Friday, August 18, 2006

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS (PART 4)

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS
& MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS
(Last Part of the Series)



CONCLUSION

IMPLICATIONS TO THE ELECTRIC POWER INDUSTRY


The implications of this story to the electric power industry are obvious:

1) The Need for new generation capacity;
2) The Need for new transmission capacity;
3) The Need for upgrades to distribution systems;
4) The Increased role for distributed generation; and
5) The Possible revisions to existing tariffs to recover upgrades & redundancy costs
.

All the above are financially, socially and politically very difficult to achieve. The distribution upgrades and new generation capacity requirements to include redundancy created by the New Economy, raises the question of whether existing tariffs and policies are sufficient to recover the huge investments or funding required.

But why worry? The rapid growth of the Internet data center sector has not affected the Philippines. It’s California’s or USA’s problem.

But then, there has already been IT Parks sprouting all over in the country (Cebu City included) - hyping to the world that these are the future IT hubs in Asia. And the Philippines being renown of its IT professionals would not become exceptions to the quest of other Internet Hotel sites. Should we forego these opportunities? In Cebu’s Ayala Center and IT Park, multi-national IT heavy companies are now populating there with thousands of employment opportunities given to Cebu, other Visayas and Mindanao professionals. And Call Centers now abound the city and high rise office buildings have shown their might in this part of the country. Economy in Cebu has obviously risen as can be seen in modern world-class malls that we have now. Consequently, the Visayan Electric Company registers a dramatic rise in load growth recently way ahead as compared to national average of 7% per year. These are indications of the effects of IT in our social lives in Cebu.

It may not be good to be dreaming but to me, there’s no escape from these opportunities.

IMPLICATIONS TO THE ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS

The other reason why I’m sharing this piece in this conference is that, we electrical engineers must be the first ones to be aware of what’s going on outside the country, electrically. We should know what Internet Hotels are all about and how power systems have to be fitted to IT environments, especially in modern buildings. This will surely help us Filipino engineers in our journey to become world-class technocrats.

In this conference there will be sessions on Power Advocacy. We must realize gentlemen that the Power Advocacy that we shall be talking about are all addressed to the serious brink of power shortfall we are facing today - reminiscent to the black-outs in the 1990’s. This shortfall however is only referring to existing & the feared but foreseen loads, not the future such as described in this paper.

Thank you and good morning…

Doods A. Amora, PEE

Thursday, August 17, 2006

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS (PART III)

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS
(Third of a Series)


II) THE MODERN OFFICE BUILDING

Let us now look at modern office buildings. Although not so power hungry as the Internet Hotels, the new computer age has also brought along the much needed transformation in the power system landscape that the design of office building wants to achieve. Computer loads are special as they require special treatment, too. They also generate harmonics that makes power systems not only dirty but also cause to reflect more loads into the system. As they themselves are vulnerable to system disturbances they help create, they therefore need to be isolated. These special pieces of office equipment even have special plugs thus needing special outlets. But then in the past and even in the present time, these special loads are not getting the attention they deserve from electrical designs.

Traditionally, computers & peripherals are not recognized as loads with “new identity”. They are just considered as part of the general purpose receptacles usually provided by traditional designs. But then, recent experiences show that computers and electronics equipment in offices now eat up more power than the traditional “plug-in” & appliance loads.

Using load densities intended for GPR’s (general purpose receptacles) with the thinking that computer and IT loads are part of it; is ‘highly argueable’ for reasons that the load densities recommended by the Electrical Code for GPR’s were established long before the advent of computers. Moreover, IEEE recommends that these loads shall have dedicated 3-wire single phase circuits, home-running to dedicated 3-phase, 5-wire panelboards, to be fed by the so-called PDU’s (Power Distribution Units) and to be served by dedicated delta-wye isolating transformer with a minimum factor of 173% in sizing system components to address harmonics.

THE OFFICE COMPUTER LOAD DENSITY*
Modern corporate offices today are expected to be replete with office computers and peripherals that would fill up 85% to 90% of the entire office desks of the building. But alas, the most recent PEC or NEC hasn’t established yet load densities for office computers & peripherals.

