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Is the Net The Cause of California's Power Problems?
kenf writes "Salon Magazine has an article about folks from the power companies blaming the internet for their power shortage woes." Well, the net does consume a huge percentage of the nations electricity. The article makes a lot of good points. I'm glad I don't live in CA, but how long before it
affects the rest of us?
California's problem is that environmental regulations and other liberal BS prevented them from building *any* new power plants in the past 10 years, while they added 5+ million people to their population, and Silicon Valley to their major energy consumers. Oops. They've had to buy power from other states to meet their basic needs for years now, and when they deregulated under these circumstances, the demand v. native supply equation caused prices to soar and CA utilities to use up all their cash buying power during peak demand. Bigger Oops. Just keep this in mind the next time the Sierra Club comes around telling you how *industry* will cause the lights to go out...
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Ah but they do. Ordinary NT 4 will turn the screen off if you have an EnergyStar monitor and an appropriate screen saver installed (which probably came with the machine).
And 2000 does all the power saving stuff right out of the box. (The guy opposite me installed 2000 a few weeks ago; now when he comes in and touches his mouse in the morning his monitor turns back on, throwing a few nasty jitters through my screen.)
- Alan
I think I read on the Contrarian Rap that even though a manager was screaming to hedge the low cost of oil (back when oil was ralitively cheap) he was told 'no'.
Someone please moderate bughunter's post up...
You see, my parents both grew up on farms, farms which have since been replaced by trees. Therefore, I feel that our family, and me myself are warranted a eco-credit..
Actually, if you look at the growth of forests nationwide over the last century, on average, everyone in the US is in the black! And throw in all the gains over the last 50 years on top of that.. Whoo-hoo!
Yippee! I've never done a gasholine-fueled bonfire outside before.. I guess it's time to start. Will you join me and use up your credits so we can have a bonfire twice as big?
Ouch, someone got up on the wrong side of the bed today. I admit, I read his post wrong, I should have been more carefull. It's not like I caled him a name or insulted him, I just thought he had read the story wrong. There is no reason to whip out your flamethrower. You could have just said that I was wrong.
If the price is depressed, like the residential rates that PG&E are forced to pay because of rate-limits, who is paying the price?
In the case of electricity in california, it's obvious that PG&E is currently paying the price for the rate limits. And what a price tag, 10 billion!
So, if the price we're paying for power/natural gass/gasholine is depressed, who is paying the difference between the real price and the price we pay. (No, 'our children' is not a correct answer, the energy we use now to bring up our children is an advantage to their future, not a harm.)
BZZT, sorry, your power supply does NOT draw 200 watts to operate, rather it can supply that much power to the rest of the system. Although the device is not perfect, it is nowhere near 100% inefficent. YOu can tell this by touching the power supply case of a comptuer you just turned off, it is warm to the touch, but nowhere near what it would be if it needed 200 watts to operate.
I read the internet for the articles.
The real lesson is - don't turn a public utility over to a private enterprise whose job it is to make a profit off the consumer. The whole fiasco was predicated on saving the consumer money.
clancey
I realize that there MUST be a few of you out there, who would rather be "proactive", and become a part of the solution, rather than just "place blame", and "point fingers", like most of the folks here, so follow this link to energy independence (or at least, reduction).
www.homepower.com
It is one of the best starting place's for learning about owning and building your very own "modular", "power station". You can become much more energy independent this way, and even remove yourself from the power grid, if you have the inclination, and money.
You will find is IMMENSELY satisfying to have some (or all), of your abode's lighting, and electrical appliances working just fine, during a blackout.
You want to impress the neighbors? Just invite them over during a blackout to have some hot cocoa, and watch a video. And then the look on their faces after the video, when you turn the lights back on and they "remember" that it's a blackout... Priceless! . Of course, this is just a nice fringe benifit, "iceing" on the cake, as it were.
And to ALL of the renewable energy "detractors" out there, SHUT UP!
You haven't lived off the grid, so your opinions mean NOTHING!
If you aren't applying a solution, you are a part of the problem.
Dig it?
The positive experience of thousands of "off the gridders" speaks volumes about how well renewable energy works. All it takes is a change in thought, and some cash.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
the logic of not turning off a computer is to avoid the jolt at startup. This is not to save electricity, it is to reduce wear and tear.
Although I can agree.. In general it isn't that cold in CA (compared to New England or the Midwest).
UPS Sucks
A hot water heater? Well, if the water's already hot of course it'd be inexpensive to run. Now a plain old water heater might be a different story.
Deregulating the prices that power companies can charge us just left the door wide open for things like this to happen. Is it just me, or does it not make any sense for us to sell off our land and our resources to companies who just sell back what they're taking from what was originally our land? But that's not neccessarily the issue at hand. What we have here is a refusal to come to a common ground on both parts. And while I don't neccessarily agree with regulating in general (a free market tends to equal out things over time, innovations come about as a result of it), I also refuse to play privy to some CEO's fund-raising tea party.
Our society has brought about an economic structure where the end-user, who is inevitably the most valuable asset a company, -including- a power company, has. Without us, there is no one to sell their power to. And without them, there would be no readily resellable power. Things work both ways, but they need to be balanced well in order for them to work smoothly.
On one hand people scream for environmental friendliness, which is, in fact, an important issue. They whine about building dams, but they want to be able to run as many lights and computers as they can get their hands on. They don't want us to build more nuclear power plants for fear of radiation and cancerous mutations, but they are perfectly content to chat away on their cellular telephones for hours and hours. I just don't understand it, I live in California myself, and, unfortunately, things seem to be out of wack half the time.
And not to mention with our newest president-elect, George 'dubayah' Bush sitting in the white house, I honestly don't see gas or oil prices moving anywhere but up. Did anyone overlook the fact that he (and quite probably) his accomplices and cronies are all in the oil business with him? Now look at that and take a guess at where our oil prices are about to head.
We want electricity companies to lower the bills, and yet we refuse to come to a compromise on what can be done to seek alternative power supplies. Compromise is sorely in need, and it has to be on both ends.
-- 'knowledge is power. power corrupts. study hard, be evil.'
Actually its because out of state suppliers are REFUSING to sell to California. Updates on radio, msnbc, cnet. We haven't bent over far enough for the power providers...
... it's called conservation ... shut down some of your hot spares in your server farms and stop setting your heat to 80 fahrenheit with the screen door open (which I've seen some of my relatives do in California, which would get you stoned up here in Washington).
No, we were ordered by federal regulators to provide power in the midst of our under-generation cycle (winter) to California. Which is why Oregon and Washington state are now suffering higher impacts than California is, even though we were responsible and built lots of power plants (wind and gas turbines mostly).
And the Governor of California, according to the latest cNet article, ordered the rolling blackouts, since Californians aren't cutting back enough on energy use, even with the extra energy taken from Oregon and Washington.
Hello
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
This has nothing to do with the current crisis. There is energy available. The plants aren't selling it because the terms of deregulation, which they locked in expecting to make a killing, turned around and bit them in the ass a few years later.
The current crisis is a financial one, caused by price-gouging and price wars between the various entities who make and distribute power. If the power companies hadn't pushed for wholesale energy prices to be deregulated, they wouldn't be in the mess they're in. They sat down with the governor and wrote the legislation. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
When I first heard about these blackouts following right on the heels of deregulation, I predicted the conservative/libertarian response was going to be "there wasn't enough deregulation." Sure enough, that's the automatic response. It'd be funny if it weren't so annoying.
NPR did a good story on this yesterday. Their electricity primer interview (5.5 minutes) gives an excellent overview, and their discussion of Southern California Edison's default on payments (4.5 minutes) is interesting too. Both require RealAudio. The page with these links is here but I don't know how long that URL will last.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Of course the computers contribute to the problem. However, the utility companies are also to blame due to lack of planning for the future. They should've seen this coming a mile away back in 1980, but they didn't. They had their chance in 1990, but they still sat on their hands. By 1995, California was already hip deep in the Internet, not to mention the software business which was in full swing for 15 solid years. Instead, they just sat on their hands, kept the generators running, and bought electricity by the megawatt from adjacent states. In the end, everyone loses.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Must resist urge to make joke about Hairy Potter beating his one with five digits....
Actually, according to my newspaper, (in Dutch, so no babel to help foreigners, so no link) the current problems in Caifornia are due to a lack of money, caused by the higher oil prices and a maximum price for the consumers to cover the cost. The BBC confirms this. So if the Californian power companies had been allowed to rise prices with the price of oil, there would not have been a problem. So, in a way, deregulation is the cause, since if the powerproduction were still a state job, no doubt the increased price of oil would have been reflected in the consumer power prices.
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
If you spend 1/2 as much on gasoline, that's more money you can spend on other things. Explain again why this is bad for the economy?
The important thing is to make sure that the price of gasoline is *correct*, so that people can Do the Right Thing, for the economy and the environment, simply by adding up the prices they see themselves. If the price of gasoline is too low, because (for example), insufficiently strict environmental regulations have the effect of undervaluing the use of natural resources, then people make incorrect decisions, like driving to a more distant store when they should have walked to a closer one, when it's the driving that really used more resources.
---J. Bruce Fields
I don't think it's entirely fair to blame Sandra Bullock for all of this.
On second thoughts...
Since I rarely pay attention to anything but breathing, I'm not sure *exactly* what's happening, but we're going through power shortages here too, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I know it has to do something with CA.. I think we provide (at least a bit) of their power, and we're running out too so we're runnin' out too.. I'm not positive on this, but I'll be sure to pay more attention to it..
If you have *more* info on this, feel free to reply and smack me with some knowledge.
- Th3Eidolon
That's true, but not for the reason you are thinking. The reason the Internet uses so much power is because air conditioning large data centers is very expensive. I know one major hosting provider who is actively considering buying a utility company because it will be cheaper than buying power on the open market. They pay more for power than they do for real estate, and they're in Manhattan!
I advised them to relocate to Alaska (seriously!) and staff their sysadmins on the same model that oil companies use for their Engineers. But that's not feasible because the average server isn't nearly so reliable that the customer is willing to give up easy hands-on access. But we'll have to re-evaluate in 2-5 years.
It's simple, really -- the VCs are there, they want their money close to them, the start-ups wind up there (Silicon Valley). This drives up the density, which drives up housing costs, power demands, and all the other drains on local culture and infrastructure... leading to what I like to refer to as the "Hong Kong-ification of the Peninsula". I've railed in the past about this, I've railed about how one nasty earthquake could send the industry into a REAL tailspin, I've railed about the labor costs in the Valley, but now, perhaps, the brownouts are vindicating my earlier observations; couple this with the current capital crisis, and maybe, just MAYBE, somebody may get wise: Milwaukee is a "Great Place by a Great Lake" and AltaVista needs to conserve money by cutting labor costs, so why shouldn't AltaVista up and move to Milwaukee? Similarly, Excite could move to Omaha, VA to Lansing, etc., and all of a sudden both Silicon Valley and the companies that "used to be there" would both be a lot better off.
Of course, all of this is predicated on an even larger assumption: that the VCs would actually be willing to believe that the people running the companies they invested in knew what they were doing!
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
I'm a California resident... in other places we've lived, the utilities placed radio-controlled boxes on air conditioners and other big loads to shed demand during peak-load periods.
When demand approaches capacity, the utilities have to buy power on the spot market to meet the demand - say they pay 20cents/kwh for that power.
Why not put "little boxes" on the net (connect via Ricocet?) that pay power customers for shedding demand during peak times? If my power company would pay me the going rate (far better than the spot-market price for power!) to shed demand, it would be a LOT cheaper than building new generating capacity, etc.
These "little boxes" could go on air-conditioning, pool filter pumps... on datacenter HVAC systems (to let the temperature rise a few degrees?), on refrigerators & freezers, ...
Wouldn't this work?
Took a tour of the Texas Tech University physial plant/tunnels/central-heating-and-cooling-plant. Kinda cool to see all of the co-generation they have going on to generate electricity from excess steam and other sources of heat.
Amarillo and Midland might be a good deal smaller than Lubbock, but at least they're pretty towns.
Go Red Raiders and get rid of Leach! At least the Band is award-winning.
Power consumption is a factor of many things, not just one juicy target.
First, not all the power that is generated ever gets used. The wastage through heating up the power grid is significant, in itself.
Then, the generators themselves are horribly inefficient devices. The best theoretical conversion is only 50%, but the reality is probably not even close. Often due to poor maintenance, the use of cheap materials, etc. Short-term profits vs Long-term gains.
Once you -get- the power, though, you don't expect house wiring is any better, do you? Poor wiring is painfuly common, throughout the country. You could probably map cities by the RF emissions of the nearby buildings.
Finally, components in computers, etc, generate a very low-grade electronic smog. Below the legal limits, sure, but enough to be measurable and to cause endless problems with sensitive receivers.
By the time you get to the Internet, most of the waste has already happened.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hopefully California's deregulation debacle will help other states that are going to undergo dereg. (such as here in Ohio) how not to do it. Now, if they could only learn from their own lessons...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
My other
I strongly beleive that nuclear power is not the best solution available
You may be right that solar and wind power have the potential to be "better" power sources, but nuclear power might be the best solution available right now. (But of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be developing new truly renewable power sources.)
I agree that there are several nuclear plants within 5 to 15 miles of populated areas, however, how many more proposed sites have been shot down because of their proximity to populated areas?
I think that this is a function of the general populace's belief that nuclear power is unsafe, rather than any real dangers.
What Three Mile Island showed the general populace is that even well designed plants fail, and that's a very frightening proposition.
You're probably right about this. But what TMI should have shown the general populace is that when a well-designed plant fails, it isn't a disaster.
In case you didn't guess, Prairie Island (the power plant I alluded to above) was pretty close to my back yard growing up. And guess what? That "nearby stream" is the Mississippi River, which they apparently haven't made into a radioactive dump (though you'd like to think that everything anywhere near a nuclear power plant is polluted with radioactivity, that just isn't true).
I think it's probably the other way around. Didn't you go to college?
--Xantho
Where'd you get that definition? Why in the world would desire have to be unlimited for it to qualify as economics?
BC Hydro was going to give back a bunch of money to their customers (i.e. me), but now that all the CA power guys are going bankrupt, it doesn't look like BC Hydro's going to get paid. So, because California would rather have slightly less smog than electric power 365 days a year, we Canadians lose out on cash dollars.
More info on BC Hydro
This sucks.
chuk
They lost their bet, and now want their customers to eat the unexpected costs. So if wholesale prices fall, the customers lose, and if wholesale prices rise, the customers lose... sounds like a typical corporate sweetheart deal. They should not be allowed to get away with this sort of thing.
Oh, and the huge losses they're suffering are a lot lower than they claim - PG&E (for example) owes a lot of money to itself. (Well, to another wholly-owned subsidiary of the same parent company). Take that out of the equation and the cries of "Bail us out now or we declare bankruptcy and the lights go out" sound less like real panic and more like part of the negotiation for the next sweetheart deal at the expense of all Californians.
How do you protect your computers when a blackout hits? Did you know that most surge protectors are only good for about a year? I found this out on a semi-geek site for networking pros, http://www.8wire.com -- they have a couple of articles on how to build in protection against blackouts and all the other mess we seem to be in for. It's pretty interesting stuff.
8wire.com also has some practical advice for network admins who want (or have been told) to protect their systems from blackouts, power surges, etc. It's important to understand what's behind the crisis (the Los Angeles Times has actually provided awesome coverage for the past few months), but we also need to know what to DO.
I know this may seem bizarre...
I keep my monitor on my UPS so that I can see what I'm doing if/when the power goes out. My machine has a lot of nasty quirks (like an inconsistent cooling system) that make me nervous to leave it running when I'm not in the apartment... so I power everything down when I leave for work in the morning.
Without the monitor, I get close to 30 minutes of power (as opposed to 18-20 with it). However, the junk I decide to plug into it changes with what I'm doing; if I am printing a lot of critical things, I'll plug the printer into the powered plugs at the expense of, say, the cable modem.
I'd be interested to know if the RS-232 (serial) software works with this USB unit. From what I've read on APC's site (not that that is a good source of unbiased information), only the Win98/MacOS drivers that are included with the unit will work with it. I'd be very happy to learn otherwise.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
In California, however, your costs are greater and the time to build is greater because of environmental regulations. These regulations are needed.
It's ridiculous that none have been built, since it's pretty much a sure win for the power supplier. Demand will go up. What they don't realize is that unless they get their heads out of their asses and build some compliant plants, it's their heads that will roll for price-fixing. And your head getting removed from your neck while it's inserted in your ass is, I'd guess, not an entirely pleasant experience.
If it just gets worse, the State will flex its regulatory muscle again, and it's only going to be even more reactionary a movement than the deregulation movement. It will hurt - again.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I hate to be rude, but you should really turn off your tv and pull your head out of your asshole. Reading something other than slashdot headlines might help too.
Do you think that the power companies want to buy power on a contingency basis from independent generators? Do they want to run themselves into the ground? Are the people running these companies retarded? No.
The 'deregulation' regulations prohibit power companies from entering into long term purchase agreements with generators. This was meant to 'even the field'.
Unfortunately, you can't even a field by digging a hole. Since power distributors have to buy small lots of power very close to the time that they need to use the power the price goes up.
Have you ever purchased film for a camera? Ever notice that a single roll of film at the airport costs more than a 10-pack at Costco or Sam's club? California power companies are buying their film at the airport.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
And it's why Americans have a reputation in the rest of the world as lazy, stupid, overweight slobs.
but the captive market is the problem, and what better position to be in than a utility in a captive market?
watch the $$$ roll by... where is it going? plant owners. what kind of incentive is that?
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Is anyone even trying to build more plants? Or is it just too lucrative to sit and watch the cash roll in the door, as prices quadruple for the same power you were selling two years ago. Yeah, you could've built another plant, spent more money, and you'd still be making less than you are now, owning less plants, creating a scarcity of resources... and you've got a damn good argument for the scarcity not being artificial, don't you?
[|]
What you are describing is an effort to preserve the company in the event of a government bailout.
PG&E is lending money to itself because nobody else will. Nobody has ever gotten rich by giving products away and loaning money to themselves.
The only people getting rich are the power generators, on the backs of California taxpayers.
Instead of blaming a failing business for attempting to preserve itself, maybe California voters should blame their idiot shortsited State Assembly for mucking with the utility regulations.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The problem actually boils down to this. There are two energy companys in california, basically.
These companies, through deregulation, were forced to sell electricity at a state mandated rate, and carry other peoples electricity for the customer, at a cut rate, losing money.
Also due to this deregulation, they were forced by the PUC to keep their charge for supplied electricity at a low.. well below the profit margin they could make money at, due to an unchecked rise in the cost of electricity *to* them from nationwide suppliers.
Now you have a fundamental block in supply and demand.. they are forced to supply at a rate a lot lower than their profit margin demands, and they will eventually go out of business at this rate. It's *not* the environmentalists, its the people yammering for a huge booming economy, but unwilling to pay the price for that.
It's not the net... its the fact that shortsighted legislators have done their best to hamstring the profitable companies (power, for one, telephone as another example) that they feel are "preying" on the consumer.
Wake up and smell the electrons folks.
step 1) remove all lawyers.
step 2) lather, rinse, repeat.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
That is not entirely true. In certain markets (Santa Clara, CA, for example) the power grid is reaching it's maximum capacity. The city runs it's own power grid for the purpose of keeping growth down, but that hardly worked since there are a number of colo facilities there now.
