Computers Causing 2nd Hump In Peak Power Demand

Hugh Pickens writes "Traditional peak power hours — the time during the day when power demand shoots up — run from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. when air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home but utilities are now seeing another peak power problem evolve with a second surge that runs from about 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. when people head toward their big screen TVs and home computers. 'It is [not] so much a peak as it is a plateau,' says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy web at Pacific Gas & Electric. '8 p.m. is kind of a recent phenomenon.' Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. Efforts to reduce demand are already underway with TV manufacturers working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma while Intel and PC manufacturers are cranking down computer power consumption. 'Without a doubt, there's demand' for green PCs, says Rick Chernick, CEO of HP partner Connecting Point, adding that the need to be green is especially noticeable among medical industry enterprise customers."

Comments

Article blows

[inviolet]

If air-conditioning is the peak demand, which it is in the South, then no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.

Only when air-conditioning demand is brought below the next-highest peak will there be any benefit at all from these secondary reductions.

That said, computers and TVs do contribute to the air-conditioning peak, and so it helps to make them more efficient... but that wasn't the point of the article.

The air-conditioning peak can only be brought down by difficult measures: upgrading the windows and insulation of older homes, upgrading older air-conditioning systems to newer models, keeping the house hotter inside, overhauling older duct systems to fix leaks and the like. Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system". We very much like to be told that it is virtuous to do what we already wanted to do.

bandwidth

[drakyri]

This is a little off-topic, but there's an analogous jump for bandwidth.

I used to work at a fairly large university, and you could watch the bandwidth charts and see what was happening:

9 am - people arrive at work, bandwidth climbs
1 pm - bandwidth plateaus - people are eating lunch / students waking up or getting back from early classes
5 pm - bandwidth halves as workers go home
7 pm - bandwidth climbs again due to student usage
9 pm - plateaus
2 am - begins to decline
6 am - minimal usage

I can confirm this

[CdBee]

My employers make and sell consumer television sets.

One of the large power companies pays the proportionate costs of our advertising for all the TVs we sell which consumes less than x watts (Sorry - can't reveal the figure).

They do this because its in their interests to get lower-consumption TVs out there, and paying our advertising is easier than paying for additional capacity.