It has been learned that today, authorities & experts in the USA are still in the process of surveying or making census on usages of computers in offices. But then, even though load densities for computer loads in offices are not yet available in the present Electrical Code, power allocation for office IT equipments has to be inputted in any office building design. Otherwise then, will be the frantic call for additional power centers.

Researches made in the internet resulted in a number of internationally published technical papers that revealed that for corporate office buildings, an average density of 9 to 10 computer units per 1,000 sq. ft. These translate to about one unit per 100 sq ft or, say “one unit per 9.3 sq. m”. The same surveys say that in addition to the computer unit, about 1.3 peripheral units (printers, scanners, multi-function electronic devices, etc) are also seen as typical installations on a 9.0 sq. m office area. (*See Reference Paper: Energy Analysis Department, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720, USA).

If a 400 va load density is assigned per 9.0 sq m, a 30 - 40 va load density per sq m is a reasonable assumption. For Call Centers, a load density of some 50 to 60 va per square meter is seen reasonable for operation areas. These are on top of the traditional building loads.

In other words, by general estimation, new Office Buildings must have about 25% to 35% additional loads for computers & electronic devices on top of traditional building load; that is, depending on the behavior of building clientele’s loads. Or a shift in load densities: from 110–120 va/sq m to 140-150 va/sq m. But these are just approximations, there’s no substitute to focused design computations.

POWERING COMPUTERS & GROUNDING METHODS
The last subject that I would like to share is how IT loads are fitted into the power system of the building– and grounding is the number one concern.

Ninety percent (90%) of the problems with ITE (Information Technology Equipments) installations are internal to the facility; only 10% are related to conditions on the utility electric service. Importantly, 75% of the problems arising within a facility are related to grounding - making proper and adequate grounding the single most important factor in reliable ITE system performance. In powering IT environments, the most recommended system configuration is the Three-Phase Five Wire System which could either be TN-S or TT 5-Wire schemes by choice as seen in Figures on screen. And there’s no way that the delta-delta or the wye-delta ungrounded systems are recommended installations.

On the other hand, the increasing population of non-linear loads in buildings such as UPS’s, controlled rectifiers, variable frequency drives (typical for elevators), computers and PLC’s are producing harmonics that distort the sinusoidal waveform of the power system. Ironically, these Information Technology Equipment or ITE’s are the ones that are fragile to these disturbances they themselves help create. But note that the Computer & Business Equipment Manufacturers Association of America (CBEMA) in a paper on power quality states, that 75% of the problems with perceived power quality problems are actually grounding problems. According to Messrs: Warren Lewis and Frederic Hartwell of Electrical Construction & Maintenance magazine in its February 1996 issue, they wrote: “a proper grounding system is the essential foundation for any other refinements that enhance power quality through reduction of harmonics. Without such a foundation, any sophisticated attempts to improve power quality will likely prove to be temporary, perhaps lasting only until the next thunderstorm.” Would the popular TVSS (Transient Voltage Surge Suppressor) work in ungrounded systems?

(To be concluded...)

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS
(Second of a Series)


INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN TODAY’S MODERN LIVES

Information Technology is fast becoming the new utility of the 21st century. They are the engines that are fueling the phenomenal growth of the Internet Economy, now known as the ‘New Economy’. Today’s data centers are highly secure, highly reliable, and highly expensive, often window-less, bullet proof fortresses built to move information with maximum efficiency. Internet has become the international access to an enormous amount of information from the simple telephone line.

While the internet and e-commerce continuously showing dramatic growth, over 350 million people were estimated “on-line” worldwide in 2005, with the numbers expected to grow to 400 million by 2006. Retail e-commerce in the US alone was conservatively estimated to be over $ 100 billion in 2005. And Internet Hotels or Data Centers are important players in the equation.

THE INTERNET HOTELS

A Data Center is a sort of a hotel which houses (by rental, by lease or by ownership) all the functions and services of highly advanced technologies, permanently guaranteeing users (Internet Service Providers, Application Services Providers, Telecommunications, etc.) entire satisfaction in terms of security, dependability and reliability 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Internet Hotels are homes to all sorts of Internet-related companies, through whose servers, routers and modems flow the bits and bytes of modern e-commerce. Internet Hotels can be small as a three-storey building or as big as medium-rise towers.

