Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

Reading Now: Free Ride by Robert Levine

 

Okay, this has nothing to do with energy efficiency, IT, or data centers, except in the most peripheral way, but given the debate this week regarding SOPA and the government's efforts to address appropriate and fair use of copyrighted material, I thought it worth a review.

Free Ride is a great read! Mr. Levine describes the fundamental battle between the high tech and communications industries on one hand and media companies and copyright holders on the other.

With chapters covering the music industry, newspapers, movies, and books, we get a clear picture that the current model will not hold: while content delivery companies certainly drive innovation and provide a valuable channel, media companies, artists, and other producers of content will certainly fail in the long term if a means of providing them reasonable earnings for their efforts aren't established.

And while the content delivery companies were able to mount a surprising "grass roots" puch this week to counterbalance whatever sway traditional media companies have over the legislative process, I can't say I'm at all confident that a reasonable solution can be found - at least in the legislative arena. (Lawyers, however, will be well-employed.)

Have we already passed the point of no return? Have we conditioned ourselves to view content as free and copyright as something to be ignored?

The US entertainment industry is our leading exporter. If we don't respect the fair use of content here, how can we ask foreign nations to do the same? And how can we preserve a free press if it isn't financially sustainable? These are crucial issues for us as a nation and society, in my view.

As the subtitle suggests, Free Ride includes suggestions for how we might establish a fair use system that keeps content generation alive, and I hope it can form the basis for a meaningful accomodation between industries that show no sign of mutual cooperation.

 

Reading Now: Collapse by Jared Diamond

I must confess I was wary of delving into Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, as I was never able to plow through to the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I'm glad I worked through this one though, even if it was a few years after publication, as Mr. Diamond has added to my world view of environmental issues beyond my extensive reading about climate change.

Here, for both ancient societies and our current global community, he describes how societies have failed to manage natural resources to such an extent that they completely fail.

I highly recommend the work, though I would steer people to read the Prologue, maybe just the section on Easter Island in Part Two, the chapters on China and Australia in Part Three, and all of Part Four, where he discusses practical lessons that can be applied based on the analyses of each collapsed or collapsing society.

There is no explicit discussion of energy resources in the book (though it does come up in the discussion of China and Australia), but it isn't at all difficult to apply the thinking around resource depletion to the energy sector. 

In summary, a challenging read in terms of scholarly tone and sobering conclusions, but worth the high praise it has received.

Reading Now: Hot by Mark Hertsgaard

I can't recommend this work highly enough, because Mark Hertsgaard focuses not solely on climate change mitigation efforts, but more importantly on the adaptation that will be required regardless of the success or failure of mitigation strategies.

I've read abundant commentary on how we must reduce the carbon output of our societies, and of course am a huge proponent of energy efficiency improvements as one slice of that puzzle.

But what struck me is that even if we successfully reduce our carbon emissions to sustainable levels tomorrow, we still face climate change that is already "locked in" from previous activities. 

That climate change will include no small measure of sea level rise (at least two feet based on conservative estimates, and perhaps much more), weather disruptions (mega-storms and changes in rainfall patterns), and potential water and food supply crises.

So we have two immense challenges, not one, and the alternative is "suffering" in Hertsgaard's calculus. We are going to loose land, more people are likely to go hungry, and mass migration will occur - some of this is going to happen even if we are nominally successful at mitigation and adaptation.

For my own part, the book reminded me to double-down on my commitment to finding sustainable solutions for water supply in my community, including the conservation, recharge, and reuse measures we've been considering for some time now.  I'm also meeting this week with our Resource Conservation District to better understand how the rise in San Francisco Bay levels will affect the southern shore of the Sonoma Valley, and what we plan to do to prepare for that.

In summary, Hot is a thought-provoking work, using compelling examples of climate change adaptation strategies from around the globe. It's well worth adding to your reading list.

 

Reading Now: The Price Of Everything

Finished this breezy book late last night, adding it to my growing shelf of books on everyday economics.

And I don't mean "breezy" as in lack of substance, but rather as a compliment to the tone and readability of the work. Author Eduardo Porter really nails a nonfiction style that pushes references and citations to a Notes section in the back, allowing you to focus clearly on the material.

The introduction and first chapter of the book start you off on familiar ground, explaining the way prices are set for goods in open markets (and it's not as simple as balancing supply and demand, when confounding factors like inefficient market information is taken into account).

Then we were off into broader territory, discussing the implications of cost allocations (and prices) of Life, Happiness, Culture, and Faith. His discussion of how we often see prices set at "free", and react to them despite hidden or implied costs, was enlightening.

The concluding chapters cover very interesting ground: how participation in organized religion is grounded in imposing costs of entry, and how leading economists are evaluating how much we might decide to spend today to fend off the effects of global climate change.

 

Reading Now: The Master Switch

I'm not at all sure I can offer cogent commentary that says something new about this work - check out this review in the New York Times, and their interview with author Tim Wu.