It's ultimately the colocation environments that suck up most of the power. Think about it for a moment. Something (big) like Ebay, which has an E10k, lots of disk arrays, lots of computers, lots of switches, plus the A/C for their colo at abovenet, probably uses more electricity than a couple residential city blocks in San Francisco.
If you consider they have a bunch of 2U's, each using 220W (guesstimate), and they have ~ 100 machines, that's 22,000W, 15,840 kwh/month! Keep in mind that this is only a guess on part of Ebay's machines, and they only account for 1/4 of one colo at one facility. Start adding up the colocation usage statewide, and it starts getting pretty nasty. The sad thing is, that even though the colocation facility has a deal with the utilities to cut back on usage, the people colocated usually don't. The A/C levels may be turned up a degree or two, but the computers' power needs are still there.
Where 24% of the worlds emissions are generated by 8% of the global population. Don't even start me on the other crap such as pesticides that the rest of the civilised world have banned, but you lot still use to save a few bucks. Other countries manage to be more energy efficient. Why is America always exempt ? Civilisation at the cost of the planet.
I blame electric cars and WebTV.
Gee, I wonder why it doesn't work?
Of course, the California energy "shortages" are really a seperate issue from the larger power problems we are to face nationally. The United States has turned it's back on Nuclear power, which in reality, is the only source yet derived which can sustain our growing requirements.
It's true that Nuclear has some drawbacks, like what to do with the waste. That's a problem that needs an answer. The answer is not to bury our collective heads in the sand, and pretend that our energy needs are better met by oil and coal, which are dirtier, less efficient means of producing power. The Eco-nazis need to stop pretending that Nuclear is less ecologically friendly than these filthy alternatives.
(Besides, I need that oil for gasoline, so I can continue to drive my V-8 SUV (Which I use to commute daily, no carpoolers though), and not have it cost me an arm and a leg.)
Let's find a safe, cost effective means of dealing with nuclear waste, and build REAL power plants all over the place. See then if talk of an energy shortage, or skyrocketing price, persists.
How can we lessen the cost of heavy lift so that launching waste at the Sun becomes cost effective?
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
For example, if we count the telephone equipment, routers, etc along the way for the communication. But then we should only count the fraction of the performance being used by the Palm. So, if a Palm used 0.001% of the bandwidth of a switch that used 15W of power at peak load, then maybe we should put that .15mW on the Palm's "Power budget". But then, to be fair, we would need to take that off of the alotment for the switch.
It just comes down to where the power is assigned to, and I still don't see how the Palm could use as much as a refrigerator.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
God, you're right. The pie is not limited. After the methane ice mines of Triton are tapped out, we'll move on to new planetary systems.
Loosen your tie, buddy, your brain isn't getting enough oxygen.
illegitimii non ingravare
.Microsoft could automatically shut off monitors on the NT login screen and set the machine to "sleep" but they don't.
We all knew somebody would be along to blame the problem on Microsoft. It's shocking that it took this long.
Hay thar.
As for getting power from the wind, we do that already in california. We have the Altamont Pass in Alameda County, Tehachapi Pass down in San Bernadino County, and I'm sure there are others, but those two contain thousands of windmills, and having recently driven through both of them, all but a few (probably down for maintenance) were spinning.
No, it is all of the hi-tech companies...
-- Windows security? Sure, which ONE would you like? -me
"The electric system in California was not originally designed for a high-tech industry. As the high-tech industry has grown, so has the level of technology that we have to provide, or try to provide," says Scott Blakey, a spokesman for PG&E, one of the state's largest utilities. "You've taken what essentially is a 19th century system
of poles and wires, and using late-20th century technology you've tried to meet the needs of what is going to be a 21st century industry."
I don't get that at all. All the power company has to provide is 120V low Z with a reasonably reliable uptime. Even for short outages we have UPS's and power conditioners are traditionally owned by consumers with mission critical computing gear. WTF? Just because the end use of power is some modern fancy dancy techno-gee-whiz gadgetry doesn't mean the generator or grid has to be also.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Leave the net on. When I'm surfing, the TV is off. When I'm watching TV the computer is off. However the cable box is on 24 X 7. Maybe if everyone shut off the cable box with a power strip when they are not watching TV, that would save more than the aprox 3 hr/day the computer used. Anybody notice cable converters run hot, even when they are "off"? Besides my home theatre uses more power than my computer. The theatre runs with a good size receiver, seprate tuner, VCR, Cable Box, and Laser Disk. Seldom is it just the TV.
The truth shall set you free!
In the old days, ca 1985, if I wanted porn, I had to drive to a newstand or an adult bookstore, burning precious gasoline.
Now I can sit at home and download it, saving energy.
You can apply this to any other kind of shopping you want to, also.
Silly. The real ones use D-cell batteries :)
Read my stuff.
Commerce? Since when does a $28 billion bail-out for massive corporations qualify as commerce? How does forcing consumers to pay for the stupidity and wastefulness of power companies mean commerce? Hrm?
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
But they do have to purchase electricity at ridiculous prices (by their own design). They thought they were going to make a killing on it by having the power pool price fixed and they could consistently sell over it. It wouldn't fluctuate, so they could buy low and resell high. There's part of your corporate bail-out and that's fact. My theory for how we got in the current fix is: Davis comes along and sees the ridiculous price-gouging going on with this system, bails out San Diego consumers (that seems like a pro-market move to me, but conservatives seem to think the only way to save the market is to stimulate it at the top and that trickle-down Hoover/Reagan BS). The power companies know they're not going to get away with that scam for long if they don't come up with some explanation, so they start engaging in market manipulation and create an artificial scarcity. It's a game of politics, IMHO. The power companies are trying to bully legislators and Governor Davis off of their turf by beating up utility consumers (e.g., voters). Which is not to say that we're not over-consuming -- conservation is a good thing to do now to avoid later problems, but the current fix is just that, a fix.
No, you're presuming that because NPR was created by liberals that it is inherently biased through-and-through and does not report any fact or reports only one-sided facts. In other words, you, like your conservative brethren, are attacking the messenger and not the message. It's amazing, though, what conservatives can get away these days. Nothing, and I mean, nothing, sticks to them. Meanwhile, Clinton gets splooge on an intern's dress and he can't get credit for anything else.
For the purpose of full disclosure, I like Clinton. I think he's done some awfully stupid, narrow-minded, bull-headed, jackass things as far as policy goes, but he has done an overwhelmingly fine job. And thought he did push California-style deregulation, I can forgive that because he didn't require exactly that model. There are some other bad policies, as well, and Clinton-Gore probably aren't as liberal in their politics as I am. But that doesn't mean I vote strictly liberal, that I ignore the Wall Street Journal, etc. The party system is of dubious value within government, and of great harm within the population. People, not sheeple (sheep-people).
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
Apparently I didn't use ENOUGH power so I had to pay for power I didn't use. I would think that at times like this they might thank people like me. I guess I didn't make their "Minimum Charge".
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Swearing is the crutch of inarticulate mother fuckers.
if this were so they would all be in massive debt - in fact, they will continue to get govt welfare while also gouging consumers...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Ayii! 'Tis there anywhere the icy hand of Gallager doth not reach?
That's lovely. But veggies don't taste like meat, and humans are carnivores, so stop making us feel sorry for the inefficiency of cattle.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
It's okay, I thought all of California was hot and sunny too, until I moved to San Francisco. Oops!!!
Deathmatch ain't the only reason I'm so white.
My bills for the electricity grew up to 30% when I started running SETI@HOME on my 3 computers.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Lets see, first off, the zero emmissions vehicle bills? Where they expect 5-10% of all new cars sold between 1998 and 2008 or so (feel free to correct me, I have a crappy memory for exact numbers) have to be either electric (preferred) or natural gas powered... Considering that most alternatively powered vehicles have to be electric, and that at least 5% of total cars sold in CA have to be such, how do they propose these cars are powered? Additionally, LosAngeles andSan Francicso have ample electric buses/light transit in their locales... How much does this compose the energy drain by the power brokers' well paid bean counters, hmmm? Of course, I'm a Washingtonian, and not sure if this fact gets out or not, but guess who has to pay California's electric bills in the interum... Regardless though, the power brokers' claims are total BS... Next!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
incontinent moron (intended slanderous pun)
What kind of a pathetic excuse is that? Didn't you learn that some things are more important than what tastes good sometime before entering high school?
As far as power consumption growing is concerned, it's not the desktops. It's the servers. They consume far more power than a truckload of desktops, and they run much closer to capacity than a desktop, most of the time.
But balance that out for the number of desktops. For every server there is probably 500 regular old desktops sitting on desks, idling and sucking away power. In the end the two are probably equal.
That may be so, but it's not liberal/leftist fraud -- it's conservative/right-wing fraud first, and centrist (Clinton) stupidity second. They pushed it, after all, after Republican energy regulators grew infatuated with the Power Pool system overseas. It was a price-fixing scam through-and-through and a $28 billion bail-out to the vertically-integrated power giants. And consumers are footing the bill. BTW, what is deregulation if deregulating electricity generation doesn't count? Sorry. I'm not buying the, "it's not what we said it was, and it's your fault," line.
No-one's yelling failure of the market. They're pointing out the obvious failure of deregulation here and in many other places where it has not been as successful as you would like it to be. Sure, there are successes and it might work on paper, but it hasn't been panning out. In some places, it has been a moderate success. Of course, I would point out that in many of these situations, consumers would have been reaping rewards regardless of deregulation. But you want to attribute every success to deregulation and every failure to liberals.
In other words, you're politically opposed to certain facts, and therefore the reporters are liars, cheats, and fools. Grow up. Anyone that isn't blindly and foolishly right-wing or left-wing knows damn well that it is deregulation, that it was introduced by Republicans, pushed as a model program by Clinton, and it's a fucking scam.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
Quoted from the story, "Twenty years ago, it was inconvenient to have a brownout. It's a killer in the silicon economy. It's blue-screen death."
Ok, I don't mind catchy phrases like, "the cat's out of the bag," but this is awful. Are we going to start hearing that something "blue-screened" when it breaks? My car blue-screened, My refridgerator blue screened. Someone hit a ball through my window, and blue-screened my glass.
So is death.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
Pah, that's nothing. I've got 240 on my bedside table. Ph33r the UK's national grid.
Stuii!
The 8 percent figure is based on a PC using 1kw, which is about a factor of 5 too high. Most of them draw about 200W.
The booming economy and increasing population are the main reasons for the increase in power comsumption.
This problem did not suddenly develop. It's been festering for years. The ones pointing the finger at the net hope to divert blame from the real culprits: power industry leaders and politicians.
It's going to get worse before it gets better.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
It constantly amazes me how all discussion on this topic conveniently overlooks the utility companies mistakes and centers blame on the form of deregulation. Yes the deregulation laws require a fixed price for consumers at this time, but this is still the short term, in terms of the deregulation project. The idea was to hold prices down during the interim period before the effects of deregulation had an opportunity to take. Most electricity distributors buy electricity using long term contracts of five years or more. If PG&E had purchased long term contracts two years ago, as they should have, they would have a guaranteed supply of electricity at a guaranteed price and would not be so upset now. But they gambled on prices on short term contracts to continue low. Now that they lost their gamble they are looking for a bail out. To make matters worse, although the centerpiece of the deregulation effort was to get PG&E and So. Cal. Edison etc. out of the production business and solely into distribution, it only mandates certain percentages of production be given up. These companies unloaded far more production facilities than they were required to by law. Again, they gambled that electricity would be cheap to buy. They lost their gamble and now they want the government and the consumer to pay.
This is not to say that the deregulation system isn't completely f@c%ed up too. For instance, I have no idea whose idea it was that electricity sales all occur at the highest negotiated price (a bit complicated to explain, but basically let's say three companies are auctioning off electricity for immediate consumption, one company sells at 7 cents/kwh and the next at 8 and the third at 9, all sales that day are consummated at the 9 cent price even though the first company was willing to sell at 7). I just think the utility companies have some serious weight of responsibility in all this that I never see in most news accounts, and hence in most discussions, of the issue.
Remember that SCE, PG&E, and SDG&E asked to have the costs fixed to the consumers (as well as for deregulation in general).
Now they're paying through the nose for it.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
FWIW the reason nuclear power is unpopular is because of the environmental expense of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. They're all very green until they're too old to operate or redundant. Then they start to become a problem.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
At heart, though, this is a supply problem, true.
We could also realize that the price we HAVE been paying is extremely depressed from the real value of the (power|natural gas|gasoline) and stop using quite so much of it.
And in California's case they really screwed the utils hard. Their prices were allowed to fluctuate but they couldn't pass any on to the consumers? And this is DEREGULATION? No, it's deregulation of the power company's outlay without deregulating their income. Say "Goodbye" to profit/profitability.
I can't wait till Ohio follows California's "brilliant" power deregulation scheme. So glad I don't live where I work!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Disclaimer: What follows is pure speculation because I didn't follow the news very closely.
My hunch is that some kelp got torn loose from the seabed and the waves clogged a warm-water release pipe, or a cold-water intake pipe, limiting the ability of the plant to condense the steam and return it to circulation.
If my supposition is correct, then any gas- or coal-fired generator would have been shut down for the same reason.
Do you think that the generators can run 24/7/365? They had to take them offline, and historically, the winter months see dramatically lower power usage, so they did what they usually do, and took them down for maintenance. This is hardly manipulating the market, but rather doing what they've done for years, much longer than dot-com's had their computers up 24/7/365.
Somebody needs to spend a little more time in Econ class.
Waste is bad for an economy.
Efficient use of natural resources is good for an economy.
As a practical example:
Say I conserve gas by driving half as much as before. That leaves more money in my pocket for me to either purchase more useful products, or to invest in my businesses to enable me to more effectively produce goods and services.
Now if hundreds of people do this, that's a serious increase in capital investement, which will produce unparalleled growth.
The fact is that the temporary (until 2002) freeze on prices was mandated by the power producers themselves, because they were afraid that deregulation was going to cause a drop in prices as consumers would be able to choose cheaper providers. They wanted a a window of ensured profitability before margins got razor-thin. The fixed price was, at the time, above predicted market rates. Only in the San Diego area was the retail price unfrozen - it was there that the first signs of the reality of the situation (that deregulation would lead to higher, rather than lower, prices in the energy market) became apparent.
In fact, there are plenty of reasons to believe that deregulation will always lead to higher prices for energy, when it leads to redundancies in infrastructure that don't exist with a regulated monopoly.
Truthfully I agree with you, friends and I have had long discussions trying to figure out why all dotcoms want to be here, and we have gone so far as to ask a few, The answer has always been "the prestige of being in silicon valley".... now I ask you last time you bought something online was it the cost or the company location that brought you to buy from them??? I don't even know where half of the dotcoms I buy from are, or care. But here they are... so here I am. I'f I ever build a dotcom I'm thinking somewhere in the middle of nowere with cheap everything. Also as soon as they relize this they are all going to make a run for it, California is taxing them like mad... do you know there is a tax on the amount of warehouse space you have in california? It is supossed to be a source of income from out of state companies with warehouses here, but it has a side affect of double taxing instate companies.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
The power companies asked to have the price fixed.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
> As many posters have noted, the California power problem has far more to do with government regulation of power than of Internet use.
Actually, it's the "free candy for all" mentality. That statement applies equally to the CA administration and legislature, the power companies, and the voters/consumers of CA.
I researched it a bit last time this came up. You can read my post here. Notice that the quotes and links are to old articles, where people were pointing out how misguided the legislation was back when it was first passed (before signed, even), and again when it was first going into effect.
In short, the utilities convinced the legislature to bail them out to the tune of 30 billion dollars, and the legislature sold it to the public as a sure-fire way to get a 10% reduction in their utility bills. The utilites that are asking for another bail out now were the chief proponents of the bill that got them into the current mess.
Please see my link above -- there are some really interesting quotes there, from back when the deal was first cut. IMO you can't discuss it meaningfully without knowing how we got where we are.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's a good thing I'm not in charge of SoCalEd. If I heard that official from SD say that, I would have resorted to Bond villian tactics. Monday morning, 9am, I would make an announcement that at 9:15, all the power under my control would be turned off. As soon as $9 billion was in an account of my choice, the power would be turned back on. It's not like they would be making money. They're 9 B in the hole. People have no idea just how dependent we are on electricity. A few days in the stone age may be very good for them.
-B
Yeah, right. All that matters is that money is made. To hell with the environment, consumer rights, civil rights, etc.
Cary
My ironic post was intended to suggest that the fellow I replied to had lost his grip on reality, capice?
And I have already reproduced. My sophisticated humor will live on! Nothing can halt the advance of my sarcasm, my oblique jibes, my witticisms!
Possum, making the world safe for the highbrow since 1963.
illegitimii non ingravare
James Hoecker, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, put it this way:
His sarcasm is merited. You should not expect investment in a market that has arbitrary price rollbacks and an uncertain and hostile regulatory environment.California deregulated electricity in the hope of milking power companies. It cannot work like that. Here in Britain, as in Scandinavia, electricity deregulation has gone smoothly.
___________________________________________
"Ple
AGREED! As to the other reply. Get a clue. You keep your leukemia, and I'll keep my asthma. Nuclear is the cleanest, and thus the safest form of power generation we have.
First, they're NOT operating at maximum capacity. This means that LACK of power is not the issue per se, it's economics. The wacko way in which this so-called deregulation was implimented the retail power companies are forced to deliver power below cost (e.g., fix/regulated retail prices, with higher market prices). Though this may tie back into supply and demand, in the sense that increased demand makes that power more expensive, don't confuse this with lack of power.
Second, most of the power retailers are LOSING money hand over hand because of the current situation. If anyone is a cartel it's the wholesalers--which is a much more complex situation.
Third, the reason why the government can't merely say "build more powerplants or else" (as if that is the real problem right now), is because money doesn't grow on trees. If power costs more for the companies to acquire (or produce) then they can sell it for, then companies will simply not sell. The companies are not some magical entity that can just absorb these costs. In fact, given their relatively low margins, operating at below cost will QUICKLY put them out of business (as is being demonstrated now). This means that shareholders and lenders will not supply money to the power companies. In other words, the power companies either raise their retail prices OR the government itself starts paying. If the government pays this is coming out of tax payer pockets anyways. Either way, you're back at square one.
Deregulation has SUCCESSFULLY circumvented these problems in many markets by allowing the companies to respond economically to demand. For instance, when demand starts to rise relative to supply, prices increase. This increases the incentive for the companies to build powerplants. Whereas in California's poorly deregulated market, they're not allowed to raise prices. Furthermore, they are (rightly) nervous that the government will step in shortly after they've spent billions on new powerplants.
This guy is spot on. As most people in Ireland at least realise, the consumer price of gasoline is a joke in the US. You guys do not pay at all for the cost of polluting our (that includes you whoever you are) environment! The price of petrol in Ireland is roughly 1=$1 / litre. What do you pay? The average car engine in Ireland is probably 1.3 litre. How much gas does your car guzzle? I rest my case.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Tofu can be rather good actually, you probably just didn't have it prepared very well.
I have a hard time believing that even in the "suburbs" there aren't some stores worth visiting in walking or riding distance.
I tried to ride my bike to the store once (well within riding distance). I was nearly killed by the monster SUVs and the fact that there is less than 2 inches of dirt before the dropoff into rocky trenches at the side of the road. If there were a bike lane, I would do a lot more riding. It's unfortunate since I really prefer riding to driving most of the time.
Ok.
...) have pretty good network and power build, we don't had any problems and plannig goes up to 2020 with big investment plans in the networks, in cogeneration utilities, in windmill, ...