Running the gamut from Internet hotels that host computer services for Internet service providers to telecom carrier hubs, co-location centers, server farms, and private enterprise data centers, these world-class facilities are custom-designed with raised floors, sophisticated environmental control systems, seismically braced racks, and redundant power systems to ensure failsafe site performance of 24/7.

THE TASK OF THE NEW GENERATION ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS

What does it mean to the electrical engineers who are here in this conference?

The engineering community now faces the task of selecting the correct power-system topology for data centers & other IT environments. By evaluating popular power-system topologies, there has emerged a shift in paradigm as deviations from the traditional way of systems designing has dramatically changed.

There are two things here that are worthwhile mentioning and I would like to invite your attention again to the following: a) The Internet Hotels or Data Centers; and, b) The Modern Corporate Office Buildings.

There are many things in common to these facilities but one of them is what I would like to highlight: IT. And the IT revolution has affected the very onus of electrical systems designing…and we, electrical engineers must be the first ones to be aware of. For instance…,

HOW MUCH LOAD WILL DATA CENTERS ACTUALLY REQUIRE?
In Europe in 2001 (the start of Internet explosion in Europe), installed power (connected load) for Internet Hotels had been established at 1.5 kVA/sq meter, excluding back up devices, and seemed all set to double within the next ten years. In only four years time (2006), the envisioned doubling of loads has now nearly reached. From this experience, the global power required to supply these buildings is thus appreciated to be very great and its timetable short.

Particularly electric intensive, The ‘Internet Hotels’ in the USA is now considered as a new ‘power consumer sector’ with usage per square foot at least 10 to 15 times more than typical office buildings when fully built-out. High Density Data Centers (HDDC’s) are ‘Class 1 Clean Rooms’ needing systems to remove particulate matter and cooling for the removal of heat. According to Mike Hellmann’s paper entitled, “Smarter Ways to Bring Power to Critical Power Facilities” as published by CyberTech Inc., dated Dec 19, 2002, he says, “depending on the nature of the IT equipment and its packing density, connected loads in these environments can range from 100 watts to a stunning 300 watts per square foot in the USA today”. With an average load density factor of 200 watts per square foot or 2,150 watts per sq meter, that is, in other words; 2.53 kVA per sq meter — that’s a lot of concentrated power imaginable.

HIGH RELIABILITY REQUIREMENTS
As Mr. Hellmann continues, “in this New Economy environment, the appetite for power is rivaled only by an insatiable need for reliability. In a world where minutes of downtime can translate to losses in the millions of dollars; when it comes to delivering power, the guarantee of reliability and capacity is a leading priority. As a result, Internet Hotels are amongst the most power-hungry of today’s critical power environments”.

Internet Hotels have built their businesses based on the assurance of plentiful power capacity and ironclad reliability. Assuring the reliability of the incoming power source means installing multiple sources of incoming power with dual utility feeds, usually from different substations or power utility grids that are interconnected to the facility’s main systems via circuit breakers. Dual unit substations are then used to step down and deliver power to the server cages, racks, cabinets and server farms. Thus, if one power source or high voltage line goes down, the system can switch to the redundant feed in a fraction of a cycle—a matter of milliseconds—without losing any electrical load. Likewise, if a transformer fails, the backup system picks up the load instantaneously, notwithstanding the electronic stationary UPS’s and another additional rotary UPS’s. Thus new reliability lingo’s have given rise to the novel terms as: N+1, N+2, N+3 or N+n which speaks for the degree of redundancy.

Powerful servers require high quality and reliable electricity, as electronic equipment cannot tolerate interruptions in electricity for more than a couple hundredths of a second. This translates into a need for an electricity supply that is at least available 99.9999% (also known as “six nines”) of the year. The need for highly reliable electricity is even more acute for the services that Internet Data Centers support. E-commerce firms & e-markets will lose millions of dollars and customers if they fail while transactions are occurring. When electricity is unreliable, web-hosting services, along with other high technology and new economy companies, may choose to relocate.