His descriptions of the rise and fall of communications and entertainment monopolies in the last century were certainly interesting, but I think he could have limited them solely to the story of the telephone industry to support his final conclusions.

The last part of the book is where the meat is, certainly given Professor Wu's prominent voice in the debate over net neutrality, and his recent assignment as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission.

His comparison of Google and Apple and their respective business models is insightful, comparing the commitment to openness promulgated by Google (albeit with complete disruption of content generation and copyright) and the "walled garden" approach of Apple (yes, beautiful equipment but no naughty pictures).

On the basis of his analysis, I'b be tempted to buy Apple stock and short Google, despite wishing it to go the other way. I'm also left wondering how other players (notably Facebook and cloud services heavyweights like Amazon and Microsoft) will fit into the picture. And what will become of the "pipes and wires" players like Comcast and AT&T, who still have tremendous market power?

I'm also interested in the lack of parallels with the energy utility industry, which seems to have been largely locked in place at the beginning of the last century. Absent some recent mergers, there are very few players that span state boundaries. And despite the perpetual promise of new energy technologies, including the latest smart grid landscape, we haven't seen anything come along to truly change the utility business at it's very core.

Perhaps the lesson from the telecomm industry is that regulatory change is more important than technical disruptions, and I can certainly see that in the utility area. I can point to any number of rate and tariff policies that make distributed and self-generation onerous, often to the detriment of the environment and perhaps even our energy system security.

For example, I know of a fuel cell company that is selling into the large home market, where customers are paying as much as fifty cents per kilowatt-hour due to their high use. That market is good, but small, and could be wiped away in a pen stroke if the rate structure is changed (like a move to real-time pricing, or an abolition of what are called "baseline" rates in California).

That's obviously a small-scale issue, but it is emblematic of how regulatory policies drive market behavior rather than the fundamental merits of disruptive technology.

Oh, and by the way, a hearty endorsement of The Master Switch.

 

 

Reading Now: Best Technology Writing 2010

I've been reading this book series for the past four years, and always find an engaging mix of articles regarding technology issues for the year.

This edition was no exception, though as the editor, Julian Dibbell, notes in his introduction, the essays are heavily weighted towards all things digital, despite his efforts to seek out writing on other technologies.

There are two articles that expressly deal with data centers: Douglas Fox's Thinking Machine (which I have commented on already), and Vanessa Grigoriadis' Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?.

Ms. Grigoriadis touches on Facebook's server footprint, though she feels it pales in comparison to Microsoft's Quincy WA data center, for example. I'm not sure that is really accurate now that Facebook is commissioning their data center in Oregon, which has about the same load as Microsoft's center - about 40 MW.

In any event, if you're looking for a compendium of articles to keep you current across a variety of technologies, this series is an excellent place to start.

Reading Now: From Poverty To Prosperity

Are you ready for Economics 2.0? I wasn't really, not having classical training in economics, but rather dabbling as an amateur, reading books like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist.

Messrs. Kling and Schulz have produced a truly fascinating collection of essays and interviews with the leading economists in the world, challenging conventional wisdom and positing a more inclusive vision of how economic systems truly work.

The underlying theme of the material is that standard economic theory does not properly account for the positive forces of innovation and creativity, nor the negative factors of bad governance and social practices.

I would recommend the book for anyone in the IT/Silicon Valley/smart grid/venture capital/entrepreneur space, as it will confirm your perspectives of how important innovation and creativity are to the success of any given economy. There is a fair amount of discussion of developing economies like India and China, as well as a timely review of credit markets, using the housing bubble/mortgage security meltdown as an example.

The Economist: The data deluge

Snagged a copy of The Economist at my club the other day, caught by the cover, which promoted a special report on "the data deluge". (Free to read on-line, copies available by online subscription and as reprints.)

Although the series of articles does not drill down to data centers and the infrastructure needed to store and analyze the flood of "big data", I can't but highly recommend the report to get a high level understanding of this ground-changing phenomenon.

The opening, introductory article, "Data, data everywhere" fascinates, as does the accompanying sidebar "All too much", which explains data units. We're all talking in Petabytes right now, but they have already defined a Yottabyte, which they say is "currently too big to imagine"!

I have been telling audiences for some time that the explosion in data will result in a focus on energy-efficient storage technologies - like MAID arrays and de-duplication. In my view, this will be the next big focus for data center efficiency, and groups like SNIA and their green storage initiative are only just getting ahead of the curve.

What I'm Reading Now

 (Nothing at all to do with utilities or the IT industry.)

A quick read, but then again, this would have a made a better long-form magazine article rather than a book.

The bulk of the narrative features the author relating experiences arranging for soap products to be manufactured in China for the US market. An interesting story but the travails and challenges become a little repetitious.

The nugget is this: industry in China can certainly manufacture goods cheaply, and they will almost make things for the US market without making a profit, as long as they can copy intellectual property. The money to be made is from copying formulations and products and selling them elsewhere in the world where margins are much higher.

A cautionary tale regarding protecting intellectual property...