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U.S. Energy News

By Sarah Jane Tribble
The nation’s biggest technology companies sat down with federal regulators Wednesday to assess the industry’s thirst for power amid fears that volatile and expensive energy could hinder the growing sector.

The fierce competitors at the table — including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard — rarely gather to talk strategy. But they were lured by the chance to influence the development of national energy standards.

“I think we may be at the beginning of a potential energy crisis for the IT sector,” Victor Varney, a vice president for Silicon Graphics, told the regulators. “It’s clearly coming.”

Already, local companies are adjusting growth plans, and data centers have moved out of California for more stable power supplies, he said.

Google’s Bill Weihl, who works with energy strategy engineering and operations, countered that the crisis isn’t upon the industry yet but is possible in the next five to 10 years if adequate and reliable energy supplies are not ensured.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which measures power use in various industries, hopes to learn from the companies, and to design guidelines for building efficient facilities and technology, said Andrew Karsner, assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy for the department. He also is considering eventually auditing energy use in technology facilities, much like the department’s audits of steel and paper plants.

The round table, hosted by Advanced Micro Devices, was the first meeting in what Karsner called a public and private partnership. Research firm Gartner estimates that within two years about half of the world’s data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to service the high-density servers companies need to keep up with demand for their services and products.

The use of electricity plays a vital role in powering the offices, research-and-development laboratories and massive data centers for the technology sector, which is one of America’s fastest-growing industries.

Concern about electricity pricing and volatility has led Microsoft to talk with its network manufacturers about building more efficient servers. IBM and Hewlett-Packard — which both build data centers — want to improve efficiency at the facilities. AMD promotes changing the design of data centers to increase airflow to keep the spercomputers cool.

The technology industry’s need for energy should worry everyone, Karsner said Tuesday before sitting down with the executives. Protecting the technology sector from an energy crisis is akin to protecting the American economy, he said.

To illustrate his point, Karsner hypothesized: “What happens to national productivity when Google goes down for 72 hours?”

It’s a far-fetched and grim possibility Karsner said he doesn’t want to consider.

Karsner and members of his energy team asked the technology executives about productivity and took notes during what turned into a four-hour brainstorming session about the need to create more efficient equipment and develop standards for building data centers.

Executives at Google, which is working on its own data center in the Northwest, charged that the energy used by laptops and personal computers should be considered in the discussion, while others argued that standards needed to be set for the development of data centers.

The executives also urged the regulators to work with efforts already under way, such as the Green Grid group Silicon Valley companies began quietly organizing in April to address the same energy concerns.

“There are not all that many experts who understand this problem holistically, and the worst thing that we could do is to fracture the bandwidth,” said Paul Perez, vice president for storage, networks and infrastructure and enterprise servers for Hewlett-Packard.