For instance, the ongoing electricity crisis in California has led many new economy companies to rethink their California operations. Web hosting companies, such as Rackspace, are actively marketing their non-California-based locations to gain new business and steal business from California hosting sites. Thus today, reliability requirements have been elevated from six-nines to nine-9’s (99.9999999%) meaning a downtime of only 30 milliseconds per year. That means colossal investments by the utility companies & Data Center owners for the several layers of costly back-ups & redundancy.

In the data center world, promising and delivering power reliability in the “high nines”—doesn’t come cheap. Requiring a continuous source of high-quality uninterrupted power, critical Internet infrastructures must rely on internal power quality protection systems. The caliber of these systems is often a defining factor for users who increasingly feel the ill effects of power-related problems in millions of dollars per incident.

The ‘Reliability Nines’ are new measurements for service dependability, consistency and trustworthiness packaged in official terms as reliability. To compare with other types of services, the following new global standards may give some insights & discoveries for us here in this conference:

1) Homes: Three 9’s (99.9%), 9 hours downtime per year
2) Factories/Manufacturing Plants: Four 9’s (99.99%), 59 minutes per year
3) Hospitals, Airports: Five 9’s (99.999%), 5 minutes per year
4) Banks: Six 9’s (99.9999), 32 seconds per year
5) E-Commerce/On-Line Markets: Nine 9’s, 30 milli-seconds per year

A few years ago, a performance of four-9’s by Power Utility companies, (meaning 59 minutes per year downtime) was acceptable. However, in ‘mission-critical’ operations such as e-commerce & e-markets, a reliability of six-9’s (32 seconds downtime per year) is now required of these utility companies. As trade-off, other systems enhancements for redundancy purposes to reach nine-9’s are understood to be of the data center owner’s concern.

HIGH LOAD FACTOR
Internet data centers have high load factors. The ‘always on-line’ nature of the Internet translates into the need for 24/7 operation for companies and services associated with the Internet, especially with regard to servers and storage facilities at Internet data centers. Research on the load behaviors of data centers suggests an almost flat load curve with a load factor of over 95 percent or close to unity.

(to be continued...)

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS

POWERING INTERNET HOTELS
& MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS

By D. A. AMORA, PEE

(First of a Series)

(A Technical Presentation Delivered during the 7th IIEE Visayas Regional Conference held at Waterfront Hotel, Cebu City on August 17, 2006)


INTRODUCTION

A power distributor company in the USA had just finished the construction of a distribution system on a suburban site planned for 5.0 MW. When the infrastructure became ready for use, piles of application for power connection reached an aggregate demand of 45 MW – a staggering 10 times of what was envisioned! In order to accommodate these load applications, the distribution company needed to install additional transformers. But new transformers were not enough, and new feeders were needed. But the new feeders were not enough; they needed to upgrade their network. In the end, the power company put up three additional substations and is posing to build more for redundancy requirements. This is not an isolated case, as this is happening everywhere and every time today in the modern world. The reason? INTERNET HOTELS….

Somewhere at the other side of the globe, a new office tower has just been inaugurated for business. A few months thereafter, the building management became frantic to install additional substation to satisfy clients’ needs. In the end, it was the clients who financed and installed their own power centers in an already cramped location allocated supposedly for electrical services. And this is not even an Internet Hotel, the tower is just an edifice built for corporate office clientele. The building owner or its representative architects did not recognize that today, there are new electrical footprints that has to be dealt with in designing power systems for buildings. Computers, IT peripherals & office electronic equipments and the harmonics they bring – they are not loads in the past, but now are eating more power than that of the traditional plug-in appliance loads. Again, this is not an isolated case. It’s happening anywhere else in the world.

The two scenarios presented above are not simple as they may seem. As they are happening everywhere in the world, the phenomenal appearance of these loads propagates back through systems and will require system-wide upgrades, not only locally but nationally; and even seen to infect globally…

I would therefore like to invite your attention to this piece entitled: “POWERING INTERNET HOTELS & MODERN OFFICE BUILDINGS”.


