Part Two: The Electric Grid—Now and in the Future

Jun 18, 2007 3:06 PM
By Lou Pechi, President, STRATA-Strategic Advisors, San Diego

This use will be possible if PHEV owners can leave their parked vehicles plugged in during the daytime. Returning some of their energy back to the grid — when energy rates are highest — may earn vehicle owners some income that offsets the cost of charging their vehicles.

Still another trend concerns some very large consumers of power, who are moving their facilities to locations with access to cheap power. In the web infrastructure, power delivery to server farms and data centers is now a bottleneck, and electricity costs heavily impact operating costs. Consequently, companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are flocking to areas with cheap power like bees to honey.

According to recent Dutch newspaper reports, a massive new server farm capable of holding 100,000 servers is being built in the Eemshaven (Eems Harbor). This farm will have access to 30 MW of power, mostly coming from a huge power plant that is just a stone’s throw away.

Google is currently building a data center server farm on the Columbia River (approximately 80 miles from Portland), where it’ll be near a hydroelectric power source. This server farm consists of a supercomputer with more than 6000 processors and is approximately the size of two football fields. Google is also planning to build a big data center in North Carolina for pretty much the same reasons: accessibility and low cost of power.

Yahoo and Microsoft are not far behind. They are spending billions in the Pacific Northwest to build out their web infrastructure. Microsoft recently broke ground on a 1.4-million-sq-ft campus in Quincy, Wash., close to hydroelectric power.

"If I saved just $10 in the operation of each of those servers, that's $10 million per year," says Greg Papadopolous, CTO of Sun Microsystems, in a recent Fortune magazine interview. "So, how much would you be willing to invest in order to save $10 per server?”

Up until now, power-supply designers concentrated mainly on designing devices that convert higher ac voltages to stable low dc voltages. Such devices perform these tasks at ever-increasing efficiencies and are capable of intelligently communicating with each other to provide higher-reliability power conversion. But based on the recent developments in grid usage, future designs will provide the added design challenges of converting low dc voltages to the high ac voltages required to feed the grid. And due to the complexity and multitude of remote locations, they will have to do so very intelligently.

With the Internet, datacom and telecom stoking the fires of the electric grid, the need for ever-increasing uptime, local power generation and the untethering of various applications from the grid, those working in power electronics are in for a wild ride into the future. Are you ready to meet the challenge? Send your comments to me at pechil@sbcglobal.net.

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