Energy Crisis, Version 2.0

The price of oil may never reach $50 a barrel. Yet fears about energy, anticipated global warming and climate change will certainly affect IT.

James Woudhuysen looks at how there seems to be no limit to the amount of nervous energy that is to be invested in energy policy, while IT is devoted to creating the image of impending climatic disaster.

Version 2.0 of the world's energy crisis is strictly different from the original OPEC inflation of 1973/4. For if evil Saudi sheikhs were never really the prime cause of that episode, saint-like environmentalists were certainly its main effect. Today, 30 years on, Green anxieties about energy are likely to have a bigger influence on servers and storage systems than the cost of a kilowatt itself.

Back in the era of Version 1.0, Ernst Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful and Forrester and Meadows reported for the Club of Rome on The Limits to Growth. Visionary though these authors looked then, the dubious ideas they bequeathed are the subject of complete social consensus now.

No IT professional can afford to ignore that. For all their complaints about being in the wilderness, environmentalists today push at an open door.

The USA's alleged addiction to oil is widely indicted as the ultimate source of bad behaviour in Iraq. Pricewaterhouse Coopers reports that the world's utilities may not be able to avoid power station blackouts. Rising fuel prices on the roads and in the air will be matched by rising fuel taxes.

Now everyone must feel guilty, personally do their bit to lower UK energy demand, pull their weight in the conservation of energy, and behave responsibly every moment of the day.

If not, a Second Flood will engulf us, just as global warming overwhelms the US in Hollywood's latest computer generated blockbuster by Roland Emerich, The Day After Tomorrow.

Global warming is no problem, but the fear of it is. So what does this sense of impending doom mean for IT chiefs?

Already, firms such as American Power Conversion make clever software that predicts and maps all the convection currents that will surround your hot data centre. But the orthodoxy of energy demand management will mean much more than switching off monitors at night.

First, IT will work closely with building management systems. It will be used to sense office temperatures, moderate heat and light in line with staff activity, control emergency generators on-site, and run heat recovery - not least, from IT equipment.

Second, the energy components of hardware production, operation and disposal will be measured to death. All aspects of the IT procurement supply chain will subjected to obsessive energy analysis.

Third, while broadband has made telework more possible, spreading congestion charges and road tolls will make it much more politically correct.

Last, the design and performance of IT hardware will also come to emphasise new criteria. Low weight in transport, more efficient and thus more expensive transformers, an end to screensavers, exotic power management software: all these will come.

Are such measures, however, a rational way forward? Well: remember that New Labour wants British firms to get into the fun business of trading carbon emissions even faster than their rivals in the rest of the EU will. Meanwhile, Downing Street will rely on natural gas from Russia - an unimpeachable guarantor of energy security! And No 10 will also rely on the building of windmills, which are an intermittent source of power.

Design tokenism and global warming

But couldn't IT assist the design and development of more and better power stations? Couldn't IT be brought to bear on the problem of manufacturing better mass-produced housing? Couldn't it also fix Britain's traffic lights and rail signals - to allow more and faster travel, not less?

Officials, it seems, lack mental energy. Meanwhile, Greens look forward to biblical floods, wasting cutting edge Computer Generated Imagery on ludicrous scaremongering.

It's time IT professionals took a stand. James Woudhuysen 15 August 2004

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