I) THE INTERNET HOTEL

THE CRITICAL POWER AVAILABILITY

Unknowingly to us, the recent surge in Internet usage has been accompanied by an equally large demand for high-quality power to feed the evolving infrastructure. I say ‘evolving’ because in the USA, Internet power consumption is now growing by the hundreds of megawatts per week—taxing the already stressed electrical grid. One of the reasons is that these power hungry data centers can require up to 10 to 15 times more energy than commercial office space even as newer and more powerful servers & data storage devices are unveiling almost every year.

As the Internet continues toward its ultimate destiny, its criticality and reliability now take the center stage of new importance. In a few years past, we in the Philippines have been hearing of power quality as the number one issue affecting sensitive electronics & IT equipment reliability. Today in the USA, the most critical concern is no longer power quality but power availability when system requirements of Internet Data Centers are emerging almost exponentially, along with the consequences of power interruptions.

For instance in December of 1999 the Puget Sound Energy (see Seattle Puget Sound Business Journal - October 2000 issue), a medium size utility company outside of Seattle, had no requests for electricity to serve sizeable loads. A few months later, in August 2000, they had been receiving requests for 445 MW from data center applicants. By September, the requests had reached 700 MW. Briefly, requests ballooned to over 1,000 MW. In other words, in an almost instantaneous fashion, additional loads reached more than 1,000 MW out of the blue. Capital investments supporting the new system can just be imagined as super-enormous and its urgency mind-boggling. By proportion, this increase of load alone is about the demand of the entire Visayas Grid of the Philippines and that is only for a Seattle suburban area.

Based on a survey in 2001 with 17 localities in the USA (see Broadband Wireless Business Magazine, May & June 2001 issues), in the next 5 years, there will be between 5,000 and 10,000 MW of new electricity demand from data center requests currently on the board. In the other futures, the Internet economy in the USA as a country -- including wireless, personal access devices and growth in the multimedia and entertainment industries -- continues to grow robustly necessitating between 15 gigawatts and 20 gigawatts of additional capacity. That translates to about 150% to 200% of the present total power demand of the Philippines. And that is only ‘additional’ capacity for I.T. centers alone. What’s going on, then?

(To be continued)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AS AN ART

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AS AN ART

The IPSD (Industrial Plant Systems Designer) must be well versed in the art of Project Management. Project Management is defined as "directing nature, quantity and timing of temporarily assembled resources, skills and knowledge to reach specified technical & financial objectives within quality, safety, social & environmental constraints”.

In project management, contractors are the players in the other side of the equation. Regardless of the classification of the contractor, a good project management is the key to the accomplishment of the project at the right quality, most effective cost and on target schedules. Of course, the bottom line of a good project management maybe the realization of the hard-earned profit on the part of the contractor while a nice, safe, operational, built-to-standard edifice, plant or facility that the client envisioned is delivered at the target schedule.

However, the lowest bid is not enough. Clients and their engineers must be quick to identify tell-tale signs if the contractors hired are good ones or not. And ‘standards’ must be in the center stage.

The following are some tips indicating a good & reliable designer or contractor.

1) A good technical design prepared to the highest standards and value creation by the client engineer or its designated designer or project managers. This forms part of the Scope of Work that will make the work commonly clear & understood by constructors.

2) A reliable & realistic cost estimate that leads to a contract price commensurate to the money invested, the efforts and risk involved in undertaking the project,

3) A good team of qualified & experienced technical men assigned in the field.

To orchestrate a project by the client engineer requires depth of understanding of the project. The client must present a clear Scope of Work & Work Specifications, in other words, a clear picture of what the client wants. Scopes of Work must be accompanied with technical plans, layout, diagrams & material specifications to be presented during a pre-bidding conference attended by the contractors all convened at the same time. Remember that contractors will base their bids on a common ground. This common denominator will spell fair play amongst bidders. Lapses must be proactively identified (most common cause of project delays) and should there be changes in plans before the final bidding conference must be covered by bid bulletins with all the players copied.

With a confident house estimate, it would be easy for the client engineer to spot or detect which contractor is gambling on the tightrope. In reality, it's very easy to eliminate the highest bids but it's difficult to ignore the lowest bid. His finance managers and auditors, (usually members of the bidding committee), will haunt him. The client engineer might even be suspected of doing monkey business. The finance guys are looking after the lowest numbers while the technical side is for the engineer to worry.

