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?

Comments

The Net will save power

[Hairy_Potter]

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.

The other side of the story

[Russ Steffen]

Here is a rebuttal to this story from the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. They contend that nationally, computers use less than 2% of the power.

Shortage, my a$$

[subedei]

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.

Hmm

[seizer]

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 ;-)

It's all about the Benjamens, baybee...

[Bonker]

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...

Re:What a bunch of crap

[Zachary Kessin]

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.

And Conservation is at least *PART* of the answer. Yes more plants are needed but if we could reduce the rate at which they are needed by 2% it would help a hell of a lot.

And face it a room full of servers use a lot of power.

The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

"Deregulation"

[Sodium Attack]

Here is a critique of California's "deregulation" of the power industry.

California regulated its own crisis

[TheSync]

As many posters have noted, the California power problem has far more to do with government regulation of power than of Internet use. In a nutshell, California is the tip of the iceberg, there has been a nationwide slowdown in building large generation plants in the last 20 years, mostly for NIBMY and environmental reasons. Small plants and co-gens have been built, but they are not providing the increase in base power required. See:

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.

It's all seti@home's fault

[ptomblin]

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.