mieszkowski documents an interesting argument about just how much electricity is consumed by the new economy. It goes back to May 1999, when Mark P. Mills published "The Internet Begins with Coal," in a report by The Greening Earth Society that attempts to evaluate the impact of Internet growth on the demand for power. In February 2000, Mills testified before a House subcommittee and claimed that "the Digital Economy likely uses 13 percent of the nation's electricity." This testimony can be found, along with a rebuttal by Jonathan G. Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, at enduse.lbl.gov/Info/ annotatedmillstestimony.pdf. Koomey disputes Mills' analysis that the Internet has created a rising demand for electricity.

Mills concluded that Web server farms are a significant, new power drain. His calculation was based on the number of Web sites (4 million) reported in the Netcraft survey (www.netcraft.com) at the time. Koomey replied that sites aren't equal to actual servers; multiple Web sites can be hosted on a single server. (However, Netcraft's methodology can discover only servers on the public Internet—sites behind firewalls aren't counted.) Koomey also questioned Mills' estimate of a server's average power consumption (1.5 kW). Most servers don't have monitors, and Koomey's testing found that a server might be in the 50 to 100 W range.

It may not matter whether the cause is rising demand or falling supply. There's no quick fix for these problems. Those of us who build information infrastructure haven't adequately understood how much the new economy depends upon the old economy's infrastructure—on electrical power plants, roads and bridges, and even police and military services. Too often, we take it for granted that these problems will be solved for us. As Lawrence Lessig points out in his book, Code, we can't ignore the legal and political process that, crazy as it may seem, still shapes the world we live in. We can't leave the power to other people.

http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/04/redi/

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 01, 2001

Answers

The capital (stock) markets experienced "irrational exuberance" largely because stock buyers "haven't adequately understood how much the new economy depends upon the old economy's infrastructure." One of the main reasons for the demise of "BUBBLE.COM" is the gradual realization of this basic fact. Hopefully, this belated realization will result in reallocation of resource deployment, and an end to the persistently high (albeit unadvertised) unemployment rate for "old economy" labor and capital.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), April 03, 2001.

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