While we’ve been looking at TV pictures of floodwaters rising around the power station that might – or might not – have provided power to the government’s eavesdropping centre, GCHQ in Cheltenham, as well as the odd half-million people, San Francisco suffered a huge power outage that knocked a number of important websites, such as the blog hosts Six Apart, and Craigslist, Yelp, and Technorati offline – as well as 51,000 people.
The cause? The city’s growing power demands, which are expanding more quickly than the electricity grid can cope. I’m intrigued by the way everyone outside governments and power companies seem to assume that electricity supply will continue to grow according to demand.
The reality is that at some point, even if there is enough generating capacity, the power distribution grid just cannot cope – and that holds more true in the US, where the lower voltages used mean greater power losses.
The signs of this problem were clear last December, when a number of companies revealed they were developing plans to move their servers out of Silicon Valley. What’s the point in having servers close by, when you can control them from anywhere in the world using the internet?
And if your end goes down, you can head somewhere that has a connection, and see if that works. If the other end goes down – well, your server’s offline.
But this means that where servers are located will gradually become a geopolitical decision. Google has invested huge amounts building server farms in South Colorado and in Oregon, where it can rely – for now – on hydroelectric power from the rivers nearby.
As power prices rise in the US, will Google, Microsoft and Yahoo begin to look for cheaper places for their servers? Or will they begin to push more and more of the work out to us, storing local caches on our machines (rather as Skype and Joost use up your CPU time to create a network-less network?)
California faced rolling blackouts back at the start of 2001, though that seems to have been partly due to Enron having manipulated the energy market there so it would be able to charge more (as in, billions of dollars) by constraining demand. Now though, the problem is the simple increase in demand. All that might hold it back is the constantly rising price of fossil fuels – which for oil at least is heading for a historic high.
As more and more of us use virtual worlds, and more and more servers labour over recording our connectivity details with people we might never have met in the real world (the one where your house can get flooded and your feet get wet), it’s inevitable that we’re going to hit a time when we can’t meet our energy demands through current means.
Which leaves me constantly looking around, wondering how the world will work without a constant, reliable supply of energy.
Which is why, although we’re on the fifth floor, I always take the stairs. After all, when was the last time you heard about someone being stuck on the stairs for hours at a time, unable to go up or down?
Meanwhile, when the electricity is back on, if you’ve found that email attachments sent to or from a Hotmail address have disappeared, you’ll find agreement – via a scientific, if small-scale, experiment carried out by Hal Licino. He created 100 emails and sent them between Hotmail accounts, between ISP emails, and back and forth from the ISPs and Hotmail. The results? The ISP-to-ISP emails hardly ever lost an attachment. But if Hotmail was on either or both ends of the transaction, only about a third to a quarter of the attachments got there. That’s not what you’d call encouraging.