I'm not very aware of history of electrical companies in CA.
I've rode the other comments and see that the problem in this precise case is not about deregulation / reregulation.
Anyway the problem of networks is still the same.
And on your
>You can't depend on the Gov't to ever do things right.
I strongly disagree with that.
In fact, in Europe, in countries where electricity is directed by public governement (such as France, Belgium,
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#include "coucou.h"
I work at Cisco Systems, and am on the architecture team designing the next generation multi-tera bit L3 switch. One of our biggest problems in designing this switch is cooling. The switch will encompass a standard network rack, be about 6 feet tall, and consume around 10-15kW in a typical configuration. That's 10-15kW in a 4 square foot region.
Granted, a networking closet won't have a whole bunch of these beasts (yet), but when you add in a bunch of lower power switches along with the big aggragator, you have some serious power density.
Keep in mind that one of the ways power-people measure power usage is by the power density: kW / square feet. A large data center can consume megawatts in a single building. As speeds and feeds increase, so do the power requirements needed to make it shake and dance.
Todd
There isn't a shortage of electricity. The problems stems from the electricity resellers selling the electricity at a fraction of what they pay for it from the producers. Sometimes they buy it for 10 to even 100 times what they sell it for. And the way de-regulation in California works is that it has a fixed price that the resellers may sell the power for. Making an extremely unbalanced exchange between consumer, producer, and reseller. The reason for all of this is a financial shortage by the creditors putting the squeeze on the electric resellers.
Listen to a more detailed and thoughtful realaudio explanation by a University of California Professor on NPR. Click Electricity Primer to listen in.
Blame the net as usual...
I suppose the power generating companies shutting down a large percentage of the plants for "maintenance" has nothing to with it.
A good article about the whole mess and the causes of it can be found here.
California Power utilities are not able to pass on the cost of wholesale electricity due to a rate freeze from deregulation. Apparantly though, the utility's parent company restructured, and can thus keep it's profits, and let the utility die.
I seriously doubt that servers use as much power as desktops. Even a decked out Compaq ES40 with 4 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 12 disk drives has a maximum power consumption of only 1440W, and that machine could probably run thousands of regular web sites, mail for 1 million people, or an entire large internet business.
Probably not long. Most of the western United States is wired together in one BIG power grid. SoCal gets a whole bunch of power from Glen Canyon Dam, the one that created Lake Powell, and it's right on the border of Utah and Arizona. Much of Utah, Arizona and Nevada gets power from this source. I know that Utah's power companies are trying to hike prices because we sell so many Mega(giga? terra?)watts to California that it is creating a shortage for us. And due to Fedral Regulations, one state can't simply pull the plug on another.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
It has everything to do with it. From 1996 to 1999 demand in California grew by 12 per cent while supply only grew by 2 per cent. There hasn't been a single power plant finished since the early 90s in California. The shortfall had to be made up by purchase out of state. But buying electricity from far off places is inefficient because of transmission losses. This increases the cost.
I agree they have only themselves to blame because they were in on the development of this plan up to their necks. But it is outright fraud to call it deregulation. What occurred was a restructuring of the regulatory picture. Aside of the environmental regs that have made providing for demand illegal in California the "free market" for wholesale electricity is non-existent. Under the restructuring all wholesale transactions have to occur in the "Power Exchange". All utilities have to pay the same (and highest) price in the Power Exchange for any given day. Private free market contracts are prohibited. Regulators (how is that deregulation requires regulators?) set the prices the utilities can charge the consumers.
Nope. Try "there wasn't any deregulation". Perhaps the People's Republic of California should try this novel concept some day. I predicted that leftists would be screaming "failure of the market" when I heard of their electric woes. It would be funny if it weren't so tyrranical.
NPR rarely does a good story on anything. They are little more than a propaganda mill for the left. It infuriates me that my tax dollars were ever used to support the pack of fools at NPR.
True, but we don't normally in the US. 220 is reserved for things that use a lot of power (twice the voltage means half the amps), most low power hosehold stuff is 110 volts. If they are using 220, then it means they are using a lot of power.
The posters point is this: for what are they using that power? Enertainment. So you can solve californias power problems easially, just turn off your TV, boycott movies, don't touch amusement park rides. There are plenty of things that can be done cheaply for entertainment that don't involve electrisity.
Fishing is a lot of fun, and catch and release is the norm for most fishermen. Get a sail/row boat/canoe, a cane pole and try some old fashioned fishing with out the electronic gagets.
Your local library has shelves full of free enertainment waiting for you. You can read by the light of a 5 watt bulb (I've done it), and even if everyone did the same the energy use wouldn't amount to anything.
Set up a community dance with old fashioned acustic insterments live. Sure it won't be as loud, but it will be just as much fun. There is a good chance that your community has musicians with more talent then the loud music that most people listen to today. Plenty of socalizing, when your not breathless from dancing. You might accually get to know someone too if once conversation quits drifting to the latest movie/soap opera. (get a life people, what happens on your TV show isn't the most interesting conversation topic, just the easiest)
There are countless other activities you can get into that don't need electrisity, and many of them are fun. I've listed three, trying to cover a broad enough range that nobody will like them all. (Even when your not the only one in the boat fishing is a silent activity, while reading is best a solitary activity, and you can't have a dance as I've suggested alone - but you can do whichever fits your personality)
You can't keep building power plants for ever. It is just plain ridiculous that California requiries so much energy while other states in the US are inhabited only by 3 or 4 Unabombers.
The cleanest power is not nuclear: after using the nuclear fuel, developed countries are bribing 3rd World countries to dump their nuclear waste there so you don't see the waste but surely will be complaining in 20 years time when a new wave of Mexican immigrants reach ths US because children are being born without brain in their home towns (which is not a joke, it is already happening). Or even worst, the nuclear waste is dumped in colonies or protectorates 1000miles away as has done France. Recent problems in Japan and Britain handling nuclear fuel shows how dangerous this stuff is, even in the hands of supposedly well trained people.
The clean alternatives are hydraulic, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, even natural gas and others, but goverments are not prepared to give incentives for their early development because the stablished industries lobby them quite hard to keep the status quo.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We all know that California is notorius for having strict environmental regulations. As such, there is a big push for having them operate their power plants at near there maximum output limits to cut down on the total number of plants that need to be operating. By doing this, the power plants do not have a safe buffer to deal with added load. In particular large transient loads. When too much load is added that is when there is a voltage collapse and subsequent brownouts occur.
Also, computers are not really the problem. Large induction motors (primarily used for heating and air conditioning) play hell with power distribution systems due to very large transient start up power demands. But do not take my word for it, please peruse the IEEE journals and power generation and distribution for articles on voltage collapse.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
The problem was caused the way the deregulation was structured by the politicians.
I agree. I should have phrased it a bit differently: "the problem isn't with deregulation, the problem was that it wasn't deregulated enough." But you'll note that there are a whole lot of fruits falling from the trees screaming that this proves that deregulation doesn't work, and the only solution is more government control.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
then build more nuclear plants
In California???? That's like a political "third rail" out here. Politicians and companies just don't want to touch it.
Granted, it's not a bad idea, just not very likely. Nuclear power out here has been villified beyond reason. It's almost like some strange form of religion... The greenies hate global warming, but they hate nuclear power even more. The result, we're on the verge of returning to the cave, but without fire, since that would cause pollution...
Remember, folks, that stupid little A/C compressor chews up much more energy than your computers do.
Funny you should mention that... I type this while I wait for one of the local A/C shops to arrive to replace my ancient A/C unit and furnace with new energy-star rated units. The down side being, I'm going to be using an electric blanket, and space heater tonight (it's a 3 day job...), in the middle of what will likely be a Stage 3 power alert... (sigh)
Temkin
I have to side with the other reply on the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge bit. There is "nothing" up there. Of course, there's no trees in Oklafuckinghoma (I just like saying it that way) or Kansas either, but that is besides the point.
Really, one should check out some of the oil projects that are going on on the Alaskan North Shore. I'm not sure where that is, but I used to work for Parsons, an engineering company that did a lot of the design work for the North Shore drilling project. You'd be surprised at how little impact that the project has on the surroundings. If I'm not mistaken, the oil field covers some 40,000 acres of land. The drilling platforms cover only about 90 of those 40,000 acres.
When people go worrying about turning Alaska into a swiss cheesed wasteland, they really ought to look into exactly what is going on there now.
Everyone should quit shaving.
Men would acquire beards and moustaches. Women would get hairy pits and legs. We'd be warmer, we wouldn't use electricity in shaving, and we'd be more welcome in the EU!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Each of the plants that are offline are nominally offline for an individually valid reason (malfunction, maintenance, etc.) but the aggregate figure is suspiciously high. The P.U.C. here is starting to suspect that there may be some market manipulation going on.
Here is a rebuttal to this story from the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. They contend that nationally, computers use less than 2% of the power.
Typical republican.. you probably didn't even read the article because of all the big words.
"...Never mind that other researchers have debunked the 8 percent figure as absurdly inflated. President-elect George W. Bush has already touted it in discussing his energy policy."
And why the hell NOT?
Seriously. Does a red light force your vehicle to come to a complete stop with your front bumper behind the white line?
The state is responsible for the laws that mandate the pollution quotas. The state is responsible for enforcing those laws.
If Gov. Davis can talk about using the power of eminent domain to seize generating assets, he's just as capable of invoking emergency powers to rescind the quotas and fire up the plants.
The gas-based ones probably won't be able to produce power at a profit, based on the price of natural gas. But the coal-based ones should be just fine.
What I still don't know (and haven't been able to find out), is (a) how many plants are offlined due to "quota" reasons, and (b) of those, how many can produce power at reasonable cost. The only "polluting" technology that I know of that fits this bill is coal. (Nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal are zero-emission.)
I didn't vote for Bush, but Cheney was a big factor in our getting through oil crises in the past. The fact is, when we're facing a national energy crisis, who else is better suited to deal with the reality of it than experienced energy-industry insiders?
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
The fact is that the temporary (until 2002) freeze on prices was mandated by the power producers themselves
That's actually irrelevant, isn't it? Regardless of whether the industry asked for it, it's still government price controls.
The fixed price was, at the time, above predicted market rates.
Ah, the miracle of central planning.
Just because the companies thought it would work out in their interest, and asked for it specifically, doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
If you want to help at home with power factor correction, get a large power filter like those made by Cornell-Doubler. They use large amounts of capacitance in the filters.
It'g good to hear from someone up on issues of power generation and distribution.
The truth shall set you free!
Lights are irrelevant. Wife is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. You must comply.
-Daniel
And environmentalists pushed for studies about how cow belching polluted the air.
I heard some talk about this on public radio last night, and the were talking with someone from out in California that new what went on. The way I understand it, the problem lies in the way they deregulated the utilities--specifically the power companies.
Contrary to popular belief they do have the power available. The problem is that they are losing money. When they deregulated the power companies and allowed competition and whole sale of the power, they only put a cap on the cost of the power companies. This idea came from the power companies themselves. One of the problems was no cap was put on the cost of whole sale electricity, and the power companies assumed they would make there profit from the difference between the price they were selling the power to the users for and the cost of the power from whole sale. Nobody accounted for the possibility that the cost of whole sale would go over the Power companies were charging (remember they have a cap and can't raise it).
Now, the power companies are face with get power at one cost and then selling it at about half the price the purchased it for. The manditory blackouts are to try and change this.
One possible way out of this is for California to temporarliy raise the cap on the amount the power companies can charge the users, and at the same time put a cap on the amount charged by those selling the power wholesale. They deffinately need to put a cap on the whole sale cost. I would not only put a cap on it, but I would gradually lower the cap to bring the wholesale cost under the original amount that the power companies are allowed to charge.
In New Hampshire, we are trying are deregulating soon, but I HOPE that the Governer learns from Californias mistake!!!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
huge percentage????? moron... a computer uses less wattage than a TV
I am sitting in a dark office in San Diego wodering if this is the stage 3 power alert that will make them shut off the power to the building.
Ahh! the wonders of the modern world.
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
With all of the computing peripherals in CA, it's no wonder they're having power drains. For years now the AC power adapters (little black plugs you plug into the wall, and then into your scanner, modem, etc..) are power hungry beasts. At idle, when the peripheral is turned off, they average a power consumption of around 3 watts! This is a relative term of course. I forget if it's per hour, and if there has been progress made in recent years, but it's still absurd for a device that needs no power when it is off to be draining that many watts from the grid. If you add up every single one of those from each desk in CA, you get some large numbers.
Californians have been watching the population and new homes grow for years. Since their scheme of raising rates failed, now the power companies are crying shortages to put the pressure on the politicians to allow them to have their way.
--M.
Don't you actually mean:
Conservatives are bad for an economy
<grub> Reading
I think he meant typical for Southern California.
Hay thar.
No, California could have PLENTY of power, but the power companies decided they dont want that. Ever since the state privatized power, about 40% of all powerplants were "down for maintenance". The laws of economics dictate that price rises when a) Demand increases, or b) Supply decreases. By creating less power, they can charge more, so they decreased the supply. However, every other new private company had the same idea and reduced their output; now, when the state really needs it, they cant simply flip a switch and turn it back on.
The state really ought to audit these companies and throw some execs in jail -- what they are doing IS criminal. Power is frequently controlled by governments because life-essential products and services cannot (and should not) be treated like a commodity, they need to be there no matter what. It just simply does not make good business sense to provide something at a loss, but a government can do just that. If CA doesnt retake control of the power industry, they do need to look into some serious regulation and spot-auditing.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
I'm sure that's true... in New England. The climate is somewhat different in the southwest. Northern California probably fits your scenario, but the bulk of the population (and electrical consumption) is in Southern California. Factor in the use of gas for heating and electrical consumption should drop even lower in the winter.
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
The CA power crisis appears to be artificially induced with the aim of forcing the state to construct more capacity. The Internet has little to do with it. Whereas I agree that CA should construct more capacity, I feel that trashing the economy this way is not a good method of achieving the desired results. It will be interesting to see developments over the next month or so...
What the fuck makes you think I care whether you find it funny or not?
Jeez. What a tool.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
So if it's clear that the there is not enough power, that new power plants are too expensive and harms the enviroment and that computers have a low power consumption we could think for a while and realize that the time for ideas like getting power from the sun or from the wind has come. If we finish our homework and make such technologies available for consumers, people and also companies could start producing energy they need.
Excuse me? I missed the part where the monopolies were in control, since CA deregulated the electrical industry a couple of years ago.
As far as I know, they are free to purchase more energy off the grid, but can't because there is currently not enough generating capacity in the state. The wholesalers are pretty much free to charge whatever they want (free market, supply and demand, all that Econ 101 crap.) I don't see any monopoly there.
On an interesting side note, NPR had a report featuring third-party companies profiteering from the situation. There are high-energy-consumption manufacturers who signed purchase contracts for electricity at ~$20-$30/megawatt, and are shutting down to sell their "capacity" for ~$200-$500/megawatt. Due to the nature of their contracts, they make more money by selling their potential usage than they would produce out the other end of the factory. (As a bonus, they get to lay off their workers while the factories are closed.) So don't worry -- some companies are still making money.
John
John
>> Sorry, dude, there's just not an infinite amount of coal on this earth
Coal? No.
Geothermal, nuclear, solar, wind power?
Close enough to infinite so it doesn't matter.
Better technology could yield more than enough power for our needs AND our silly "wants." Asking _people_ to conserve will never work as well as coming up with
A: More power
B: Devices which conserve by their nature.
If all computers use less power, if all light bulbs use less power, etc., etc.... obviously Joe Average doesn't need to conserve; it will happen for him.
Everyone should conserve; I'm not arguing against that. But not everyone will, and I think planning your national strategy for power consumption on hoping people will "do the right thing" is a bit naive.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
You might want to reread my post. I'm advocating building more nuclear plants far from a "liberal greenie" position. The simple fact is the raping of Alaska that I was talking about had nothing to do with the environment (you will notice I did not use the word wilderness) but rather with using up all of that oil on nothing but producing power for users.IMO there are many other better uses for the oil and we should leave it there untill we really need it. The simple fact is nuclear power is cleaner and more healthy for all involved. The disposal issue is not really that tough (only tough really because people can't seem to get past emotion on this issue). And if I might give you a bit of advice try moving to a place that you like. On the other hand if you are as bitter and irrational as this post makes you seem stay in Alaska away from people.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
And, of course, I blame it on liberalism and "consumer watchdogs" like Nader who believe in carrying their mantra of "protecting the consumer" to the extreme. In this case, "protecting" the consumer by not allowing the power providers to recoup their increases cost of operation is ending up hurting the consumer because they now have no service to buy.
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
The recent power crunch in CA is a sign of the times. Look at the waste in this country. Every upscale 'House Frau' drives to Starbucks in a massive Lincoln Navigator just to buy coffee. Its sick. The same attitude carries over to electrical consumption. We leave lights on, A/C is left running at max when not at home, in some upscale communities in Colorado the sidewalks and driveways are heated to remove the snow! That's sick. I work in the tech industry but I'm not going to give a kneen jerk GW Bush type reaction that we need more power plants to keep the economy going. I think that consumers need to conserve and industry needs to conserve. So go ahead and lable me a tree hugging, fresh air lovin, clean water sipping liberal! Just don't call me a tofu lovin, pinko commie...then I'll get mad :-)
The casual consumption and careless waste that continuous goes on just boggles the mind. It isn't just limited to power. Try food, water, gas and disposable styrofoam stuff too.
My wife and I started limiting electricty consumption even more so with the crisis. I would turn stuff off all the time but now what ever isnt being used gets shut off. We lowered the refridgerator setting and freezer setting by 1. Used to be 7 now 6. Heat is at 64 degrees, for when it dips at night. Now if california houses had the same R rating as houses on the east coast I think they would be more heat/ac efficent. As soon as the heat goes off, it gets cold. It disapates quickly because the insulation is probably R6 here. It is R12 I think on the east coast. (12" of insulation.)
Anyway our electric bill was 43.00 this month down from 53 last month.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
This is so damn typical...
It's typical of the current thinking in B-schools and MBAs. Don't "own" any real assets, outsource everything. Be a middleman selling the products with someone else's technology in them from someone else's factory to customers shopping on the web site written by someone else's programmers hosted on someone else's servers, delivered with someone else's trucks. Calls are handled using someone else's call center.
This way you don't tie up your cash in low-growth assets like factories, buildings, machines or employees. You just skim 10% off the top and can manage the entire thing with a cell phone in one hand and a coke spoon in the other.
From an economic perspective it's hard to argue *against* this kind of strategy -- putting your cash into high-yielding securities makes higher returns than a factory and yeilds greater liquidity. I just think that from a macro perspective it leaves systems vulnerable because everyone hops onto this bandwagon and no one invests infrastructure.
There are other factors to take into consideration as well. Silicon Valley uses far more than its fair share of electricity, between server farms and fab plants. For every new link in the World Wide Web, Cisco had to fabricate a half dozen routers. This would represent industrial use, but it's still Internet driven.
Either way, CA's in a mess. Remind me of Scotty, from the original Star Trek series: 'I no can do it, Captain! I doon have the power!' :-)
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
Nuclear waste is just non-fissionable radiocactive material, but, nuclear powerplants don't create -more- radioactives... they take radioactives and accelerate their decay by hitting a critical mass to cause rapid fissioning instead of slow decay one particle at a time.
