You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘energy’ tag.
You probably think I’m going to talk about how IT shops have to reign in spending given our current economic forecast. But I’m not. I’m actually commenting on a recent article out of Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania has begun a major effort to cut electricity use, requiring the state’s 11 utilities to not only stop power usage from rising, but to cut it starting in 2011.
How would you like to be a company with a datacenter located in the Philly area right now? If you are a datacenter company you need to start making plans to get out of Pennsylvania. The problem is politicians get warm fuzzy feelings about these kinds of efforts and don’t understand the collateral damage. What if New York tells businesses they are going to start cutting power generation? Or California? Or Minnesota? I know that my business would be seriously impacted.
You can’t grow businesses — especially IT businesses — today without increasing power. I agree that conservation and energy efficiency are good things. But we can’t conserve our way out of an economic downturn. We have to build our way out of it with increased business productivity, sales, and yes power.
I wrote an article in my company’s blog 6 months ago questioning “green” policy efforts. I’ve been doing some more thinking about this subject lately as I’ve come across articles about taxing energy producers to offset global warming.
Let’s think about this logically.
Energy is required to innovate. Physicists need to run simulations on grid supercomputers. Large disk systems are required to store testing data. Email and collaboration tools are required to coordinate project teams. All of these activities require power.
As you increase the cost of power you increase the cost to innovate. Increasing the cost of innovation will likely slow innovation and decrease the number of companies pursuing innovation.
I believe we should focus on decreasing the cost of energy versus building an artificial energy market using tax credits or carbon caps. What we have today is a situation where government is manipulating the energy market to force changes in energy production and costs.
I agree that we should minimize our impact to the planet by reducing waste. I want to leave my children a cleaner world than my grandparents left me (which actually won’t be hard to do). But making it harder to innovate and solve energy production problems at a time we need it most is kind of like cutting off our nose to spite our face. I would rather increase pollution over the next 10 years and keep energy costs low if that meant we could find a longterm energy solution faster.
Many proponents of artificially inflating the cost of energy believe that this will spur change in the market. I agree that this will create change: even more companies moving manufacturing and operations to countries like China and India that are building power plants like mad. But even if you believe that artificially increasing energy costs will drive companies to look for new forms of energy you have to make a big bet: new and cheaper forms of energy will be found.
Maybe instead of creating a carbon trading system people should be buying stock in companies that are researching new forms of energy production. At least they would be putting their money where their mouth is. They could be part of the solution versus becoming a barrier.