Experience shows that life would be miserable in a project, if it is started with an incorrect budget. However, most electrical budgets are always born without electrical parents. It just comes out as if, by magic. In the end, quality & standards suffer.

DAA

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

DOODS' SPEECH: 1989 CIT PARANGAL RITES

SPEECH DELIVERED BY ENGR. DOODS A. AMORA ON THE OCCASION OF CIT PARANGAL RITES ’89, HELD AT THE CIT QUADRANGLE, 4:00 PM, MARCH 8, 1989.



(Backgrounder: The Parangal Rites of Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT) is the most solemn & most prestigious commencement ceremonies of the institution. It aims to honor the King or Queen of Engineers for the year - by way of a Julius Caesar-like coronation. The King or Queen of Engineers is one who achieved the highest average grades from first year to fifth year in his/her engineering course, in other words, the best among the best. The Parangal also honors the ‘laude’s’ of the batch and all other honor students graduating for the year. For the record, as a sidebar, Ernie Abunda, the first president of IIEE North Cebu Chapter & PEE of SMC Glass Plant was the King of Engineers for the year 1995.)

“Our beloved President of the Cebu Institute of Technology, Don Rodulfo T. Lizares Sr., Executive Vice President of CIT, Mr. Gregorio L. Escario, Mr. Rodulfo A. Lizares Jr., First Vice President, Dean Achilles Alfafara of the College of Engineering & Architecture, Dean Ariel Jumalon, of the College of Liberal Arts, Atty. Corazon Evangelista Valencia, Dean, College of Commerce, Department Heads, Faculty Members, The Queen of Engineers of CIT batch ’89 and the members of her court, Outstanding Honorees from the College of Commerce and Liberal Arts, parents, graduating students, guests, ladies & gentlemen, good afternoon …..”

“To be a “King or Queen of Engineers” of a leading school of engineering in this country is NOT THE CUP OF TEA of your speaker, and because of that, I have to honestly say, that with contradicting feelings of pride and humility, I accepted your invitation with mental reservation but without purpose of evasion.”

“I take pride to be part & parcel of the CIT PARANGAL ’89 as your guest speaker; in fact, I consider it one of the greatest challenges in my career. To my mind, it is almost an impossible dream to address to a body as august as this –
in an occasion highlighting the beautiful tradition of this prestigious academe – the act of recognizing the cream of the crop – the way of extolling the best among the best in terms of today’s PARANGAL rites.”

“This beautiful tradition had started many years back since the early days in the history of technical education in this part of the country and has continued up to the present days. Since then, the impact of being a King or Queen of Engineers had become a by-word -– it has formed into a monumental legacy that lives up the reputation of CIT as producer of quality engineers. This legacy had been attemptedly imitated by many others schools, but the living imprints of what is CIT, cannot just be obliterated, and that, no engineer in his right mind could ever dare not to recognize.
IBA ANG MAY TATAK CIT, MAY PANGALAN ITO, PARE KO…!”

“In the midst of that pride and enthusiasm that I feel this afternoon, I am at the same time, humbled in the wake of the presence of the Queen of Engineers, the immediate members of her court and the outstanding honorees from other colleges whom I am to give honor today. As I pointed out earlier, to be one of them is not my cup of tea, and that only reminds me of a story I gathered in one of our recent management trainings which runs like this:

"Not every long ago, there was an open market of brains somewhere in this part of the globe. What was being sold in that markets are solely human brains (utak). In one of the display booths, the brain of the famous Albert Einstein sported a price tag of $1,000. The brains of Thomas Edison & other scientists were tagged at $2,000 a piece. Then, in the Filipino section of the market, the brain of the genius, Dr. Jose Rizal commanded a price of $5,000. Together with Rizal’s brain were a bunch of brains labeled “CIT Queen of Engineers & Her Court-Batch 89”, which were priced at $5,000 each (same as Rizal’s). Every prospective buyer seemed satisfied with the pricing scheme except for one unlabelled brain which carried a price tag of $1,000,000. The curious buyers asked the attendant why the brain was incredibly so expensive when it was not even 'labelled'. The attendant replied that the brain was a special one because it was owned by an engineer of San Miguel Corporation, specifically Mandaue Brewery. The owner of the brain even became a guest speaker in one of CIT’s Parangal, the attendant added. So what then if the brain was an SMC engineer? What made it so special?... the buyers insisted.
Then the attendant concluded, this brain is very expensive, because it’s slightly used!"