And where does all that uranium come from? The ground... so... exactly how are we creating more danger by digging it up, using it, and burying it again? (well, aside from the transportation and use phases with their obvious dangers; but as far as I can see, once it's re-buried we're no worse off than before it was mined.)
Also, the salt caves proposal estimates something like a 2% chance that the caves would be ruptured in the next 10,000 years or so, which is probably at least as good of odds as any given uranium deposit remaining buried.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I don't think it will affect the rest of the US, because unlike California, most other states actually build Power Plants... nifty concept ya know..
Nicely put!
- If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.
There were 6 of my computers, and 4 others through the house. Not one of them had heat problems. Computers are more than able to run with outside temperatures above 100F. Show me one that isn't and I'll show you a CPU Fan that is bad.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Yeah, the internet. And all those damn TV's! What about all the power stations that have been taken off the grid? What about all the repairs that have not proceeded with a sense of urgency? Its an artifical problem, created by the power companies poor planning skills. Of course, its our fault for actually using electricity......
That's also true in the beach communities in Southern CA like Ventura, Santa Monica, Newport Beach, Oceanside, San Diego, etc... the ocean marine layer keeps the temperatures quite mild during the summer, with the occasional exception of strong offshore desert winds. But North and South, when you get a few miles inland - Walnut Creek, Sacramento, San Gabriel Valley, Riverside, Rancho Bernardo - the climate in the summer demands air conditioning, and almost all homes built since the late 60's have central air.
I can see the fnords!
Do you guys have any IDEA how much electricity Holywood, Universal Studios, and all of the other Studio's/Major Amusment parks use over there? Most of their outlets are 220's!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
More seriously, your ideas are good, but a bit naive. I like dancing, but doing so involves a drive downtown. And the bands that play aren't accoustic, nor are the places lit by candlelight.
Fishing would take a much longer drive.
Unfortunately, most of us don't live in small towns where the dance hall is just around the corner and the lake is a mile hike.
The power shortage in California is a fraud. There is only one entity to blame, the power companies, who wrote the deregulation bill and have been milking consumers and taxpayers since (and before, I might add).
The power shortage is artificially induced. California has not built any power plants in 10 years. The average age of a power plant in CA is 30 years. There is supposed to be built into the rates a surcharge (and this is older than deregulation) which provides these companies with cash to upgrade and invest in new power plants. This money, however, has gone straight to the pocketbook instead of being used for reinvestment. PG&E is now the largest own of power plants in Massachusetts. In 1995, PG&E bought out an independent power producer and proceeded to shut down 5 power plants.
The average number of power plants down at any one time in California has been historically around 10-12%, even in times of crisis like earthquakes and heavy storms. There have been times recently when this percentage has gone as high as 40%. Can anyone say price-fixing? Of course, the politicians have mentioned it a few times, but since they get heavy contributions from the power companies, they are reluctant to follow through on anything. We are told that these plants are down for "routine mainenance." Again, this is something which used to be fairly short-term, sometimes for just a few hours. Now, all these plants are going down for weeks and months. They conveniently come back on-line when the price of electricity has gone up.
Has anyone looked at PG&E or Edison's profits? They have been skyrocketing since deregulation... and, again, this should come as no surprise since they wrote the bills. First off, they made incredible profits by selling OLD power plants at a premium. It should be kept in mind, however, that they didn't sell off all their power plants. These companies made more profits in the first HALF of 2000 than they did in all of 1999. On top of this, they have raked in billions of dollars from deregulation, from tax-payer subsidies for "stranded assets" and sur-charges (on top of their subsidized decrease in rates).
So how are they in crisis? Well, if they were individuals, it would be called schizophrenia. Essentially, they are treating themselves as two individuals, one which takes on all the debt and one which takes in all the profits. If I tried that, I'd land in jail or a psycho ward in no time. They have one unit (retail) which is buys the power (in part from themselves) and then sells it to the consumer. This portion is not making a profit. But these same companies also have another unit which takes in the profits from selling themselves electricity, from the various billion dollar handouts the state of CA has given it, and by acting and brokers for the electricity, driving up the price, their stock, and their profits. There was an article in some papers yesterday about the Federal regulators approving of this scheme, PG&E being allowed to split itself in two to shelter its profits in one half, while taking billions of dollars in "bail-out" money from the state for the other half.
This is the way these companies work. They cook up a scheme to milk us and get their friends the politicians and journalists to help justify it and push it through. And of course, we don't believe them, even, but what are we going to do about it, we aren't organized? A poll printed in the L.A.Times last week revealed that something like 60-65% of us think this whole thing is concocted. They count on us not being able to do anything.
Done.
I understood that the power companies got the deal they wanted. They just bet the farm on the wrong horse. Serves them right to go out of business then, no?
Don't make me laugh! What's the capacity of the power supply unit of your super-powerful computer? 250W? 300W? That's the *maximum*, but never mind that, let's assume you are actually using that much power. That's 3 lamps. 5 of the very weak 60W lamps.
How much does your microwave uses? 500W? 750? What about your toaster? 1000W? 1500W? Electrical heater: 2000W? 2500W? Refrigerator, freezer, electrical boiler, water heater, hair drier, TV... your computer doesn't even make a dent on what you are paying (and consuming).
There are two reasons for the California problem:
1) The power companies put all new power station development on hold until the deregulation was through, to see what kind of playing field they would have. The deregulation was long, and the power consumption skyrocketed all through it.
2) The power companies were incompetent, resulting in very bad deals and power consumption predictions.
(8-DCS)
That is the second most interesting viewpoint on this I have read today...my own being the first of course...
Uhhh, isn't New England cold in the winter? The least amount of power consumption per year varies depending on where you are in the country. Winter in CA is the same climate as New England spring or autumn seasons.
There is one reason, and one reason alone for the power shortages: lack of power. We knew that we needed to build more power plants years ago, but the government totally screwed it up.
And now they blame deregulation! It's just incredible gall, when the problem began way before deregulation.
And no, conservation is not the answer. Not in the past, not now, and never will be. The pie is not limited, and doesn't have to be. More technology is the answer to the problems of technology. We are not going to return to the caves, so I hope people will just deal with the fact that most people like civilization.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"I'm glad I don't live in CA, but how long before it affects the rest of us?"
This question implies another one: "How long can the rest of us ignore it, and avoid taking action?"
That's right, how long can we avoid taking action? THAT's what everyone really wants to know. How long can we pretend that the problems are someone else's? How long can we run our computers 24 hours/day in our neighborhood, before the power outages come.
I'm hear to tell you friends that the time for action is now. Now, as in RIGHT now. The power grids are connected right across North America, and the power sources are dwindling worldwide. Our rate of power consumption is going up astronomically, and isn't going to change unless YOU do something about it.
Try asking a different question. Instead of asking how long before it affects us (it already is!), ask how we can keep the problem from affecting us at all (any more). In other words, find a solution for the problem before it's too late, instead of running away from it. (If you think that running away is a crazy solution which no one will ever take seriously, think about how many people you've heard say, "Thank God I was smart enough to see this coming and leave CA.")
This holistic approach goes for everything. We really do live in a global community now--let's try to repair and sustain it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I would use it if moving the mouse during the shutdown didn't crash the computer. Every time I move the mouse as it starts to shut down crashes my computer. I do shut off the boxes when I am not using them however. Having energy star off by default is to reduce service calls for excessive crashing. Having it set to shutdown about the time you finish reading an article is bad as start of shutdown and mouse movement may happen at the same time. It needs fixed before it can be left on by default.
The truth shall set you free!
An A/C, or heater (and let's face it, Californians are going to have those on 24/7/365, too) is going to use 4 kw, which is 2880kwh/month.
Actually, for most of the year we enjoy the clement weather. November to about February is when we start turning the heat on. We're real wussies when it comes to cold.
Think of all the California potheads that rely on indoor grown marijuana, a decent grow roow consumes hundred of kilowatts/hours a day.
If you could grow marijuana outside, using freely available sunlight, power consumption would drop.
Or the Californian's could jsut stop smoking pot, like that's gonna happen.
From what I have seen about the Cal ISO (http://www.caiso.com/) is that the cheaper generators are NOT generating. This causes the ISO to use emergency quickly on power (Jet Engines) that have the highest cost. This drives the $ amount for power up quickly.
UPS Sucks
Now people with the IQ of a dead lemming, or the president, will blame the 'Net for everything from smut (its the naked people, not the 'Net,) to smut (or other cause of crop failure.)
There's more power used in California by grow-lights for people's pot gardens than by PCs. You KNOW they've been smoking something to come up with that argument.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You know, even if it were the case that PC's and other high-tech devices were at fault here, it's not been entirely unpredictable that technology in the home is going to increase over the last 10 years, has it?
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I estimated (using UPS logs and growth prediction) the power requirements over the next year (assuming we doubled equipment and wanted some overload capacity) around 12-16kVA. A contractor they hired had a different idea. He went from box to box reading and adding up the maximum load specs from each power supply, and came up with a ridiculous figure. We settled on a 36kVA UPS.
Needless to say, we're using just over 10% of its capacity, with absolutely everything online.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
In one way or another. You or your company most likely buys a product from a company in Silicon valley...and if the price of electricity is going up and the outages are costing the companies..the price will slowly be passed on to you or your company as the consumer.
Power companies sold off their generating plants because they were a liability and expensive to opperate. The new owners of those power plants want to boost their bottom line. So they grab a hold on the big knob and turn it down, and "Oh! Horrors! There is a power shortage". We now have one more finger in the pie, this was not a problem when the power distributors owned their own plants, they were motivated without power they would have nothing to distribute. Now that they are just distributors the generating owners have us by the balls. Sure there are regulations about prices and such, but hey, just shut down a couple of plants for mantanence and volia! power shortatage! Now the feds will have to revise their regs to allow the generators a raise in revenue because we have a "power shortage". And the distributors go on happy as they still get their cut of the pie and will probably slip in a little boost for themselves along the way even thought they have divested themselves of the burden of generating power. Which is viewed buy most as a nasty thing, pollution and environmental stuff and all that. So I would also look forward to the loosening up of regs regarding power plant construction and emmissions.
Same old shit different day.....
Rick B.
I, for one, have had enough of Reality Master's half-truths based on ideology rather than facts. Here's a fact: there is no actual power *shortage* in California right now. What there *is* is an economic crisis caused in large part by deregulation legislation that the POWER COMPANIES THEMSELVES HELPED TO WRITE!!! Sure, perhaps there should have been more power plants brought on-line prior to deregulation--but shouldn't the fact that they were not have been taken into account when deregulation was implemented? Sheesh.
--J
I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
I feel asleep at the wheel on that one, since I quite agree with you on the renewable resources tack. However, while finite resources *are* available, there is little incentive to switch; the cost/benefit ratio just isn't right (for the power generating corporations left to themselves). With nuclear power there's the NIMBY syndrome: nobody wants one, despite the fact that France has demonstrated that it's possible to run a relatively safe system.
I'm glad you didn't mention hydroelectric, since that powersource, while "infinite", causes environmental (and speciec) damage in of itself.
yours,
yours,
kbs
Reduction in the growth rate when compared as a ratio to the GDP growth rate :)
Jeremy
To me, it seems simple: people want to buy power off the companies. Companies want to sell power to make money. Why the heck can't they sort it out properly?
Part of the problem here is that CA was only partially deregulated. The wholesalers can charge pretty much whatever they want. However, the utilities can't pass those costs along to the customers--the price they're allowed to charge is frozen. The utilities would love to buy & sell electricity, provided that they didn't lose money on the deal (even if they just sold it at cost). But you can only buy at 30 cents/unit and sell at 7 cents/unit for so long, even when the state makes you.
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
I've been following the Wind Power industry for a few years. We are starting to see wind farms crop up around the nation, even though wind power costs more. Deregulation can allow citizens and businesses to specify which production facility they want to buy power from. These wind generation facilities are getting direct support from consumers who want to use green power only.
Here in New York, a small wind farm was erected and went on line this fall. New York, or at least my power company, NYSEG, won't allow me to specify who I buy from. To allow people to support wind even if their local monopoly won't let them, this wind farm is selling certificates. If you want to support that wind power enterprise you can buy some "pure wind" certificates. Your basically just giving them money. But that's what it's all about I guess.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
The motley fool had a decent article a few days ago on how the situation is a combination of poorly executed deregulation, NIMBYism (or BANANAism as they call it...Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and limits on what fuels can be used. It can be found here.
It's a reduction in the *rate* of growth.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Borrow an ammeter from someone and measure the actual consumption. That 300W is so the machine can handle spike loads (disk seeks, for example), not continuous average.
I was working out how many UPSes were needed for a build lab. We had 12 RS/6000s with 1 KW (actually, 1 KVA, but we'll gloss over that) power supplies, so I figured we'd need a whole mess of UPSes. Plus a 30 or so PCs with bog-standard 250W supplies, about half of which we wanted protected.
The results: The RS/6000s drew peak .8 amps, giving about 100 VA, making real power less than 100 watts. They would idle around .5 to .7 amps, depending; the newer ones with the faster memory and CPUs used less power. The PCs peaked a little higher and idled a little lower; .9 to 1 amp peak and .3 to .4 idle. (And remember, the PCs had a nameplate rating 1/4th that of the RS/6Ks.)
The absolute worst pig of a machine I could find was one of the early SMP RS/6Ks--one that runs so hot you can feel the heat when you walk by it. It drew 3-4 amps. Even the old multi-chip processor RS/6000s drew a measly 1.2 to 2 amps.
My SyQuest Syjet, with a 1 amp supply, drew peak 0.1 amp and idle 0.01 amp; though this was running into the low end of the meter's resolution.
Monitors were also depressingly light on the power; just under an amp for a modern one and about 1.5 for an older 6091 (big, hot, heavy) set.
Your amperage will obviously vary; but those nameplate ratings are the absolute top max. If your drives coming up together exceed that number, your power supply will shut down. (Not fun if you're trying to hot-swap on an not-hot-swappable machine.) But they only do that once; and bigger systems will stagger disk spin to reduce the need for excess power overhead.
Car radios are the cause of air pollution.
The internet capabilities of the computers included in the figures are NOT the ONLY function these machines have. Ppl would still use the computers, no matter what Super Bowl advertisers would like you to think.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Because there is a power plant that has finally wound it's way through all the red tape and is finally under construction. I didn't say that no one was trying to build a power plant. Only that environmentalists and others have gotten the government to put so many roadblocks in the way that one hasn't been succeeded in getting finished since the early 90s.
Note: It's probably advantageous to NOT put your monitor on the UPS unless you really need 24/7 access even during an outage. It gives you more reserve time if the power goes out and you're not near the machine. If you actually need to use the monitor, you can plug it in manually (you have a spare flashlight, right?).
If you're in an office, consider a UPS for the hubs/switches. I've seen an non-UPSed hub cause problems during an outage by cutting a critical (UPSed) machine off from the 'net.
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Have you included the monitor in those 500W? Does a power supply rated at 300W always draw that, or is it the peak consumption before it blows a fuse?
But, appart from that, I tend to agree, although I wouldn't be suprised to hear that MAE-WEST draws a but-load of power. At least a couple of 10s of Kilowatts. Still, that's not much amortised over the computers it serves.
Johan
In a way, the problem here is that there are inherent difficulties in treating electricity as a commodity, because the consumers are unable to buy power-line usage directly.
That is the real stickler here. Intel wants to buy power. Utah (off the top of my head) has power to sell at a price Intel likes. However, the difficulty of getting that power to intel makes the deal hard to close. But that is clearly the way to go.
To me, it seems simple: people want to buy power off the companies. Companies want to sell power to make money. Why the heck can't they sort it out properly?
;-)
Anyway, a typical desktop uses, say 350 watts, which is 252 kwh/month.
An A/C, or heater (and let's face it, Californians are going to have those on 24/7/365, too) is going to use 4 kw, which is 2880kwh/month.
Hmm. Why not blame those lazy Californians for wanting a perfect 70 degrees year round, rather than blaming them for wanting deathmatch, year round
So - when switching the power management in PCs off would be outlawed in California?
Have you ever considered the long term costs of nuclear power? It might be cheap and clean when all you consider is the first years of the plant's life, but when you start to factor in waste management (which will have to be dealt with long after we are all dead and the United States is no more) and dangers involved with operating a nuclear plant, things look much worse. I don't consider myself a radical environmentalist, but I am amazed that anyone in the United states could ever think that Nuclear power is really a cheap and clean power source when the used fuel rods much be dealt with for such a long time and in the highly unlikely possibility of meltdown an incredible amount of damage would be done.
You might want to do a little more research before you call nuclear plants clean and efficient when there are very real waste products and the long term cost is very high.
As for the cause: Aside from the financial problems of California's power plants, much of Oregon and Washington's power comes from hydroelectric and nuclear plants, both of which depend greatly on natural water to generate power (nuclear plants use water for cooling). Recently, we've been getting much less precipitation than usual, so the rivers are lower, which means the hydroelectric plants are generating less power.
Just the other day, Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Gary Wu of Washington held a press conference in which they warned that rolling blackouts or possible for much of the northwest if the situation doesn't improve.
Oh, yay.
--
What everyone needs is a way to produce a small amount of power for their own consumption. The use of a solor cells on their roof, for example, would allow them to offset the power they use on a daily basis. In fact, if everyone did that I bet you'd see a large dent in the amount of power consumed on a national level. I bet a couple solar panels could power your computer...
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
A lot of you are responding and debating what can be done, and how 'bad' is this going to get (Cmdrtaco included). That just shows you haven't read the article. The whole point was that the Internet is -not- adding significantly more demand to the power industry. Power consumption in the 90's continued to increase at the same rate as the 80's. The power shortages in California are mostly due to other reasons, with a few exceptions where the tech industry really exploded.
In fact, there is reason to believe that power consumption itself is down because it has been rising at a much slower rate than the GNP.
There is no crisis related to power consumption of Internet devices.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Actually the problem isn't because there is a lack of power. The "deregulation" of the power market in CA has cause this. Legislation drafted several years ago caused the consumer side of the market to have a price cap while allowing the whole sale market to be free. The assumption was that the wholesale market would drop in time allowing the gap between the consumer cost and amt. for wholesale to grow allowing more profit. What actually happened was the wholesale market prices flew through the roof. With the consumer cap in place comapnies were loosing money hand over fist. Now the companies aren't able to pay their bills and the genearators are going to cut off the supply.
- If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.
Two points:
To an economy, money is all that matters [one need only look to most Asain economies, where health or illness of economy seems to have little to do with civil rights]
This is about consumer rights, namely the right to not be screwed by folks who all say its not their fault. The average person on Cali uses energy pretty much on par with most others in the US [except maybe gasoline due to horrible traffic] so why should they pay so much more? Someone, somewhere got greedy, plain and simple.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Y'know, the interesting part of your post is that it doesn't really matter if the end user shuts down his or her PC. At least not during winter.
What happens to the 100W that goes into a monitor? It gets turned into heat and dumped into the room. Why do you have a heat sink on your 40W-consuming CPU and 70W Peltier? To dump heat into the PC's case. Why the fans? To dump heat in the case into the room.
If you're a colo, heat sucks. You've got so many boxen that you need a big AC to cool the room.
If you're at home in winter, leaving your computer on 24/7 just means you don't need to heat your room as much from external sources.
And if your home heating is electrical (baseboard heaters, etc.), there's no measurable difference in your power consumption either way. Power off your computer and spend more on your heater, or leave it on and note that the duty cycle of your heater drops a few percent.
