Tech leaders: Prepare your organization for a new power grid
Source: Patrick Gray · TECH REPUBLIC · | May 20, 2021
How we deliver and consume electricity is changing, and many of the changes are being driven by power-hungry technology companies.
Source: Image: pan demin/Shutterstock
Electricity has largely been taken for granted by people who are several generations removed from the novelty of replacing candles and oil lamps with the magic of electric light bulbs. Instead, we plug our devices into a wall outlet and generally don't question the fact that safe, cheap, generally reliable power will flow as long as it's needed and the bill is paid on time.
However, everything from how we generate, consume and even think about electrical power is changing. The WSJ recently featured an article whose title—The Electrification of Everything—nicely sums up shifts in consumption. While rarely considered, except perhaps when searching for another outlet in an overloaded surge protector, the number of electrical devices in our homes and businesses has skyrocketed. Moreover, many of those devices are connected to networks that also demand power, which deliver services from massive data centers that consume volumes of power that rival small cities. Add to this growing consumption an accelerating trend of electric vehicle adoption, and many localities and states mandating electric heating and cooking in new homes, and it suddenly becomes a bit more challenging to take the lowly wall outlet (and the infrastructure behind it) for granted.
Rethinking the ultimate utility
For tech leaders, it might seem like these changes are the utility's problem, and that power companies will "figure it out" and keep pumping electrons as they always have. However, rapidly increasing demand is coinciding with electrical infrastructure that's quickly reaching the end of its capacity and, in many cases, the end of its service life. From a near-term practical perspective, California-style rolling blackouts and an increased focus on reducing power consumption could become commonplace. Most IT shops with on-site infrastructure have power backup as a matter of course, but when was the last time you audited your generation and battery capacity, checked and refreshed backup batteries and simulated an outage?