"There you are… Ladies & Gentlemen… my job this afternoon is therefore not easy. I come here to honor the super stars in this academe when I am not even a moon… But just the same, let me praise the Queen, the members of her court and the honor graduates from the college of Commerce & the College of Liberal Arts, by saying that, you are all polished diamonds outshining over a heap of other gems – the very jewels that our Alma Mater is so proud of. It is indeed my honor too, to be with you in this momentous occasion."

"May I therefore request the audience to give them a big applause of congratulations!"

"But let me ask you this question, who do you think are the happiest and proudest creatures at this peak moment? Is it the school? Is it the honorees themselves? Or is it your boyfriends or girlfriends hiding somewhere amidst the crowd? Let me venture to say, that there can never be any prouder and happier creature today, than the parents of these diamonds we are honoring today. The parents, yes, the unsung heroes, yet the most important ingredient of this testimonial honor. To you, proud parents, we salute to your undying devotion, to your inexhaustible dedication, to your unwaning support and love towards your children. Words can never be sufficient in appropriately describing your sacrifices and heroism."

"To the parents, let us give them our sincerest congratulations!"

"At this point, let me pass on this message to the honorees as well as the graduating students of this institute. Now that you have succeeded in the academe with your mission, goals and objectives, you are now in the position to aspire for greater heights of achievements such as working on your own career paths to mold your own life as professionals as you develop the necessary competence and capability necessary for your journey ahead. You should be ready and willing to demand the best from yourselves as the road to this new dimension of success is narrow and steep upward as you can observe within any corporate working environment. The road is literally littered with people tumbling down, having failed or fallen on their way up. Up the organization ladder, the triangle accommodates only a few at the apex for the best qualified."

"Let us all remember that there is no victory without a struggle and victories should never be subject to contentment, because if they are, your progress stops. You have just passed your first acid test…you’ll have more baptisms of fire later on."

"Everyone must find his route to success. You must possess a certain degree of imagination and vision. You must be able to think ahead – to visualize a plan beyond the immediate present. In other words, look beyond where you are to where you want to be. But you have to work hard to reach it. Again let me say, that you have just made the first mile… and you have much more miles to tackle ahead."

"Let us all remember that as professionals;
it is our responsibility to make this world better than what we found it."

"I wish to say that the Parangal is a venue to honor the cream of the crop. But this honor is not only for them, but to all of you, graduating students of this institute, because you are the best among all others. You are a class by itself."

"I would like to close this speech by giving some food for thought. For the engineering graduates, in case you do not know, a few days from now, you will be starting to practice the oldest profession. I know that not all of you would agree with me when I say that the engineering profession is the oldest profession. Proof…? In the book of Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 3, it says…” When God created the world, He commanded, Let there be light… and there was light.” Does it mean Electrical Engineering? Yes."

"But who runs the boilers & the turbines? Mechanical Engineers? Yes. But who treated & prepared the water? Chemical Engineers? Yes. But who constructed & maintained the buildings? Civil Engineers? Yes. But who provided the statistical efficiency & productivity control charts? Industrial Engineers? Yes. But who maintained the electronics controls & instrumentations? Electronics Engineers? Yes…and the list goes on from computer software to hardware engineers."

"But the list doesn’t end up there, because one would surely ask, who handles the finance? CPA’s & the bankers? Yes. But who handles the education of all of the above? Is it the product of Dean Jumalon’s college? Of course, Yes."

"You see…, everyone has a mission. Even in the academe, from the school itself, to the faculty, down to the last student, we all have roles to play. In CIT, these roles had been played and achieved all these years, from generation to generation without interruption. Do you care to ask why? Because, in CIT, “IBA ANG MAY PINAGSAMAHAN!”

"As I close my piece, may I request everybody to please rise…

At this point, let us congratulate ourselves by giving out our loudest applause….

Thank you very much for your standing ovation…!"


Engr. Dominico A. Amora, PEE
March 8, 1989