So for those of you in CA with electrical heat in winter, feel free to overclock and leave your monitors on 24/7. USE the heat your boxen generate!
(My bedroom's about 2-3F warmer when I leave my PC and monitor on all night. And yes, I did spend a couple of weeks, one night with heat, one night without, comparing delta-T of room versus outdoors, to prove it. As always, YMMV. But for me, my 'puter makes pretty good space heater.)
I thought about naming this post "who's the Imbecile" but decided not to stoop to a low level. Now If you had read my post you would have seen I was stating that we DON'T HAVE central AC in most homes. So the amount of power they would use is irelevent. By the way, do you live in California? If you read my post you would have seen I do, so chances are I know a little something about what goes on here. just a tip: reread, consult a dictonary, or ask your mommy to explain a post to you before you comment on it.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
You are correct, I should have said that nuclear is the cleanest VIABLE energy source. Hydroelectric, wave, and geothermal can't be deployed everywhere. Solar and wind can't produce enough electricity to meet the demands, and natural gas produces CO2, and since natural gas is a fossil fuel there is only a limited supply. See the current natural gas price averages?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sure, they could point fingers and blame that big nasty 'net, or they could just fix or replace their ailing, aging power plants, couldn't they? A storm (granted, a nifty big nasty one) actually managed to take down a nuclear power plant? Well that says a lot (of good things) for the safety systems there, but not a whole lot for the plant's design or operation. Why not fix what broke, work out how to prevent that failure from occuring again, implement that fix, then build more nuclear plants to retire the aging systems currently powering the state? At least they're getting threats of power loss in a state that doesn't have horrendous temperature extremes (back off, I know about Tahoe :). Last year we (in Colorado) got to listen to Texans whine about power failures (that actually happened, and weren't just threats) ... the main cause was all their precious air conditioning.
Remember, folks, that stupid little A/C compressor chews up much more energy than your computers do. Hell, even in the production lab where I work the cooling systems use more electricity than our servers do.
Read my stuff.
It's the effects of the so-called deregulation, which allowed the power distributors to create a cartel and therefore drive suppliers into near bankruptcy. There's plenty of power supply in California, just not enough money in the right places.
1) Little change in capable output: Over the last twenty or thirty years the U.S. has done very little to increase the technology used in producing electric power, therefore stifling our ability to compete with the growing demands for electric power.
2) The HUGE increase in high amp appliances. From toatsters, microwaves, washers, dryers, things that nearly every household now has. Its a safe guess that in the last twenty years our average household demand for electricity has risen dramatically. Not inlcuding the internet.
I don't think that our little low power computers, even in great numbers, have much, if anything, to do with California's,(or anywhere else for that matter) power failures.
Opps, I think you read it wrong. Power consumption isn't lower. It's the rate of groth of power consumption that got lower. The amount of energy used USED to go up 2.9% every year. Now It only goes up 2.3% a year. It's still going up, we are still using more power. But the difference from year to year is getting smaller each year.
Man, I have never heard such a load of concocted bullshit in all my life. 'The Tech Industry' is responsible for overloading 19th Century era electic lines, as stated in the article.
HELLO? MCFLY? HELLO?!
What the hell were all the SoCal electric companies doing when the rest of the world was busy upgrading their infrastructure over the last 10 years to cope with the technology boom? Here, in Pissant Amarillo, TX, *all* the utilities have slowly been upgrading their infrastructure. Both SWB and Cox Cable have been putting in fibre lines. SPS Electric has been slowly upgrading their capacity, both in terms of generators, lines and high-tension poles.
At *some* point, deregulation or no, the SoCal power companies made the decision that upgrading infrastructure would not look good on the bottom line. Rather than use half a coked-up brain cell to figure out that the industry was growing fast and they needed to keep up with it to stay profitable in the future, some power executive chose profit *now* rather than survival *later*.
This is so damn typical...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If this were the '80s the Power Companies would be blaming this crisis on all the kids listening to Ozzy!
Sheesh...
Recently I made the move from apartment land to a house and it's amazing the complete change in conservation habits I now keep, especially being reminded of my families utilization every month by way of utility bills. Before I had a 300W halogen blazing away in my living room, along with several table lamps. Now I have two 11W Ikea high efficient lightbulbs (a 92% savings). Before I had it so hot that I'd open windows during the winter to let out heat. Now I have a programmable thermostat that keeps the temperature completely comfortable but while sleeping or at work it drops it down, etc. Before I had my coffee machine going pretty much 24/7. Now I brew a pot and transfer the coffee to a thermos decanter and shut the coffee maker down. Before my three PCs ran 24/7. Now my two workstations go into energy saving mode as soon as possible (without disrupting my work), and they even go to hibernate (a Windows 2000 feature that spools all memory and state to disk allowing for extremely quick restarts with everything exactly as you left) after I haven't used them for an hour. My FreeBSD machine still runs 24/7 though I've removed unnecessary cards and stopped overclocking the processor (Dropping the voltage).
The point is that by following a few simple tips the power consumption of California, and all of North America for that matter, would drop considerably. I've never taken the time to get the metrics and do the math, but I have no doubt that it's considerable. Anyways here's a couple of tips that personally I think are crucially important. Not only will it ease the power crunch, it'll slow the rate of us using using resources and damaging the environment. You don't have to be a "tree hugger" to realize that if coal is being burned for absolutely no reason like old technology lights that isn't too smart.
The point of all of this is that you can save massive amounts of electricity, and this will be reflected on your electric bill, without sacrificing quality of life. I'm not talking about becoming a hermit in a room with a candle, but rather doing simple things that are transparent good practice habits. A lot of people are wasteful out of habit, not because it improves their life in any way.
Any other tips?
There is power transmission capacity via DC however, a few cables from Denmark to Norway and Sweden (none yet from western Denmark to eastern Denmark, though).
--
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
Yes and Trees Cause Pollution
The power producers jacking prices to the sky.
The consumers thinking electricity is some kind of right.
Wanna solve CA's problem in a hurry? Lift the price caps on the power companies so their rates go through the roof to keep the power on (ie the power company doesn't go bankrupt) or better yet, let the power companies go bankrupt so they turn of ALL the power. See how fast change happens.
Yes - you should conserve. System standby, CF light bulbs, better insulation. But blaming the Internet. HAHAHAHA
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
"Some analysts, bolstered by a study declaring that the Internet is responsible for fully 8 percent of all national electricity consumption, assert that the Net itself is responsible for spiking demand to unprecedented heights. The new economy, it seems, is an energy hog. Never mind that other researchers have debunked the 8 percent figure as absurdly inflated. President-elect George W. Bush has already touted it in discussing his energy policy. What better reason could there be to allow oil drilling and coal mining in virgin wildernesses than the need to keep the Net running?" So we have at worst 8 percent since when does that count as a huge percentage. I mean come on people we could increase 8 percent with just a couple of reactors. Get with the program.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
It's the Slashdot Effect! All these people are using their super-high-power computers to post comments at Slashdot! The same site that brought chaos to your site if someone linked to it is now bring chaos to the power grid! It must be found and stopped! No, wait... Umm, nevermind.
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suwain_2
We can solve the lack of powerplants issue quickly - any community can veto a power plant in their area - in exchange the community goes to the top of a list - that community will be taken off the grid BEFORE any rolling blackouts occur. They stay at the top of the list until another community NIMBYs a powerplant. After 15 or 20 years, they fall off the list. That should put a stop to NIMBYing most decent projects. A safeguard should be added to prevent rediculous power plant proposals - ie trying to build a small plant in the middle of a highly developed neighborhood...
.02
my
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
This is stupid.
... California utilities (including LA's DWP which is *thriving* in this crisis by selling its surplus) have owned out of state power generation capacity since before deregulation.
California's power problems are not a problem with production, but with finances. It is true that California hasn't built in state power plants in over ten years, but that is not the problem
The problem is that the two big utilities companies orchestrated a stupid STUPID deregulation plan, and it has now come back and bitten them in the ass and they can't pay for power they've already used much less power they will need.
They agreed to sell off their power production facilities, buy power from the people they sold their facilities to through a poorly organized exchange. Believing that capitalism was some magic wand, they believed that prices would magically drop, so they agreed to consumer price caps.
Now that the power producers are selling them power from the facilities they built at 10 to 100 (yes one hundred!) times the prices two years ago, they are starting to realize that the whole deregulation and divestment and price caps and 'let the market set the rates' plan was stupid and they are asking the taxpayers of California (not the big-business power consumers) to pay the bills.
Again. There is no power shortage. Few states produce all the power they need. Most buy production from other states. There was a botched deregulation, and poor finaancial planning by two utilities companies who are more willing to default and declare bankrupcy than pass the expense of their decisions on to their parent companies.
California's problems lie with stupid CFOs and corrupt politicians.
Maybe you should unplug those electric chairs of yours?
i had a sig, once..
Having just moved away from California (and thank gawd!), I was able to see a lot of local news shows and newspapers about the power crisis. There's a lot of fingerpointing going on, except all in the wrong direction.
The public is unwilling to realize that they are the problem. I saw a city of San Diego official come on TV last summer and tell her constituents only to "pay what is fair". I don't think I have ever seen such an irresponsible act from any public official ever (in my short and naive 26 years). What does she think? Is the electricity fairy going to come down from heaven and make everything right?
I happened to catch a bit on CNBC (financial television channel) yesterday about the stage three emergency delclared by either the state or Southern California Edison (power company). The reporter said that the emergency was declared for financial reasons and not because there is an actual shortage of supply. SoCalEd also is putting off making an interest payment on a bond they have outstanding (read: that doesn't happen unless the company is in trouble).
Californians think they can just have the power companies bail them out until the current crisis is over. Well, it will never be over, because the power companies can not make any money, because the citizens won't let them make any money. So, thus, SoCalEd cannot afford to increase production, build power plants, etc.
Not only that, no one wants to get into the market there, because they cannot make any money. So then there's not competition.
And now they're all screaming that the power companies are taking advantage of the "high fuel prices" to make a quick buck off of the public.
All I can say to California. You reap what you sow...
less gas expenditure means more pocket money, but if I'm STUCK AT HOME
Even if you don't spend your money by wasting resources, you can do the economical situation a favour by saving or investing it. Thus, the money can be used by somebody who needs it and hopefully you can get it back with some returns.
I think the Japanese boom was built around this.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
In order to deathmatch year round, one would need a climate controled environment, since modern microprocessors are rather hot little beasts. Even one of the Kryotech boxes [and I've seen one up close and personal] would be very unhappy at a room temp of 90+ degrees Farenheit[sp?].
BTW, I don't support the article's assertion that the net is the cause of Cali's near power collapse, I'm just pointing out the flaw in this one arguement.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
This is scaries than I thought...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
This was all over the news channels here in the Netherlands and they actually stated that might happen here too.
As you might know in Europe (except for England) the power coporations are owned by the the government. At the moment there is a excess rate of about 30%, meaning that there is 30% too much power. But now even (it-)companies in Amsterdam have difficulty getting power and more and more are deciding for co-location outside of the city
Privatisation is scheduled for the power companies, who knows what is going to happen then as 30% excess is not efficient
In my opinion we will get there a lot sooner than we think, and we should actually think about making our devices use less energy. Not just our computers, but also routers and air-conditioners(!!!) etc.
- Bolke
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
The reason they're having blackouts is no
mystery. It's Econ 101 guys:
Demand high, supply low. What does that mean
for the fair market price? High. What does
the government do? Put price caps ridiculously
low. What happens? Everything has to shut down,
the only expected solution that can happen.
Take out the stops and everything will be fine again.
The only other partial reason for it is the strict polution limits set. They can't operate without exceeding their quotas so they are shutting down for that reason as well. This is more of a tough problem than the pricecaps, because they can't just open it up to "pollute all you want, guys" but they can't just keep everyone in the dark either.
FYI, Phish Tickets-by-mail only distributes a small number of tickets for each show, so the mail-order crowd isn't the reason you can't get your tickets.
However, Tickets-by-mail is a much more reliable way to get your tix than through TicketBastard. And even though you have to deal with getting money orders and fill out forms that may challenge the perpetually stoned among us, it's waaaay less stressful than hitting "redial" over and over and over and over, only to hear busy signals or that @(*&#$%#&ing message "There are no circuits availble. Please try again later."
That's because they are making more money on reselling the power they have contracted for than they would make by running the factories and producing their product.
That's a sure sign of a system out of whack.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
According to this Reuters story, California has already triggered blackouts due to excessive energy usage today.
Which causes other adjacent states to suffer rolling brownouts, plant closures, and blackouts.
So, it's not some academic theory, since once those drop, a portion of the World Wide Web drops, which has, of course, effects world-wide.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Finally! I now have a valid reason to move my computers back in the living room. Really dear, we're saving on the heating bill. Yes, I know it's freezing in the rest of the house, but it's fine in here. If it's cold in the kitchen, turn the oven on and make me some dinner.
In my high school computer lab, I have some *really* stupid people. After a few hours, our monitors power off. So when you come into the lab in the morning, all the monitors are off, but the computers are on. I've seen several people walk in and hit the power button, expecting the computer to come on, not realizing that they just need to press the keyboard or move the mouse.
These are probably the same people who saw some "weird error message" (consisting of the words "The system Administrator has locked this workstation..."), and decided to sit down, restart the computer, and use it. The teacher (with Admin access) ended up losing a lot of work he had done, and he wasn't all that happy with the moron who shut the computer off.
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suwain_2
As I recall they actually create incredible amounts of methane pollution but unless a few billion people give up eating meat there's not really much we can do about it...
Thank you for saying what I wanted to say, but with more eloquence. :)
Nuclear power is definitely a good way to go. I wish more people would get over their media-induced hypochondria.
SDG&E (distributor) is owned by Sempra Energy(Producer). Sempra Energy sells wholesale power to SDG&E. While SDG&E whines about losing money, Sempra dramatically increases it's profits. As I see it Sempra is raping its subsidary company until SDG&E is allowed to increase prices, at which time Sempra will make even more money.
Funny how back in july when my power bill(for 525KwH) was over $150 they were reporting 34% growth. Now that retail prices have been capped, Sempra is still projecting higher earnings.
Add to all this, last week when CA had a state stage 3 emergency(power reserves drop below 2% of availble power) 1 THIRD of California's production capacity was off line for "routine maintenance or other factors."
It's not about low production, it's about greed.
--Alex
Banned from moderation 01-27-2002. Fuck you too
Did you actually read the article before spouting this drivel ?!?!
While it is true that the large utilities did not sell all of their plants to other wholesalers, but they did sell many of them to other companies. If you have read anything else about the crisis you would also know that electricity is being brought in from several other states who now are refusing to sell any more power to CA.
Now the CA deregulation scheme forced all electricity to be sold by wholesalers to the electric companies who would then sell to the consumer. Now your theory of PG&E conspiracy would work if they were the only wholesaler of Electricity, but they are not. There are any number of other electricity wholesalers as well as the power companies from other states selling to the utilities and unless they are in on this "price gouging" your 'theory' is bunk.
Why is it that everyone has this strong desdire to make themselves the victim of everything, instead of realizing that the price of electricity is only as high as people are willing to pay for it. They can't force you to leave your lights on and use the microwave, that is your choice, so don't come crying to me about how the mean power company is making it more expensive to microwave your burittos.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
Investment = Savings. That's right. The more money you save, the more loanable funds there is for somebody to start a new business. Whether they get the money from a bank or by selling bonds/stocks, they get the money *that you saved*. And that's the key. Higher savings results in higher growth rate of the economy. You are correct that higher savings also results in lower consumption, and therefore decreases GDP. But that is a *short term* effect. GDP will increase in the long run because the economy will grow faster.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I agree that there are some definite cons to nuclear power, but I have to take exception to some of the things that you said:
Why do you think nuclear power plants can't be built near populated areas?
Why do you say this? Why can't they? Prarie Island Nuclear plant (Red Wing, MN) is built about 5 miles outside of what is officially the Twin Cities metro area. Of course, it's 30 or so miles from St. Paul, but there are still a couple of towns of 15000 people about 5 or 10 miles from it. That qualifies as "close" to me, so I think that you're imagining this limitation. (btw, there's no evidence of any harmful effects of the nuclear plant in any nearby residents).
Unfortunately there is sufficient evidence for concern that even the redundant backup systems would fail. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island provide very convincing examples of what happens when systems fail at a nuclear power plant.
Yes, but what you failed to mention is that they provide very different examples of what happens when systems fail. Chernobyl shows that when systems (and people - it was mostly people failing, not systems) fail at a poorly-designed plant (positive feedback), disaster can strike. Three Mile Island shows us that when systems fail at a well-designed plant (negative feedback), you have a mess on your hands, but no disaster. Nuclear power done intelligently and carefully does not have to be dangerous.
Because of agreements made between the US and Canada regulating the price of canadian generated electricity sold to the US, california has closed 9 of their power plants. It is cheaper for them to exploit these trade agreements then it is to keep their own power plant operations going. This sees Canada and it's citizens taking it up the ass - it's no wonder that mexico wants NAFTA re-drafted. Canada should not stand for this nonsense. The price of electricty has doubled in the last six months in Canada because of the demand the US is putting on our resources. The agreement states that we cannot charge the US more for electricity than we charge our own citizens. That is just BULLSHIT. As a result we all suffer because California and the like are having a below average temperature this winter.
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
""...connected to the Net use 1,000 watts of power, which is as much electricity used by 10 100-watt light bulbs.""
Glad they did the math for me cause God knows I could never have figured that out for myself...
Better information has allowed warehouse districts to turn into lofts. It used to be that lots of goods would sit around in the delivery pipeline waiting, and waiting. That old-fashioned "carrying cost" toasted a lot of energy keeping things warm, lit, guarded, etc.
As the article points out, there is not a dramatic demand increase. Rather, the cause is modest increases of demand with ZERO increase in supply, and no incentive to build.
I think that the cause of the problem is the old story of politicians creating a state where nobody in their right mind would want to build a power plant. The new economy had nothing to do with that.
73.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
It probably does take a significant chunk of power to support, say, making this post. You need power for my desktop box, power for the routers, power for the machines at slashdot, power for the servers at salon and the other mentioned sites, and the internet to connect me to all of them. Between all of these, it's a big total.
And that's just my internet. Everybody else has their own internet, which uses up... wait...
They seem to be failing to realize that all of the desktop boxes use a single overlapping internet, which means that, while a substantial amount of power is necessary to maintain my machine, that same power goes into maintaining hundreds of other machines.
Having a Pilot with internet use takes up close to the same amount of power that a desktop box takes up. Having both takes up about the same amount of power as just one.
The reason that servers and server farms exist is that it's more efficient for a group of people to share resources than for everyone to have their own. It only looks more when you charge the cost of the whole thing to each person.
Good to hear that wind energy can also provide capacity. Usually, this feature of wind energy is overlooked. The good thing about wind energy in this context is that it has marginal costs of zero - when you have that thing, every penny is additional income.
They are also very reliable. These days, availibility is typically way beyond 95% (from a new turbine, that is).
Wind energy is also rather fast to build. A wind farm can easily grow by a Megawatt a day, plus some months for the projecting (if you have solid wind data - otherwise, measure for a year or two first). BTW, wind energy has had a growth rate of some 35% during the 90ies, and still sustained, so expect to see more of it. Especially with 35$/barrel oil...
Another interesting question is whether there is enough elasticity in the demand to actually cut down the demand. If the kWh costs half a dollar, how much will consumption fall?
