The Information Age is rendering the nation's aging electricity grid obsolete and dangerously crisis-prone—with risks to IT potentially more serious than any Y2K bug would have been. Trouble is, there is no leadership focused on a fix this time, and
About three terrawatt hours per year, or 4 percent of all energy used by office and network equipment is consumed in "off" mode. Even when office computers and other digital devices are off, they continue to need juice for "life support."
Source: The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
A typical server farm uses 10 to 20 megawatts of power per hour-roughly the equivalent of 10,000 to 20,000 homes with every light and appliance turned on.
Source: Edison Electric Institute
A 20-minute outage at a Hewlett-Packard circuit fabrication plant would cost the company $30 million and an entire day of production to be lost.
