Riding Out the Coming Electrical Storm

By John Dillon

One of the paradigms in the developed world is the reliable supply of electrical power — as much as we want when we want it, 24/7. It’s what our economy and lifestyles are based on, and is fundamental to the standard of living we take for granted.

But there are storm clouds on the horizon, gathering largely because of the inability of electrical generation capacity to keep up with demand. It now can take a decade or more to get a site license for a new power plant no matter how it generates power, and other existing power plants are reaching the end of their design lifetimes. Yet demand for power continues unabated.

According to AFCOM’s Data Center Institute (DCI), 90 percent of all businesses will experience a significant electrical power interruption by 2010, and one in four of these outages will result in an appreciable interruption in business. Electricity conservation will be one of our only options in heading off this challenge.

In the desktop engineering world, with our multicore architectures, larger working memory requirements, large displays and disk drive arrays, the real electricity hog in a computing system is the power supply. A Typical AC/DC converter achieves only 74 percent efficiency at best. And with the combination of DC/DC converters and onboard power regulators that make up the rest of the power-delivery system, more than half of the energy drawn from the AC outlet is wasted, much of it in heat.

On July 20, 2007, we all gained a clear path forward to help address this power-supply problem. On that day, the EPA’s Energy Star 4.0 guidelines for computing systems — including desktop and portable PCs and technical workstations — went into effect. These standards mandate that computing system power-supply units achieve a minimum efficiency of 80 percent across rated loads from 20 percent to 100 percent to gain certification. This efficiency bar will be regularly raised in succeeding years, reaching 90 percent minimum efficiency by 2011. International Data Corporation projects that by 2010 this initiative alone will save the annual output of up to 20 coal-fired power plants, equal to 54 million tons of carbon dioxide or the annual emissions of 11 million cars.

We expect Energy Star-certified computing systems with power supplies rated at up to 375 Watts to begin appearing on the market almost immediately. Power components at this rating are readily available, although they will result in a premium of about $30 per system. While such desktops may be appropriate for entry- or mid-level technical computing applications, it will be some time for high-performance systems with power requirements of 1,000 Watts or more to achieve Energy Star certification — but they will almost certainly follow by 2008.

While waiting to put the new Energy Star desktops into your purchasing cycle, remember that power interruptions are still on the horizon for nearly everyone. So take a look at uninterruptible power supplies for critical systems and put a crisis management plan in place to minimize the impact of a power loss on your business.

John Dillon is acting managing editor of Desktop Engineering magazine and has worked in the desktop computing and MCAD industries for more than 30 years. You can send comments about this subject to DE-Editorsmailto:[email protected].