--
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
Despite all the yellow press report about rolling blackouts, municipal power departments have not been affected. For example, LA's DWP has more than enough power to cover the CITY usage. If the crisis continues much longer they might even have to reduce their rates to consumers. Several smaller municipalities are considering running their own power now.
Hmm.... is Katz writing this ??? Nevermind....
Still it tells us that The Net has arrived into the mainstream. We can now be blamed as the root of all problems, just like the Rich, the Republicans (or party of your choice, if you're not USAian. . .), or Dead White Males. . .
Merkins.
Yup. This is a troll.
Deleted
Should have read the fine print :)
Blar.
Well, I suppose some of them may need a bitch-slapping...but if that is true then some environmentalists deserve impalement... ;-)
A shining example of environmentalist irrationality is nuclear power, which has a wonderful track record safety wise, and a much smaller impact on the environment than coal and oil fired plants. It is a recognized fact that thousands of people die every year from health problems associated with conventional power plant pollution (not to mention the effects on global warming). As an added benefit, nuclear could provide plenty of cheap power, with no limit in sight.
That said, I'm hopeful that solar and fuel cell technology will finally kill the idea of central power generation...which will be a big win for all of us, with very low environmental impact. We'll see if the politicians have the cojones to support these technologies with aggressive tax incentives. Somehow I doubt they will in the face of the utility special interests...
They are the ones who are implying a huge increase in energy demand (that isn't there) and a need for a drastic rollback of environmental regulations to cope with said increase.I don't think anyone is claiming a "huge" increase...but it is quite a problem if we are even 1% below the necessary capacity.
Don't forget that California has a constant population influx, so we need to increase power production to compensate, even if per capita usage levels stay the same. This BS about "no new plants have been built in ten years due to uncertainity about deregulation" doesn't wash...the real reason is that power companies couldn't afford to build plants due to the enormous barriers erected by the Peoples Republic of California. Well, this little fiasco will hopefully do a lot to weaken the power base of the Democratic fools who've run this state for far too long......
Please pardon me if I sound a little irritated. My electricity bill has risen about 300% in the last year. >:-/
The 'Net is the root of all the rest of society's ills, why not blame this one on it as well?
...for the Internet these days. Is there a social issue or cause left that hasn't blamed the Internet for something?
Of course, it is a big, easy target for blame. There's no one company behind it, pretty much everyone uses it in some form, so everyone has to share the blame. And most importantly, you can't really consider shutting it down as a solution.
When people start bitching about the Internet causing Problem X, they're not looking for solutions to the problem, they're just looking to shift blame from themselves, to make themselves feel better. Whether it's politicians taking the Stance-O-The-Day, or parents wanting to know why Junior doesn't listen to them, the results are the same.
Here is a critique of California's "deregulation" of the power industry.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Listen, I'm willing to credit Sandra Bullock with many things, but the movie wasn't THAT good. I doubt it's playing often enough to even cause a brown out.
Deregulation.
First off I live in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest is literally keeping California online right now for lack of a better term. Most of the big aluminum plants up here have shutdown and almost all our excess hydro power is being shipped down south. Many of our resevoirs are so low that there is no longer sufficient pressure to generate power. This is pretty typical, California has more people. God forbid we piss of a whole bunch of voters so we'll just screw over a few smaller states. If you think California was a problem wait until this summer when Washington, Oregon and BC don't have any water to generate with and everyone else needs AC.
Anyways everyone is worried about the wrong type of computers. The problem isn't desktop boxes it's server farms. The major server farms (there are at least 5) in the Seattle metro area eat as much power as the entire city of Seattle proper (that's about 600K people fyi). The problem is in all those idling servers and the AC to cool them not the guy running 5 desktop boxes solving SETI at home. For example the server farm in Building 11 on Microsoft's main campus uses 1/2 of the power that is sent to the city of Redmond.
I think it's important to remember that although nationally this doesn't amount to much when you consider that many server farms are centrally located in high-tech areas it's easy to see how the strain could be more in San Jose or Seattle when compared to say Fargo's heaters.
Most of the problem is that the (and I say this with the utmost respect) stupid tree-hugging, nuke-fearing, tofu-eating, fur coat-painting enviornmentalists won't let anyone build the safest and cleanest method of power generation... nuclear plants. They should realize that despite their good intentions, they are eventually making things worse...
In a word, bullshit. (Sorry, kids.)
Nuclear power plants are 'clean' only in terms of air pollution. If you look at total waste over time, there isn't a power source on the planet that's more wasteful, besides maybe harnessed animals. What usually isn't considered in that 'clean' assessment is the refinement of uranium, the disposal of radioactive coolant and other radioactive tools, and the interesting problem of disposing of nuclear waste, which even Tower would probably balk at storing in his backyard for a few hundred thousand years.
Nukes are good for two things: submarines and starships. That's about it.
I do agree with one aspect of the article Tower recommended; government intervention in the power industry is making a ridiculous situation even sillier and will likely force a few companies out of business. It's never a good thing to cap the price of a product that way.
As an aside, solar or wind power is cheaper than existing power plants in the same way personal computers are cheaper than mainframe computing. It may be more expensive to start, but when you put the power generation decisions in the hands of the power users, the market encourages things to get very cheap very quickly.
~chris the tree-hugging, nuke-fearing, tofu-eating, solar-using programmer/physicist
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
for the past 10 years environmentalist groups in california have done everything they could to keep new power plants from being built in that state. now they don't have enough power to support all the people and business in that state, and they can't get new powerplants built fast enough to meet the demand.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Hey, Easterner, the entire West Coast is on power saving cutbacks - Washington, Oregon, California. That's 25 percent of the population of this country and more than half of the high tech areas. That's half of the broadband service customers.
...
That's like George Bush saying the West supports him, when he lost in all three Western states. Nobody lives in the rest of that area you call the West - I know, I grew up back east in the Rockies.
That aside, the problem is not so much deregulation as a combination of rate wheeling (the stupidist idea since unsliced bread) and forced divestiture of power plants from power companies. This was a train wreck waiting to happen, paid for by idiots who've never had to switch a high voltage circuit in their lives. I used to be a Power Engineer, and did my best to keep Washington State from going down the drain with those turkeys, and just barely managed to pull it off. But now we get to provide power for those Californians in the middle of our low power generation capacity period, when it gets a bit cold up here and we can't run the dams flat out.
If it weren't for the fact that Washington and Oregon have put online many megajoules in wind energy over the last couple of years, California would be freezing in the dark right now. That plus the natural gas turbines we bought in anticipation of shortages
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
- Population Control: One Couple - One Child. Reduce population to a reasonable level (reasonable as determined by environmentalists/economists/politicians/$other- just something much lower than now). Do this World Wide.
- Factor the Environment and 'the commons' into the economic equation. Force business to pay for the resources they use. Force customers to pay for their own garbage when they take it from a store. Tax the fuck out of useless shit like Plastic McHappyDolls and other non-essential trash. Etc. Etc.
- Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Result:- A world where we can sustain ourselves 'forever' with a very comfortable life (ever increasing via technology).
- No TreeHugger (like myself) will ever ask you to 'give something up' because your consumption of said thing will be calculated into the 'sustainable population' equation.
Alternative?- Population Increase continues. Pollution becomes threatening for all life. We all return to the caves... basically we remain on our present course.
- $your_suggestion$
Unless of course we are willing to bet the future of humanity on our ability to exercise self control (not pollute/have dozens of children) and/or discoveries of technology to save our a$$e$.Im am a betting man - but given: Available Options vs. Risk vs. The 'Hard Choice' - it becomes pretty clear. We need to find a mechanism for control - to achieve a balance. Nature has that mechanism; its starvation/disease/war etc - if we use our heads we may be able to avoid this. Otherwise its back to the caves for us all...
If we can manage to find another planet and actually get there.. I guess the choice becomes a more philisophical one. Would we choose to not become the planet/universe equivelant of a virus? or could we control ourselves... another interesting idea.
I think Everyone is going to be affected sooner then you think, as power prices rise here in California it is going to raise the price of production for all those snazzy electronic gizmos produced here... and that cost is going to be passed on to you the consumers. Unless something is done soon to lower costs EVERYONE will pay. And this counts for all those dotcom stores based here too.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
More than anything, I feel that California's power problem is caused by one main thing (and several smaller things).
this one main thing is; oil prices rising.
The #1 factor in America's booming economy for the past decade has been cheap oil. Nothing else regulates our economy faster.
OPEC learned the hard way back in the 70's that when they cut production and raise oil prices, that they dump the whole world into an economic downturn, and consumption drops.
Unfortunately, they have short memories, and it looks like we're headed the same way.
Remember - it wasn't Reagan's economic policies, it wasn't Clinton's economic policies, it wasn't Alan Greenspan's genius, and it wasn't the end of the cold war, and it wasn't the "new economy". It was Cheap Oil.
Now that Cheap Oil seems to be going away, natural gas prices skyrocketed, and we're seeing power companies in an unfavorable legal environment getting raped (better them than us - well, since they're fucking us, we catch the diseases from them anyway). That is the cause of the power problem in California. GW Bush will do the pennywise/pound foolish thing and tap the arctic wildlife preserve for oil (won't his oil-buddies be happy?) - face it, it was going to happen sooner or later anyway. . . and it's not going to happen soon enough to save our economy.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
-Bolke
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
..Make Californians ride bicycles with generators and batteries to work. When they get to work, hook the battery up to their workstation to power it. You've helped generate electricity, reduced pollution, *and* provided a health benefit!
Alternately, they could just steal a neighbor's car battery and use it. Same net effect: power and one less car.
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
As far as the "greenies" go:
When someone declares themselves as an environmental activist, why not pull their meters? Since they themselves are contributing to the downturn of the environment by using the electricity that is produced by the very same power plants that they want to stop. Or suspend their drivers license? Since they drive cars that pollute our atmosphere, etc... etc....
Blame it on the Internet indeed.. without those power plants, there wouldn't be an Internet...
I love it! Irony is such a neat thing...
-j
California is headed for something big, they just dont see it yet. They know they have to build more plants, and there are plans to do so, but those take years to build.
Expect CA to go into a mild to moderate recession of its own over the next 3-5 years, as businesses move out to get more power.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
Ever hear of contracts? If someone has a longterm contract to provide a resource, they remain locked into that contract even if the price of that resource increases. A contract - such as a lease - can act as a negotiated window of protection from market rates. Essentially, the power distributors in California negotiated what they thought was a good contract for them with the California energy consumers. Additionally, it should be noted that the power distributors actually own much of the power production within the state; they began buying facilities when dergulation impended.
A side effect of the deregulation is that private companies cut down costs on various things. Of course they build less power plants but there is also a major problem with the network itself.
...) and so more interconnection = more stability. This is why all european networks are interconnected, from Portugal to Finland.
Of course, maintenance and building of new lines is one big consequence but another is interconnection.
It is a known fact that the US of A electrical network is much less interconnected than other (developped) countries. As said in a seminar earlier this (academic) year, it now has the same characteristics that third world networks have. If I remember well, west coast and east coast are not even interconnected correctly.
FYI, interconnection of networks provides a reserve of regulation (frequency-power,
Another example of deregulation who failed :
- British rail (people died because of cost-cuts)
- Network Solutions (domain name something)
--
#include "coucou.h"
I keep seeing various media outlets making this sort of mistake with respect to various economic indicators.
Obviously, it would be incorrect to say that the net has reduced power consumption, if the stats that you have presented are correct. Perhaps, it would be more correct to say that it has reduced the rate of power consumption growth.
California's been getting a free lunch at the expense of the rest of the country and now they're getting the bill. And they could drag us all into a depression because of it. Somehow I can't feel pity.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Amazingly, even in the midst of this crisis, they are blocking the proposed power generation center south of San Jose (right where it is neede most) because of environmental concerns. Yup, thats right kids, even as we speak it is as impossible as ever to build new generators in California. Out-of-state suppliers are licking their chops - they've got at least three or four more years of gouging to do before the citizens of California become incensed and turn their wrath on environmental groups. Its too bad - I generally consider myself an environmentalist, but in this case they're building up some negative karma with the general public that will take a decade or more to repair.
Sounds like regulation to me.
So is the government telling power companies what to do with their assets (IIRC, the "de"regulation required the power companies to sell off their generators to small companies [who then turned around and gouged the power companies for the power]).
So is the government telling the power companies from which agencies or organizations they must buy their power from.
In short, I don't think there was any deregulation at all - the problem seems to have been the "REregulation" that the California state government did [which they called "de"regulation to make it sound harmless.]
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Since they're concerned with air pollution, more people are buying electric powered cars. Those cars take a lot of batteries, and batteries need charging. While normal people burn gasoline and just pump a little CO into the atmospere, the electric car people just plug in taking valuble electricity that could be used for more worthwhile things.......like running that large Tesla Coil, or nuking the furby.
karma? what karma?
[ ]
An A/C, or heater (and let's face it, Californians are going to have those on 24/7/365, too)
Actually, no -- not in many parts of California, at least. One of the wierdest things about moving here was discovering how much Northern Californians eschew central heat/air. A/C is very uncommon in residences, except in some apartment complexes, though it is the norm in commercial settings. Central heat is similarly far less common -- wall mounted gas room heaters and other localized heat sources are common, in older homes.
My experience is that even when they have it, people here don't use it the way east-coasters do. Any time I travel east these days, I'm struck by how much warmer indoor areas seem; I've evidently gotten used to the northern Californian norm for keeping the heat off or way down (65 and below!). When I think back to the winter I moved out here, I remember constantly complaining about how cold I was, how cold people kept spaces. Now I don't even notice it.
Of course, Southern Californians are much more obsessive about AC, but I can't imagine they're much different about heating, really.
No, this is not true. When prices take into all side-effects of a transaction, this works.
But when side-effects escape, like carbon dioxide out the tailpipe raising global climate temperatures, which serves up bigger and more powerful hurricanes/typhoons, which cause more damage, then no, money is not all that matters.
One of the rolls of government is to set up the right kinds of rules to push these side-effects back into the prices folks pay. Trading pollution-allottments are a policy along these lines that works well.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
FWIW the reason nuclear power is unpopular is because of the environmental expense of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. They're all very green until they're too old to operate or redundant. Then they start to become a problem.
This shouldn't be the insurmountable problem that people make it out to be. It should be a manageable problem, but the industry's hands have been tied so that reprocessing the fuel rods is illegal (France does it), and there's no storage place for high level waste due to NIMBY/Green interference. The result is, nobody is researching ways to manage these problems, or create new reactor designs that are easier to decomission.
Temkin
That kinda bullshit hyperbole is what makes me want to bitch-slap environmentalists these days.
Where the hell did environmentalists come from? Maybe you didn't read the article, but did you even read the slashdot story submission? The power companies are blaming the net; it's hard to get farther away ideologically from an environmentalist than a power company.
--
...not to mention people overclock, causing cpu power to rise exponentially. This is so they can watch porn faster.
NO
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Yes in this case blaming deregulation is probably correct because it was done in a brain dead fashion that means that the power companies have to sell electricity for a fixed price while buying it on an open market.
You're right. I'm just annoyed that people call this "deregulation". In a deregulation, all or at least most of the regulations would disappear. here they just replaced the old regulations with even stupider new ones.
The PC term should be "reregulation".
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm sorry to say you can't lay it all at the feet of the politicians this time!
The utility companies in Cali helped craft the terms of their own deregulation themselves. Because they wanted to be able to recover "stranded costs" (i.e. uneconomical white-elephant projects) over time rather than writing them down immediately, they opted for fixed, regulated consumer pricing. Bad bet -- when demand and the market went up, they got squeezed.
This is why some areas like San Diego are in relatively better shape. They had nothing to write off, so they could let the rates float with price and demand. Although consumers there are paying multi-hundred dollar electric bills, they aren't at risk to blackouts.
Or this:
Or even this:
Don't be fooled by the politicians, the electric companies, or their lackeys. Competition is the solution; they are terrified.
The only real and permanent solution to our power woes is to cut our independence from the power companies by using other sources of power. It is very possible for a household to be completely reliant on alternative energy sources. That would free up the power companies to better serve businesses and other consumers of mass quantities of power. The power companies are keeping us in the 1950s by fooling us (the average american family) into thinking that we need thier power. Now that the internet is in full swing, they can't keep the supply/demand ratio balanced. This problem will continue to grow as technology expands unless we, the consumer seek out alternative power sources.
Duron = Athlon - 192K L2 cache. Same chip otherwise, same heat, same die specs.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
What you're leaving out is that throughout the early 90s, the California Power companies went on an outrageous binge of buying up power suppliers and other companies ... OUTSIDE of California (primarily Central/South America). Now we consumers get to finance their purchases, without having had an opportunity to prevent the errors in the first place.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
rant Salon is a liberal rag thats ran by liberals for liberals and dumb ass soccer moms. The net isnt the problem. Deregulation isnt the problem. The power stems from the fact the fact that a bunch of puss filled, dope smoking, tree fucking, yuggo driving, enviromentalist whacko's communist have made it nearly impossible to build new power plants. The population of california has doubled in the last ten years. There have no new power plants built in ten years, bc of the tree hugging faggot bean curd eating enviromentalist scum filth of the world. These are the same assholes who say the SUV is the greatest threat to mankind. They arre the same assholes who say drilling for oil is dangerous when it isnt. These are the ppl who say that our energy prices should be raised and think of Al Bores book "Earth in the lurch" to be their bible. The way to get the power crisis adverted is to elect republican representatives, boot puss filled Maggots out of office and grind them up for fuel to power generators.
Don't most Californians use electricity for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer ?
Wouldn't it make sense to do maintenance in the Fall/Spring when people won't need the AC or heat as much ?
UPS Sucks
Because in California there are too many damn fool environmentalists who don't want any more pollution.
Yes, we should all embrace the pollution and strive to create more whenever possible.
Perhaps the problem is that we don't invest enough in creating non-polluting or at least less polluting ways of generating energy. Mainly because those damn power companies and others who make their living by polluting the environment fight any attempts to create an alternative to their services.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
In California it you cannot build a nuclear power plant or a coal operated power plant. This leaves natural gas power plants, which is the most expensive of the three to operate. This is one reason new plants have not been built - blame the environmentalists for that.
Also, there has been talk of "deregulation" for many years, creating uncertainty in the industry. No one knew what the business landscape was going to look like, which made the risk of building new plants very great.
Economic 001 (which comes before Economics 101) explains the whole situation. Regulated markets are inefficient, and the electricity market in California, from the construction of plants to the generation of power to purchasing to selling, is heavily regulated. There is nothing in the least bit unique about this situation, except perhaps the media calling this hyperregulation "deregulation".
They've already begun. A cow orker came in today and said they'd taken down his neighborhood in Palo Alto two minutes before his coffee was ready.
.za and .il and .tw who share your pain.
D'oh!
They'll take down my office any minute.
So I type with haste.
The rolling blackouts last 60-90 minutes. Just long enough to deplete many large-scale UPS systems that are "protecting" many large-, medium-, and small-scale network service providers in the Silicon Valley.
Like the ones involved in bringing Slashdot to your face.
Notice higher latencies today? Stuck-at URLs? Think you're the only one in the world who visits your favorite gerbil-stuffing site? Yes, there are pervs in
Next time someone asks you to sign a NIMBY petition on a generator for your grid, power them down.
--Blair
"The depression has begun. Oops. It's over. That's what the 1GHz economy will do for you."
Deregulation has SUCCESSFULLY circumvented these problems in many markets by allowing the companies to respond economically to demand.
