In Search of the Lost Power

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

April 22 was Earth Day.

On that day, summer set in with a bang in northern India. Delhi crossed 40 Celsius, and promptly marked the occasion by starting off those long and frequent power cuts.

At offices and homes across the region, people prepared for the summer.

At my South Delhi home, our power backup died, and we upgraded our inverter's ageing batteries with two large, heavy tubular batteries, setting me back Rs 14k. We went around checking where all we could cut power use, to stretch that battery backup. (We even got our air conditioners serviced, in eternal hope and optimism about power availability.)

At night I found a snazzy marketing pamphlet from our power utility, BSES Rajdhani-“Remember when marketplaces were full of noisy and smelly gensets?” and laughed because the same evening, we'd found our local marketplace teeming with noisy and smelly gensets.

Few countries are immune to outages. US-based Electric Power Research Institute estimates that they cost Americans more than $100 billion a year. (An act signed by President Bush last December makes it US policy to upgrade electricity grids with communications and sensors to create a "Smart Grid" that can avoid power outages, lower emissions, and cut energy consumption).

Two days before Earth Day, a part of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, lost power due to a failure at utility company Eskom. As I write this, the area's been without power for five days. Eskom resorts to scheduled power cuts, and admits these can damage appliances not designed for power interruptions and surges. (At our Delhi home, a new exhaust fan burnt out on Earth Day.)
But India faces an acute power crisis that gets worse each year. For businesses, that means rising power and backup costs, and an urgent focus on power-savings and lower-power equipment.

Prasanto K Roy, president, ICT Pubilsing Group, CyberMedia

Summer gives us time for a pause and a reality check on what we're consuming. Few people in India would worry about overuse of power (or the resulting emissions) if it were not for the shortage of power. That shortage requires forcing us to plan, spending on capex, looking at ways of stretching the battery backup and generator power, and more.

And it gives us a chance to look for 'leakages'.

Old incandescent bulbs are a clear no-no: they'd drain any backup system (yet they dominate the Indian landscape, due to cost). CRT monitors are equally heavy drains and heat sources-each is like switching on a 60 watt bulb in your office. LCDs save you power, letting you stretch your current UPS battery bank, and don't require as much cooling.

And what about PCs left on during the night? Businesses see a third or more of PCs left on.

Our CIO circulated the figures for our company, CyberMedia, on Earth Day. Our 683 computers draw over 200 kW per hour. A sample showed that 30% were left on at night, that's up to 300,000 kW-hours of power going down the drain in a year.

Users aren't going to 'go green' overnight. Greener tech-PCs and displays that suspend on non-use, or D-Link's Ethernet switch powers down port by port-or policies such as powering down segments of the network at night or over weekends (say, everything but the servers) can help.

Like it or not, the summer of 2008 will be racked by power shortage. But think of it as an opportunity-to explore the green side.

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