High stakes. High voltage: new millennium, old dependency on electricity

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 2003 by Fred Moore

The first 50 years of the information age has been based on the widespread availability of electricity, and the 21st century has begun to be even more dependent on the presence of electricity. Like food, water and air, electricity has become one of life's necessities for much of the world. We have all too often taken the supply of high-quality electricity for granted, believing that it would just always be there--the signs of a true utility. Recent events now make this assumption much more precarious than ever before.

The enormous electrical blackout on Thursday, August 14, 2003 shut down just about everything--including air conditioning, air and rail travel, cellular and telephone access, and Internet services--in what's been referred to as the largest power blackout in history to hit the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. The blackout hit at about 4 p.m. EDT in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, much of Ontario and Ottawa in Canada. Nine nuclear power reactors--six in New York and one each in New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan--reported that they were shut down because of the loss of offsite electrical power, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Bethesda, MD.

What was the impact of the August 14th blackout? Though the financial losses aren't known yet, and may never be known, the loss of electricity touched most aspects of human activity based on a variety of reports. New York hospitals were better prepared for this outage as a result of the September 11th attacks. However, air traffic at six airports came temporarily to a halt (JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Cleveland, Toronto, and Ottawa). Airports across the affected region were shut down by the FAA, which led to hundreds of flights cancelled or delayed. Planes were still grounded at New York's JFK Airport as of 8:30 p.m. Thursday evening.

In New York City, countless international travelers were stranded without water for two days at John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports. Airlines were often not able to provide sufficient information about flights. In some cases, people calling ahead were told that airports were open; but when they arrived, they discovered that this did not necessarily mean that airplanes were taking off or landing. JFK airport had no computer systems and no lights, which resulted in an estimated 50,000 bags that couldn't be moved or even located.

By Friday afternoon, Federal officials reported that 700 flights were canceled nationwide and delays continued throughout the weekend. In a ripple effect, delays and cancellations reached many other airports that never lost power. Northwest reported canceling 174 flights on Friday--three-quarters of which were flights from Detroit--and stopped all operations at LaGuardia. Another reason airports had to close was due to the fact that TSA did not have backup power supplies for their screening equipment.

For these truly mission-critical businesses, the need to develop a power supply strategy that deals with and delivers stable, high-quality levels of power and continuous operations is becoming real clear. The strains on the national power grid are appearing, and when the unexpected happens, the impact gets more severe as the value of data increases daily. As an industry, we can no longer afford to overlook or avoid the now critical task to implement a power supply strategy. Do many businesses know what the availability index (how many nines) that your power source actually delivers and what it should become in the years ahead to meet the demand of your IT technologies and facilities?

Strengthening mission-critical facilities along with an overall energy supply strategy is not an option for most businesses. Estimates indicate that electricity accounts for at least 40% of the overall energy consumption in the U.S. today. Many of those electrons are flowing into information technology devices. Even more interesting, the Internet is "estimated" to use as much as 8% of the kWh output of the U.S., while another 5% of the kWh demand goes to support larger, multi-user computers. On August 14th, 300,000 of the 2.4 million AOL users online at 4:11 p.m. just disappeared due to the power outage. All Internet backbone computers did have back-up generators that immediately set in. Web traffic was rerouted to other computers and a flood of backup activity hit business computers when the power was restored. The resulting additional bandwidth load slowed down corporate networks for a few days. The aggregate Interact energy load could potentially reach 50% of all electrical consumption in 2010 that is being used for information technology support. This means that by the year 2010, electricity will account for half of the energy consumption in the U.S.--and half of all electrical consumption will go for information devices!

Microprocessors consumed about 90 watts in 1995 and are expected to consume about 180 watts each in 2010. The consumption per microprocessor increases while the number of microprocessors in use grows exponentially. As heat increases, reliability of computing equipment decreases. Teleprocessing equipment generates the largest heat load of today's computing technologies. Servers and disks ranked second and third, followed by workstations. Tape storage systems rank fourth, as they generate the smallest heat load. The positioning of chilled air-cooling units relative to hardware and perforated floor tiles is critical to enable sufficient airflow and to ensure the overall high availability of computing technology. Cooling a data center efficiently, while balancing the device energy loads, has become an IT science. New technologies including Carbon nano- tubes, MRAM, and Quantum computing are expected to slow energy consumption levels. However, the increases in worldwide demand for computing power, network transmission and storage will continue to drive the overall energy load higher. These more efficient technologies will only slow the energy demand rate.