Just curious, but where exactly are these markets that have successfully deregulated electricity? Here in Alberta, Canada, we are into our first month of electrical deregulation and are already having problems with doubling and tripling of prices. The government has stepped in with subsidies on power bills and rate freezes (they have to call an election this spring). It looks like we may be starting down a path similar to California's.
If there are markets out there that have successfully deregulated their electrical production/distribution industries, I would like to look at how they did it so perhaps we can follow their methods and avoid the fate that California is experiencing.
Please follow up your previous post with some specific examples.
Thank you.
Trickster Coyote
Illusions are real. Reality is an illusion.
Ideology is for ideots.
Even in houses that do have central heat and air, the furnace is gas powered. The electricity required to run the fan to push the heated air isn't all that great. I know this because of my power bills. In the summer, my gas bill is negligible (just the hot water heater). My electricity bill is huge. In the winter, my gas bill skyrockets. My electricity bill drops to a third or less of what it is in the summer. Oh, did I mention that I live in California? This power crisis is the result of poorly thought out degregulation (partial), along with some factors that frankly don't appear to have been made public. The point about HVAC is a good one. In the summery, California is going to draw way more electricity than it will in the winter. While the Bay Area lacks a great deal of air conditioning, in the Sacramento valley and Southern California they are almost mandatory. So for places without AC, power consumption should remain relatively constant from season to season (as most places without central heat/air do have gas heat). In other heavily populated areas of the state, power consumption is going to rise significantly in the summer. So it makes no sense that a sudden increase in demand is behind the crisis. It has been brewing for a long time. One big problem is that with the wholesalers deregulated, who is going to build excess capacity and then sit on it for a few years until it is needed. So power firms are going to go with a "just in time" approach, or, more likely "not quite just in time" (i.e., they want to bring new capacity online after the need has been there for a while and the price has gone up).
A troll with a 4 digit UID.
Beats my 5 digit one.
Put lots of monkeys onto lots of bikes and Ta Da!! We have power!! And the scientists can pretend that they're doing research at the same time. Now of course there are issuse, like we need certain monkeys simply to breed otherwise they all may die of exhaustion. But hey, we could be doing the species a favour, only the strong will survive and propogate... then... Planet of the Apes!!! Woo Hoo!!!
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Yes, you have it right. At least the theory, the reason that the average Californian has to spend more money is because we don't have enough power plants. And the reason we don't have enough power plants is because we haven't built any new ones in 10 Years. And why haven't we built any in 10 years? Because in California there are too many damn fool environmentalists who don't want any more pollution.
-Nails-
I heard a blurb on the radio this morning that I thought was kind of funny....
Someone was commenting that they had just managed to get keep enough power flowing yesterday by temporarily shutting off the water pumps that suck water from northern california to feed southern california. (It wasn't a comedic comment, incidentally...)
<joking>So, first L.A. sucks away all of our water, and then they suck away all of our electricity to suck away all of our water?</joking>
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Jeez.. talk about far-fetched...
I have a theory too: if we didn't have closed-source operating systems dominating the market (read: Micros~1 Windows) we wouldn't be so dependent on the x86 CPU architecture.
If could just recompile and go on a new CPU, all the stupidity from the past could be cleaned up.
And if CPU's wouldn't need all that bloat they'd use a LOT less power. And run faster, too.
So you see, if you think hard enough everything can be blamed on Micros~1.
The high-tech companies will hire unskilled labor at 4x minumum wage to pedal bicycles to power the servers, thus bringing more people into CA, thus causing a higher usage of electricity, thus requiring more pedal-power people to come in...
Aw, screw it, just build some more power plants.
California rejected nuclear power plants for a few simple reasons: the power companies swore they were absolutely safe, but wanted a cap on the amount they would have to pay if there was an accident. I guess they aren't all that safe, huh? Especially when the decided the perfect location would be on top of a major active earthquake fault.
We Californians may be crazy, but we aren't stupid.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I use my system to heat my bedroom at night, so I no longer need my space heater. The point is that any estimate of the impact of the internet on power is only goining to be based on power consumption and not take into acount the power that the internet has alowed to be saved.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
The companies that are reselling their discount electricity are aluminum smelters in Oregon. Making aluminium is a hugely electricity-intensive process, so these guys either buy vast quantities of elec or make it themselves.
But it's interesting to note -- they have given their employees vacation WITH PAY. Not a bad deal if you ask me.
Really, mine has a 300 horsepower diesel engine and a six speed transmission.
Some basic economics at work in California right now, and no one wants to come clean and admit that they fudged royally by not bringing excess capactiy online before deregulating prices.
Forget all this "cartel" shit being tossed about - power companies are just following the price up the supply curve, just as the regulators allowed them to do.
Okay, about six years ago the Clinton administration came up with this irie Energy Star rating that is given to products with low-power mode capabilities. It seems that computers everywhere, especially in California, would switch their monitors (which consume 200 - 500 watts) into low power mode after a reasonable period of idleness. Take a few hundred watts per household, plus many thousands of watts per office, and there's a large amount of power wasted on keeping picture tubes warm.
However, the makers of the most popular consumer operating system in the world (and that's not an endorsement) do not have the low-power mode enabled by default; therefore, only true nerds and relatives/friends/s.o.'s of said nerds have their low-power monitor setting enabled!
Think about it--no one (but nerds, etc...) explores MS's non-default options. Look at the proliferation of j03 5cr1p7 k17713 who takes advantage of the enabled-by-default Windows Scripting Host and wreaks havoc across the internet.
The Energy Star thing is an example of a great idea that suffered from poor implementation. I see that the solution is to integrate the setting into the monitor and leave it on by default.
I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
Ewige Blumenkraft!
As Mark Twain once said: There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
One of the best bits of the article talks about how building a new power plant in California is about as easy as getting venture capital for an e-business in 2001. This is true. And it's a large part of the problem.
Everybody complains that power is too expensive, yet nobody ever wants a power plant "in their back yard". This goes ten-fold for nuclear plants, which, really, would be a lot better solution than the current natural gas ones that are generating most of the power out west.
The price for consumers didn't increase since a cap was placed on retail prices. But the wholesale prices that the power company pays the other "generators" was not capped. Many of the suppliers are limiting production of power in order to increase demand, and along with it price. The wholesale price for electricity has gone up tenfold in many places. So... The price the power companies charge stays the same, and the price the power companies buy power for increases. Many places are selling power for a loss right now. On top of that, the power companies are becoming more and more afraid that they'll never get paid for the power they share. So what do you do... Stop sharing power. So, what do you get? A half assed attempt to deregulate power.
The government put the utilities in an impossible position as part of their "deregulation." They fixed the price they could sell at, while allowing the price they buy at to float. Then they shut down SIX power plants. Then demand went up. Hmmm... decreasing supply and increasing demand; let me check ny Econ 101 book. Says here that price will go up. And it did, for the utilities! So they were put into a position of losing money, since they were mandated by law to sell power to anyone who wants it at a fixed price below the market price.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
What's the average power consumption of a computer on a network? Assuming that it's always on and that it is configured to use its power saving features one can probably assume that it consumes on average about 166W (back of the envelope calculation for 8 hours of usage per day - 500W * 8/24 = 166W). That's well below 1000W. I don't claim that these figures are anything more than guestimates but I think my figures are less than conservative.
What's the power consumption of a 48 port cisco network switch? I have some cisco 3548 XL switches that consume about 150W (AFAIR) so that means we add 3W per workstation to the power cost.
If we assume that the per workstation power consumption cost decreases the further we get from the workstation, on the network, then we can probably more safely arrive at an average networked power consumption of 350 to 400 Watts.
These guys Mills and Huber (Hubris?) are suits. Their only agenda is finding a scapegoat so that the politicians will agree to build more power plants. Either that or they're just lackwits.
:wq
... do you mean to tell me that it actually costs MONEY to run the net? So much for 'FREE' speech.
-- Phenym
Near the end of the article, it makes clear that the rise of the internet and the information economy has actually reduced power consumption:
"between 1987 and 1990, electricity consumption grew 3.3 percent a year ... from 1992 to 1996 total energy demand grew at about 2.4
percent a year in the U.S., during a period when the gross domestic
product was growing at a rate of 3.2 percent a year. But from 1996 to
2000, when the Net boom was really taking off, the gross domestic
product grew at an average of 4 percent a year while energy demand
grew at a rate of only 1 percent."
Years GDP Growth Energy Growth
1987-1990 ? 3.3%
1992-1996 3.2% 2.4%
1996-2000 4.0% 1.0%
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Not only do they create a lot of methane pollution, but they require huge areas of land for a small amount of meat produced, relative to what could be gotten out of the same area by planting some sort of veggies.
Of course, to get this extra room they have to cut down more trees. But then, how many trees do you have to see?
But anyway, considering that for about a week straight the coolest it got next to my athlon was about 105F and I didn't have any problems with it, I'd say you may want to look at ventilation a bit better if you have ran into any problems.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
No. They use it for cooling in the summer and very little in the winter, because the winters there aren't cold enough to require any serious heating (in the most populated areas at least).
The seasons go something like warm, warmer, hot, warmer, warm....
Just heard on the radio that rolling blackouts are going to hit Northern CA @12:15 Pacific. Each is going to last up to an hour and a half. Must have been some tremendous activity on all those servers up there.
Well, SOME of the compact fluorescents still have magnetic ballasts, which is essentially a transformer with a small neon lamp sized gas discharge starter, you can tell these apart because they flicker briefly when switched on. Newer compact fluorescents have electronic ballasts that work on the same principle as a computer's switching power supply: The 120 volts AC is converted to DC via a bridge rectifier and a couple of small filter capacitors, then a high frequency oscillator is used to step up the voltage through a very small coil and a ladder of capacitors to the operating voltage of the fluorescent tube. These are the ones that wink on instantly without flickering.
A computer switching power supply that outputs 400 watts is much lighter weight and more efficient than a 400 watt transformer because the line voltage is converted directly to DC, then inverted back to AC but at a very much higher frequency than 60 HZ, like around 20 KHz, therefore the transformer to step the high frequency AC voltage down to the +5/+12/-12 volts a computer uses needs only to be the size of a match box, with filter capacitors the size of "C" batteries, rather than big buzzing transformers the size of golf cart battery chargers, with filter capacitors the size of quart paint cans. This is all made possible by high speed switching transistors which are now much more readily available than they were before the age of home PCs.
Converting line voltage directly to DC then feeding it to capacitors for rectification is seen as a pure resistive load by the power grid, regardless of what that rectified DC is used for, whether it is used to power an inverter, or run lights or DC motors. Some power companies are even toying with the idea of high tension DC lines for long runs, with the voltage being converted to AC at the substations, saying that energy lost during conversion from AC to DC then back to AC is less than that lost due to inductance along long runs of AC lines.
No, the damn environmentalist hippies are the problem. Complaining about building power plants for the past twenty years just because it would encroach on some critter's natural habitat.
They should go back to san francisco with all the other hippies. Or get back in the kitchen and make me some pie.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Having a cable modem means I can download in minutes, then turn off the computer when I'm done for the night, rather than leaving my computer up and running all night long and half the next day using a dialup modem and GoZilla to fetch all my warez, mp3s and pr0n.
Great, Bush Jr gets into the whitehouse and believes firmly that the scientists and nerds are stealing all the electricity.
A Palm consumes as much E as a fridge.. give me a break.. I'd love to see their calcs on how much E went into a can of coke or a phonecall.. Oh well helps set the tone for the next four years.. we'll get lots more of those famous republican bizarro concepts, "Just say no", Star Wars, "thousand tiny points of light", etc.
We had this network that ran on small monitors, and then they upgraded the machines to run on fast pentiums and big screens, because that's what Windoze NT needed. The first big power outage took out the UPS, because the computers were sucking heaps more power.
Did this make the network users more productive? No. Did this make the network easier to administer? No, because stepping from Netware to NT was stepping back a few years.
So where was all this juice going. Sucked up into the ether to keep NT's bloatware going. What can you think of an OS that requires a pentium to boot?
Take a look at the power needs of Windows 95 and ME. Has the needs of the last five years really meant that we need to run a fast pentium with 64 MB, or is it just using resources because it it there. Do we really need to upgrade computers because only the latest OS is available? Come on.
There may be many computers that are more powerful than they need to be, and are just sucking the juices of the nation dry. Not in a big way, but Moore's law operates here as well.
At home, I run a 486 and a pentium. When I do code development, I do not need the grunt, so I do it on the 486. This is also the guest machine and the network client. When there's a genuine need for speed, then I fire up the pentium.
We could think of this in a single box, operating like a dual flush toilet. When both are on, one could act as the video accelerator. Pushing a turbo button could change the innards of the machine to add the needed grunt.
Programs and OS's could carry energy ratings, based on some form of minimum standard usage. You could then play feature against energy.
Maybe we need to think behind raw power and think in terms of the ecology. Every little bit helps.
Maybe we should be thinking globally. We should design energy efficient standards, and enforce them, even as far as product recalls. Start living as if the Earth matters.
Think Different, Think OS/2
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Nuclear power is NOT clean, safe, or cheap. These illusions are carefully crafted and maintained by the nuclear power industry and the Department of Energy.
Nuclear power plants seem clean because there aren't any smokestacks billowing pollution into the air, but the polution they produce is invisible to the human eye. Why do you think nuclear power plants can't be built near populated areas? Additionally, the process of mining the fuel is exremely poluting, and there is no way to dispose of the spent fuel rods, which are still extremely radioactive. Currently they are generally stored in on-site storage tanks awaiting the day that the government sets up a central storage area and takes over the responsibility. This brings us to safety.
Nuclear power plants could be safe if they were properly maintained, but of course they aren't. Why? Because maintainance costs money, and power generation costs money. The corporations that own these power plants would rather buy DOE officials than properly maintain the deisel generators which provide backup power for the cooling system. In fact, the lack of mainainance at nuclear power plants was one of the few valid y2k fears. Nuclear power plants are required to power their cooling systems (which are the only thing preventing meltdown) from the grid. In the event of grid failure there are the afor mentioned backup generators. Unfortunately there is sufficient evidence for concern that even the redundant backup systems would fail. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island provide very convincing examples of what happens when systems fail at a nuclear power plant. So much for safety, what about how cheap it is?
Guess what? It isn't! Nuclear power plants are subsidized by the Departments of Energy and Defence. Since this cost is hidden from the consumer, nuclear power appears cheap. Our tax dollars at work!
Of course, I don't expect you to take my word for it. Feel free to verify anything I've said hear. This link should get you started.
I don't want it to seem like I have something against nuclear scientists, I know a few and they are very smart people. I would feel a lot more comfortable with nuclear power if the engineers and physicists were actually in control of it. As it is, politicians lie for a living and any confidence I may have had in business folks was squelched in my days as a math tutor. I've seen the kind of people that major in business, and I wouldn't trust most of them to run my coffee machine.
It would be awfully inflamatory of me to shoot down your solution without presenting one of my own, so here you go. I won't argue that deregulation has caused a lot of problems, but it also encompasses the solution. Thanks to deregulation anyone can produce power and feed it back into the grid. For a few thousand dollars you can buy a few solar panels and a phase matching inverter. Wind generators and micro-hydroelectric generators can also be had fairly cheap. Last time I went to San Jose I saw lots of sun and wind not being used. If all these companies that are suffering under the yolk of rolling blackouts put up roughly one of thier CEOs weekly salaries for equipment and installation, the problem would be solved. If Reagan hadn't done away with the tax credits for doing so, they probably would.
Again, I encourage you to check it out for yourself. Try this link for starters.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Well, the Athlon uses twice as much power as the Pentium III (60 Watts vs. 30 Watts). If AMD ever achieves 33% marketshare, they will be more to blame than Intel.
A relative of mine works for a muni power company up in the Northwest. Since I live in California, I was talking to him about the whole "power crisis" thing.
It turns out that most power generation facilities must be shut down periodically for maintenance. This is a necessary thing -- if you don't do it, the plant blows up, melts down, starts polluting (more than usual, that is ;-), etc.
Last summer (2000), there was a huge surge in the power consumption in California. Since the generators here couldn't provide the necessary power, the utilities went looking elsewhere. The high demand of power led several major generators, both in California and other states, to delay the regularly scheduled maintenance until the winter (now). The rationale was that winter power consumption tends to be much lower than summer consumption.
Unfortunately, there was a bit of poor planning involved: these days, both delayed and regularly scheduled plant closures are in effect. I'm not sure why no one thought of this at the time (last summer) -- perhaps the assumption was that more power plants would be brought online by now? I know there are several in California that are scheduled to begin operations this summer (2001)... not that that helps us now. Compounding the problem are the recent storms along the California coastline: the increased surf has interfered with water intakes of several coastal generating facilities, hampering their ability to produce power.
My recommendation is to get yourself an Uninteruptible Power Supply. I like the APC Back-UPS Pro 500. You can only "interact" with it if you have Windows 98 or MacOS and free (non-hub) USB port... but if you don't mind it being "dumb," it makes a great deal at less than $150 for 500 VA. Plus, it has four powered outlets, plus three surge. It provides me (PII/400, external zip, 17" monitor, cable modem) with 18 minutes of power...
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
My local power supplier is PG&E. They're crying because their wholesale supplier is charging them too much and they aren't allowed to pass along the increase to the consumer - the result of a sweetheart deal THEY brokered with the State of California. PG&E is threatening bankrupcy.
The wholesale supplier is making record profits out of this mess. The name of that company is PG&E.
What!? Something smells very funny here!
-- Will program for bandwidth
the primary problem is that there is no efficient way for power providers to 'store up' on power. they can't run a plant just as hard at night, and save up electricity to meet the peek demand - they have to generate at near the level of demand or lose it.(at least alot of it)
as soon as someone wakes up and realizes that battery backups are about the worst way to store energy, maybe we can start to deal with it.
back a while in wired (8.05) there was an article about using flywheels to store energy (story). and a former aeronautics guy (company) who was working on it. (there's also some others link, link, and probably others) it was truly fascinating and they claimed energy storage efficiency of many times the level of currently used batteries. (not much of a feat, batteries suck)
Nasa's power and propulsion office was looking to replace the batteries in the ISS with this stuff (story) what ever happened to that crap? and how long will it take power companies to catch on?
perhaps only the lack of competition allows them to point figers instead of solving their problems?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I recently did a report on different types of power and their effects on the environment, economy, etc. One of the conclusions I came to in the report was that there would be very little research on alternative power production methods, because there was no market drive (i.e. our current methods are doing fine). Basically, whenever there is a fuel shortage scare, people freak out and goverments go crazy building nukes, hydro, etc. Well, that hasn't happened in awhile.
:-)
Basically, I think a power shortage will spark interest in building new plants and doing more power research, not a fuel shortage. It's strange, the energy is there, it exists, but converting it to a usable form (e-) seems to be a problem. Hopefully, the new Bush administration will address this problem.
My solution, more nukes baby! Hey, I live 30 miles from TMI, and I work 5 miles from it, and I'm still fine...I think. At least I don't glow in the dark
As long as you don't repeat California's mistakes, you don't have much to worry about. Pennsylvania and Texas are deregulating in a way that will assure them plenty of power, for example. CA capped retail rates but let wholesale rates float. It hasn't allowed a new powerplant online in 10 years during a period when demand increased 5-6% per year, so now 15-25% of power comes from out of state, across power lines that are themselves a mess due to 'deregulation'. It forbid utilites to contract for power for long periods and forced them to buy on the day-ahead market. It forces the purchase of power thru a power exchange with oddball bid rules that assure that a much higher than necessary price is paid. And just yesterday I was hearing some environmentalist saying what a lousy job of conservation CA does, and that's all that's needed to keep the lights on. Just learn from our example, let markets work, and you'll be fine. As an example of what can happen, here in San Diego I'm paying 21 cents per KWH, up from 3 a year ago. The next bill I expect to be above 30 cents.
