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)