On August 14, 2003, shortly after 4:00pm, a massive blackout hit US and Canadian Cities from New York, Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto. 50 million people were without electricity. Elevators, traffic lights, airports and public transportation were down during what should have been the afternoon rush hour.

President Bush said the blackout served as a "wake-up call". Bil Richardson, former Secretary of Energy stated "We have a huge demand for electricity with computers, technology, more people, but we have not fulfilled the infrastructure needed to deal with that new demand," he told Good Morning America today. "In other words, we don't build new transmission lines. The American people in many regions don't want them in their back yard."

A survey by the Yankee group reveled that half of the corporations they researched put their costs of downtime at $1,000 per hour and 9% estimating that the costs were more than $50,000 USD per hour.

A study by the Greening Earth Society claims that 8 percent of all electricity used in the United States goes for powering computers. They claimed that over the next 20 years, this will grow to 50% of the power consumption.

An article by Tes Maniwa in Electornic Design, September2, 2002 stated:

Recently, one industry analyst noted that server farms in Seattle are dissipating as much power as the rest of the Seattle metro area, including the Boeing plants in Everett. Also, 25% of the total cost of their operation is for power and air conditioning. The idea of electronics being a low-cost, environmentally friendly industry is being challenged by the reality that this equipment may be one of the drivers for the rolling West Coast blackouts. This power consumption is transformed to heat, forcing designers to address thermal issues in addition to the other difficulties of creating new designs for ICs and equipment.
The amount of total energy consumed by computers is hotly debated. Some point out that a person shopping over the Internet is conserving energy because they don't have to use a car to do the shopping. Los Almos Labs did a study that puts power consumption by computers at 2 percent.

While today, it is customary for people to shut off their computers as they go home, new distributed computer models suggest we will leave our computers on all the time. Just as we have a power grid where power can be shared between consumers and producers in different regions, grid computing will allow cycles of idle computing to be used off the grid.

An International Company could shift processing power from North America to Asia during off hours or the company could make those computer cycles available to sell over the grid. Grid computing will likely have the impact that computers will stay on all the time.

Today's electricity infrastructure was not designed to power the Internet Economy. Whether computers account for 2% or 8% of the total power consumed in the United Sates, it is a percent that was not factored into the original designers of the electrical grid itself.

During the 1990s, there was a massive explosion of building. Instead of making massive investments in new power plants, power producers agreed to share energy between regions. 20 years ago, the country produced 30% more power than what was needed. as this excess energy gets redistributed to other regions, the reserves are becoming less and less. As energy demand increases, there is less excess energy to put on the grid and as demonstrated the latest blackout, a power surge in one area can take down the entire grid and leave millions of people without power.

Computers and monitors marked with Energy Star are designed to save power. However, they only save power when not in use. One of the problems with Energy Star is it gives people the false sense that they are not wasting energy by leaving a computer on all the time. The typical energy efficient computer, not counting the monitor, consumes from 15 to 40 watts in sleep mode. If you leave our computer on all the time, that means you are using an extra 16 hours a day and another 48 hours a weekend or 3328 hours a year. If we use an average of 25 watts, that means the computer will use 3328 x 25 = 83,200 watts per year just in sleep mode. The same computer uses about 150 watts an hour when operating.

For every watt of heat that each computer generates, it takes two watts of air conditioning to remove that heat. The typical CRT display uses 60 to 90 watts. We will use 60 watts for this exercise. At 8 hour a day and 5 days a week the computer is operational 1,300 hours. The combination of the computer and monitor is about 200 watts of power per hour or 260,000 watts. If we add the air conditioning, this could take as much as 780,000 watts a year per computer during operation and 83,200 watts when in sleep mode. That would be a grand total of 863,200 watts per year per computer. At .10 per killowatt, that is $86.30 cents per computer. An office with 100 computers would pay $8,630.00 for electricity.

NOTE: Running a screen saver means that the computer is not in sleep mode. The fact that the computer is displaying something means that the computer is in active mode and not sleep mode.

Energy efficient desktops and LCD displays can dramatically cut power consumption. An energy efficient desktop will consume about 20 to 30 watts of power. LCD monitors consume from 15 to 20 watts.

Energy efficient desktops are less expensive than laptops, easier to upgrade and allow more flexibility. Laptops are another energy efficient option but they tend to be more expensive than energy efficient desktops and less flexible.