Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

Utility Facility Charges: A Primer

A question came in today from a consultant pursuing energy efficiency opportunities in IT - thought it a good policy to answer here in the blog so that others can access the information. Edited question:

"Assuming a data center is over built with regard to its electricity capacity, does the customer have to secure a fixed amount of power from the utility upfront and pay up for it even if it isn't used?  Or does the utility company charge you based upon a variable rate on the energy you have used?"

If you ask a utility to install a given amount of electric capacity, to what extent are you "on the hook" for it if you don't end up using it all? The answer is "to a large degree"!

Utilities make capital investments in the form of distribution (and sometimes transmission) capacity based on customer load projections. If those loads don't materialize, there are tariffs in place that allow the utility to bill for their costs of ownership of the facilities. This arrangement is typical for any commercial load of appreciable size, and takes effect if energy use is below a preset level.

Uptime Symposium Presentation

I enjoyed attending the Uptime Symposium last week in New York City, and will post some thoughts and reactions throughout this week.

In the meantime, I had lots of requests for copies of my presentation deck "The Carbon Content of Power: A Primer for Data Center Managers":

Download Uptime 5 17 10

While the content did draw some good discussion, and I did get positive feedback, I must apologize for delivery that was not up to my standards. 

In any event, the key messages are that the information sources for carbon content of utility-delivered power are very rudimentary - you should be sure to drill down to the level of your specific utility provider to get a good conversion factor.

Further, because data centers have essentially a unity load factor, managers are likely to overstate the carbon footprint of their facilities because the carbon content of electricity can be heavily time dependent.

If you are a consulting client of mine and would like to learn more, contact me for a copy of my latest white paper on this subject.

SMUD Data Center Course Recap & Self-Gen Discussion

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District held it's third annual Data Center energy efficiency course and vendor event yesterday at their energy center/headquarters, with my colleagues Mark Hydeman of Taylor Engineering and Ray Pfeifer of Synapsense sharing course presentation duties with me.

Mark and I significantly improved our respective slide decks, which I think contributed to a much smoother overall session compared to the one we delivered at Pacific Gas and Electric's Energy Center just two weeks ago.

As always, we pored over the course evaluations at the end of the day to see what improvements we could make. Although the scores were uniformly high, we were disappointed in the relative dearth of written comments.

One set did set me back a little. A participant indicated that he thought we had given short shrift, and even outright dismissed, the applicability of on-site generation to serve data centers.

District Utility Services - Great Idea for Data Centers?

If you're interested in the alternative energy space, I recommend hitting the earth2tech site from time to time for news on everything from clean power to the smart grid. It's particularly good for news on start ups and M&A activities.

In a report today, Justin Moresco talks about Veola Energy North America's purchase of a district cooling system in Baltimore.

Two things struck me about the story. 

First, this is only the second district cooling plant that I have heard of in the US - the other is in downtown Austin, TX. I've been wondering why there aren't more district heating and cooling plants, and why utilities aren't all over this as a business opportunity (both the Baltimore and Austin systems are run by local utilities).

It seems to me that utilities have only limited opportunities for growth, and many of those opportunities are hampered by regulatory constraints.  Getting into appliance sales, leasing, and servicing, for example, is generally out of bounds for this reason. But building utility infrastructure, delivering steam, hot water, or chilled water, looks a lot like traditional utility business that a regulator could understand and allow.