Good point
I think computers make people use more power and more paper..
In my experience most people leave there computers running at work 24x7 (not my power...). A few have too. I found old unix users just shut off there monitors..Microsoft could automatically shut off monitors on the NT login screen and set the machine to "sleep" but they don't. That would help a lot.
Also people tend to print a ton of stuff
And for crying out loud print 2-up.
little effort seems to have been made to reduce this paper use. I've been at a company that litterally had paperless time reporting and paperless pcwares buying stuff. It worked really well. (If your boss was out, it would automatically forward to the next person to
sign digitally..)
If you took the time to read the article you'd see that the people who need bitch-slapping are the anti-environmentalists. They are the ones who are implying a huge increase in energy demand (that isn't there) and a need for a drastic rollback of environmental regulations to cope with said increase.
Maybe Al Gore should have thought about all of this before he invented the Internet.
Not to mention that the internet is not necessarily creating usage where none would have existed: if I didn't buy a book online, how much energy would I consume driving to the store? How much energy does an email take, compared to making a phone call, or sending a letter (all those postal trucks, sorting machines, etc...)
I heard on the radio that some newsblabbers were warning against the "dangers" of nuclear power generation. Well, sure, Chernobyl and stuff.
But nobody considers the dangers of thermal power plants. A few years ago, a huge fire started at a French refinery in a heavy oil storage tank. (Heavy oil is the very dense oil that you burn in oil-power thermal plants). Six workers died. Huge pollution. Also, last year, France suffered from a major marine pollution when a tanker loaded with heavy oils, apparently destined to yet another thermal power plant, broke in a storm. All beaches on the Northern Atlantic front were slick with oil.
As for natural gas plants, there are major explosions during natural gas transports (trains and trucks mainly) every year. It is reasonable to assume a good percentage of these transports are destined to butane-propane thermal plants.
It would be interesting to find statistics about accidents in the oil refinery and transport industry, and correlate it with the percentage of this oil consumed by thermal power plants. This would put the nuclear power risks in perspective.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Quoth c_monster:
;-)
"nuclear waste, which even Tower would probably balk at storing in his backyard for a few hundred thousand years."
Gee, my backyard is pretty small - the garage takes up a lot of it... it'd be tough. That and I'm planning on selling the house in few years - don't know if the potential buyer(s) would take as kindly to it as I... (balk - you win)
The processing is a nasty step, and as I've mentioned in another post somewhere, fission power isn't the greatest solution, it just happens to be a good one for right now. Cost somewhat aside, we can take further steps to use up more the fuel and reduce the danger of the waste, and we certainly could do a better job of storing it. I'd love to see more renewable sources in wide use, but I think for now, we have the ability to safely (...) use fission power until we convert over to other methods.
Remember that processing costs for solar power are high, and the chemicals and costs of the storage baterries aren't the greatest either. Great gains are being made, but it's not a full time solution yet. I like the PC/mainframe analogy - the power situation we're in corresponds more to the early days of personal computing, when we still had a long way to go... though I doubt we'll fit the same exponential curve to home power generation that we did to home processing power
I'd also list aircraft carriers on the list with subs and starships...
I had said "They should realize that despite their good intentions, they are eventually making things worse... " and you remarked (unsurprisingly): "In a word, bullshit."
That last line was a little bit (or more) of a troll - guess it worked. Didn't mean to (seriously) offend anyone with the adjectives - just painting a picture of a 'typical' CA Green activist (non-CA activists don't eat nearly as much tofu, from what I'm told)... My post did come off a little more pro-nuclear than I even wanted to sound. Given the choice of a nuclear plant or a coal plant 15 miles from my house, I'd choose the nuclear plant. I agree that the system at the moment is not optimal, but there is still a lot of potential in fission power that can provide for a relatively long time before we can sustain our power needs with other sources.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I work for a residential DSL company and our corporate office in Northern California lost power early today. About 20 minutes ago their back up generators went down and our network was virtually crippled. On our network, no NOC = no network. We are now back up but 50,000 or so of our clients were directly effected buy California's power problems.
I predict that this is just the tip of the iceburg and the real problems are just begining...
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
Older PCs perhaps, I know my Duron would not be happy... the thing already runs between 50 and 60 degrees celsius [approx 106 to 127 degree farenheit]. If the room temp were already over 100 degree farenheit, it might not die outright, but it would not be happy [the Duron chip is only rated, by AMDs specs, to about 190 degree farenheit before it will croak. Also, AMD has already stated, and it has been demonstrated, that an improperly cooled CPU will be toast very quickly] So, yeah, YOUR boxen may have been fine, but LOTS of new ones wouldn't be.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Actually, computers are not the scapegoat. They are merely one contributor to the problem. If we hadn't deregulated, we would still have the same power usage, and probably the same amounts of power. The fact that we did deregulate just exacerbated the issue.
Simply pointing out the energy consumption of an industry is really not the same as pointing out the wasted energy. You can make no assumptions about how much they're wasting based on consumption.
The article appears to be goading the IT industry.
----------------------
Even the person who came up with the 8% claim knows its full of crap:
Mills defends his 8 percent figure by saying that it's only an estimate: "The total may be somewhere between 5 percent and 6 percent. Our number is an estimate. No one knows for sure. We know it's not zero. That's why the whole debate is sort of silly in a way, if you're focusing on a few percentage points."
(emphasis added is mine) This is a comment clearly intended for the mathematically challenged. If Mills estimates 8 percent, and the true number is 5 percent, then his estimates for total power consumption fo the net were inflated by 60% of the true value. I don't call that "a few percentage points", I call that "wildly inaccurate".
If we're looking for something to blame for the high power usage in California (and this has been mentioned before in other threads) - it's people leaving their machines at work on all night long. I work at a company that is heavily invested in distributed n-tier solutions. I have 3 computers in my cubicle. About 1/3 of our employees have more than 1 computer in their cube/office. I am the only person I know of who completely powers down at the end of the day here. Most people can't even be bothered to turn off their monitors.
I'd like to think that the place I work is an exceptionally inconsiderate environment, but from my unscientifically collected reports from friends at other places, this is pretty much the norm in the industry. Leaving the computer on overnight supposedly saves you a few minutes power up time the next day (I don't see why, I usually hit the power buttons, then go get my coffee. When I'm back they are waiting for me to log on).
I think the only way we arrogant Californians are going to wake up and start conserving is if not conserving starts hurting us in a noticeable fashion. They keep threatening blackouts, but only a few have actually happened (more people lost power from the storm that blew in than from rolling blackouts). They need to stop warning and start doing since nobody is taking the hint.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Multiple sets of Ni-Cad D cells, with a 120V charger.
Voila, more power drain.
There's more than just corporate FUD flying around.
Consumer Activist FUD - These utilities shouldn't be able to charge consumers more to make up for their bad business solutions.
Nice theory, but if the utilities don't have any way of paying off their debt, then they will go bankrupt. That means you might see some banks go under which would be really bad for the economy, not to mention the bank's accounts are federally insured, so there goes a ton ot tax money. The utilities aren't the only ones who made some bad decisions either. This plan was was passed by the Legislature in California. The people of California put them in office, and if someone has to bail out the utilities, it should be California, not the federal government.
Politician FUD - This deregulation law was passed by the previous administration and the utilities were the ones pushing for it, therefore it's not our fault.
There may be some truth to this, but this problem's been building for years, and they still haven't done anything about it. All they've managed to do is have the assembly pass a law to have the state buy power at a price that's unacceptable to the power producers.
Electricity producer FUD - Our costs have gone up, we have to charge more
They say the costs of natural gas have trippled, but the price they're chargin for electricity has gone up 10 times as much as it was. Sounds like some greedy wholesalers are getting rich. Of course they have to invest billions of dollars to build power plants, and they never know if some new Californian environmental regulation will cause them to have to shut their plants down before they pay them off, so I can't blame them too much for wanting to recoup their investments when they've got the advantage in the market.
I don't live in California, and my gas and electric bill is twice what it was last year, and I just put in a new more efficient furnance. Most Californian's on the other hand are still benefiting from the price caps on their electric bills, and aren't paying for the fact that oil and gas prices have shot through the roof. I just hope the federal govenment doesn't bail California out of this mess. If they do, the rest of the country gets to bail our most prosperous state out of their mess.
I'm for a free market economy, but maybe it just doesn't work well for utilities. After all to some extent utilities (especially heating) is a necessity, and the truly poor in this country are really going to be hurt at times like this when naturat gas and oil prices skyrocket.
Go read this guy's write-up and you'll know what is causing California's power woes.
Refusal to cut rates has nothing to do with this situation. People want their power...you really think Intel can't afford to pay a bit more so they can have all their lights on? The issue is the available electricity. Cali has used up all it's domestic juice, and now they want out-of-state plants to sell juice at a discount? Fuck that!
Blar.
That's pretty funny, given that Dubya has jumped on the numbers given to help justify suggesting more drilling and mining in supposedly protected areas.
In any case, it wouldn't take a huge percentage increase over forecasts to cause problems, especially during peak use periods.
With those bazillion Pentiums out there, sucking as much watts as they do, it's no wonder CA is running out...
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
The one bright spot in all this is seeing a state government that's utterly dominated by Democrats deal with a crisis. The Satalinist leanings of some of the proposals are quite breathtaking. And the latest state budget that was passed which assumes continued high growth in the CA economy is nothing short of delusional. The state has just passed a bill that will have it buying the power and then selling it to the utilities. The greens and the corporation-haters are screaming their guts out. They apparently want the utilities to go bankrupt. As theater, you can't beat this. The problem is that the cost of admission is rather high.
The Electricity Blame Game
The Deregulation of the Electricity Industry: A Primer
Congress and Electricity
The last article, written in 1998, suggested that as Congress look at electricity de-regulation, that it NOT follow the Californian model, for these reasons:
The short answer is that politicians rather than market forces designed the restructured California electricity system. Politicians, while paying lip service to deregulation and the magic of the market, could not bring themselves to simply let go of the industry. Reflecting the fear of both consumer activists and electric utilities that real markets would prove disastrous, the California legislature placed constraints on the restructured industry whose net effect was to stifle the very forces necessary to drive down California's utility rates. Consumer choice thus became a meaningless exercise.
I have 5 computers at home, and I used to turn off all but the server and the ip_masq firewall when I wasn't using them. But now I'm in competition with friends to have the most seti@home units completed (2761 so far) so I leave them all on.
Oh well, at least I turn off the monitors.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Where's the Ads touting Apple's lower power consumption?
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
If the general idea of deregulation is to lower costs to consumers, why deregulate when it doesn't seem to have the desired effect? What was wrong with the regulated market that we have had for so long. It seemed to provide the power at a pretty good price to consumers. Why change?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You don't know much, do you? Because of environmental regulations, power plants in California operate at a loss. They can't build new plants because of environmental protests, and expensive regulations and rate caps ensure that they can't even break even with the plants the have, much less have "$$$ rolling in". Duke Energy, where my father works, recently had an offer to buy a power plant in California for one dollar. They refused, because the cost to run a power plant in California more than outweighs the money made from selling the electricity.
The environmental lobby created this problem, and until they wake up and ease off on the regulations, they're going to have to live with it.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
How come even a small part of the USA can't last for five years on the kind of regulations most European countries have been subject to for the last 20 years?
Us Europeans don't get blackouts or brownouts. Pull yourself together! Sort it out!
It doesn't need a load of discussion. Somebody in California just needs a damn good slap round the head. Stop pissing about!
And why are these regulations only applicable to California? Sure the whole of the USA should be subject to environmental controls? Environmental controls only work if they are worldwide.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
And would you want the reactors built before solutions for decomissioning them safely are in place, especially as the solutions might impact how you'd want the reactors built in the first place?
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Hm, maybe not a Duron.. but I'm thinking my Athlons didn't have a problem. That's what you get for buying second rate hardware I suppose.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
From what I heard on NPR last night on the way home the issue is not about lack of power. There are actually more than enough power generators to supply the power that is needed. This problem is cuased by the fact there was an enrgy exchange that was developed during the deregulation of power. How is works is that the Power companies by power form the energy exchange, and then sell it to the consumer. Part of the legislation that affects the deregulation says that the power companies can only charge the consumer x dollars for the power. However, the energy exchange does not have this cap. As a result, the energy exchanged created an artificial shortage. This caused the price to skyrocket, and is driving the power companies out of business. So, the bottom line is that the deregulation is the cause of the problem, and that computers are just a scapegoat. Nobody wants to assume responsibility for their actions anymore. That is the key.
In response to this, I've created a little GNOME applet that queries http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html every few minutes and updates a little graph showing current power usage in CA. It's nifty!! Download it here: Powerload
The Salon article is actually devoted to debunking the claim that the net is a significant power drain. (And they do a fairly convincing job of it, if you ask me.) Please read before posting....
---J. Bruce Fields
And Ronald Reagan said that trees caused pollution!
Although agreeing w/ the point that power shortages are largely a product of badly thought out political strategies, the fact remains that we also use a lot of power (US, w/ approx. 5% of world's population, produces approx. 25% of world's greenhouse emmissions). And if that power is used for information technology, it can cause local bottlenecks. For instance, it is planned to rewire the library here at CU -- Norlin -- primarily to support ever larger numbers of computers and printers. This will involve mega$ to run fatter wires through existing or new conduits, while the library continues to operate (translate: scaffolding, wrecked sheetrock, stripy black and yellow tape, and hammering noises, for about three years). -fff-
However, here in San Diego we have San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) who owns the distribution network and Sempra Energy who owns the generating plants. Oddly enough, Sempra also owns SDG&E! So SDG&E is claiming that they are going bankrupt buying electricity at high wholesale prices. But of course, they are buying that energy from Sempra WHO OWNS THEM! They are buying energy from themselves and they are claiming that THEY are the victim.
Meanwhile, Sempra has generating plants that they shut down during the day to artificially drive up the prices with an artificial shortage. In the late afternoon when the rate per killowatt hour is higher they start up the generators to produce energy at the new, now higher rate. They even sell 20% of their power out of state at lower prices, thereby also creating an artificial shortage in California.
This practice is so rampent that it was the primary topic of our Governor's State of the State address last week.
Meanwhile, Sempra energy showed a $100 million profit the quarter before deregulation. How are we suppose to believe that there's a legit reason for our energy bills to quadruple when they made $100 million dollars of profit back when their prices were fixed? Did the cost of coal quadruple in June? Did the cost of oil quadruple in June? Did the cost of gravity to pull water through turbines in a hydroelectric dams quadruple in June? Of course not.
The cause of the high prices of energy is simple. GREEDY BASTARDS! The entire time that they were screwing us with $200, $300, even $400 electric bills that were $75 the month before they didn't release one press release to explain why. You would see city council members, senators, members of UCAAN, and reporters on TV talking about how they're going to try to help San Diegans. But you didn't see a single member of Sempra Energy explaining their point of view. Why? Because their position was completely indefensible.
We did hear how the state would help California's poor pay these outrageous bills. But if my electric bill goes up $325 per month that's $3900 per year of after tax money. To make that $3900 I have to actually make roughly $5500 pre tax. Sempra Energy just reduced my yearly pay by $5500 dollars! That's certainly enough to hurt a middle class family. So it's not just the poor who are financially strapped. Imagine how your life would change if you just had a $5500 cut in pay.
It's greed ladies and gentlemen, pure and simple greed. That's what's driving up the prices, not scarcity.
The eco-whackos in California have opposed the construction of new power plants in CA despite the fact that it's long been known that the current power generation capacity wouldn't be enough.
Coal power plants do cause quite a great deal of air pollution, and the cleanest power that we have, nuclear, has become such a political hot potato in the land of fruits and nuts that nobody with half a brain is going to be involved with the creation of one.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Do Californians use electrical devices that are not computers OR use their computers for non-net activities? Of course not. Then the answer is no, the net is not the cause of their "energy shortage".
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Given the president elect is an oil man, and the VP is an oil man, the views of the people in charge are NOT going to go out of their way and move to convince people to use LESS energy.
The last president who was 'into renewables' was Jimmy Carter. It will take a major spike (ala 1970 gas price hikes) in energy costs before the US will shift toward using renewables or even the concept of co-generation/micropower.
The rolling backouts are comming for you where you live. Give it time.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The fact is that the companies are out of funds to *buy* power. The rolling blackouts are just a threat so that the California Government will step in and regulate again.
There's more than enough power out there.
By putting the monitor in "energy save" mode at the NT/2000 logon screen, and defaulting the screensaver to shut monitor off..
This would at least stop the monitors from sucking juice if users are too lazy to shut down the machines.
Even better would be to default the cpu to "sleep" after 3 hours of non use.
Of course knowing the average microsoft users this may be a tech support headache but its for the greater good..
Here's and article from this week's Newsweek that explains how CA failed (both due to planning and implementation) and what it might mean for other states on the brink (like my home state, TX.)
an interesting read...summerized, they say CA failed due to 2 things:
1. But then the economy jumped into high gear and demand spiked, thanks in part to power-hungry dot-coms.
2. Because of a thicket of state regulations, it takes up to seven years to plan and build a power plant. Finding a place to build one is even tougher in California....
the article seems to feel that TX will be a better implementation b/c it doesn't suffer from as much of either of these problems...Austin is our only Dot-Com city and we'll let ya' build almost anything anywhere b/c we have so much space!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Taco, the things that are happening in California are happening in Michigan, they just aren't as noticeable. If you know someone at your local power authority ask them how much the company is paying for electricity, it's probably more than 500% higher, they just aren't allowed to pass that change on to you, the consumer, like California Power companies are.
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Reposted from my post above - Ive got Karma to burn, so I am going to repost this comment. People dont like the idea so its marked as a Troll - Its not - Im not kidding. Not one bit.
Here is my winner solution to the problem:
Population Control:
One Couple - One Child. Reduce population to a reasonable level (reasonable as determined by environmentalists/economists/politicians/$other- just something much lower than now). Do this World Wide.
Factor the Environment and 'the commons' into the economic equation. Force business to pay for the resources they use. Force customers to pay for their own garbage when they take it from a store. Tax the fuck out of useless shit like Plastic McHappyDolls and other non-essential trash. Etc. Etc.
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Result:
A world where we can sustain ourselves 'forever' with a very comfortable life (ever increasing via technology).
No TreeHugger (like myself) will ever ask you to 'give something up' because your consumption of said thing will be calculated into the 'sustainable population' equation.
Alternative?
Population Increase continues. Pollution becomes threatening for all life. We all return to the caves... basically we remain on our present course.
$your_suggestion$
Unless of course we are willing to bet the future of humanity on our ability to exercise self control (not pollute/have dozens of children) and/or discoveries of technology to save our a$$e$.
Im am a betting man - but given: Available Options vs. Risk vs. The 'Hard Choice' - it becomes pretty clear. We need to find a mechanism for control - to achieve a balance. Nature has that mechanism; its starvation/disease/war etc - if we use our heads we may be able to avoid this. Otherwise its back to the caves for us all...
If we can manage to find another planet and actually get there.. I guess the choice becomes a more philisophical one. Would we choose to not become the planet/universe equivelant of a virus? or could we control ourselves... another interesting idea.