The Story of Cap & Trade videos – Annie Leonard and Warren Buffett

December 17, 2009 Dave Ohara

Annie Leonard has a new video on the story of cap and trade.

http://storyofcapandtrade.org - The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from whats really required to tackle the climate crisis. If youve heard about Cap & Trade, but arent sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

And, here is another from Warren Buffett who discusses cap and trade as a regressive tax.

Economist article on IT systems effect on the financial crisis

December 14, 2009 Dave Ohara

Economist has an article on the relationship of IT system and the financial crises.

The article starts by pointing out financial services spends $500 billion globally annually on IT, according to Gartner.

Banks and information technology

Silo but deadly

Dec 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Messy IT systems are a neglected aspect of the financial crisis

NO INDUSTRY spends more on information technology (IT) than financial services: about $500 billion globally, more than a fifth of the total (see chart). Many of the world’s computers, networking and storage systems live in the huge data centres run by banks. “Banks are essentially technology firms,” says Hugo Banziger, chief risk officer at Deutsche Bank. Yet the role of IT in the crisis is barely discussed.

The point of the article is the silos of IT made it difficult to see the overall risk.

This fragmented IT landscape made it exceedingly difficult to track a bank’s overall risk exposure before and during the crisis. Mainly as a result of the Basel 2 capital accords, many banks had put in new systems to calculate their aggregate exposure. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) spent more than $100m to comply with Basel 2. But in most cases the aggregate risk was only calculated once a day and some figures were not worth the pixels they were made of.

During the turmoil many banks had to carry out big fact-finding missions to see where they stood. “Answering such questions as ‘What is my exposure to this counterparty?’ should take minutes. But it often took hours, if not days,” says Peyman Mestchian, managing partner at Chartis Research, an advisory firm. Insiders at Lehman Brothers say its European arm lacked an integrated picture of its risk position in the days running up to its demise.

But is IT really the cause or its the people who refuse to work with other groups? IT has grows so large because users want to own the data systems, as information is power. As the economist points out the problem was discovery of issues across systems.

During the turmoil many banks had to carry out big fact-finding missions to see where they stood. “Answering such questions as ‘What is my exposure to this counterparty?’ should take minutes. But it often took hours, if not days,” says Peyman Mestchian, managing partner at Chartis Research, an advisory firm. Insiders at Lehman Brothers say its European arm lacked an integrated picture of its risk position in the days running up to its demise.

Due to the power of IT industry, people focus on going faster.

But many other banks are still in firefighting mode, says Mr Mestchian. Much of the money invested in IT still goes into making things faster rather than more transparent.

The change needed in IT is to think more about transparency of their systems and how they work with other systems. This is will happen as social software systems permeate more of IT. The old term was collaboration, now it is is social software/networking.

Imagine if twitter and facebook worked in a financial systems IT systems. Could you discover issues faster?

Christian Belady’s history of PUE

December 9, 2009 Dave Ohara

Christian Belady has a post on the Inflection Point for Efficiency in the data center which provides an early history of PUE as a data center metric.

In my opinion, it wasn’t until 2006 that the industry really did go through a paradigm shift. While there were a few of us who had been pushing efficient computing approaches for over a decade), we had limited success in moving the industry until 2006. What happened in 2006? I think the notion of establishing an industry efficiency metric and data center metrics were born. I thought it would be interesting to recap those milestones based on my perspective:

Christian provides three milestones you can read in his post. Here is the third milestone.

April 23-26, 2006: High-Density Computing: Trends, Challenges, Benefits, Costs, and Solutions

This symposium was the Uptime Institute’s first and it focused on Density trends. However, it was this conference where I first presented an Efficiency Metric called PUE which seemed to capture the attention of many of the attendees. As a result, I published a paper on PUE with my good friend Chris Malone later in the year at the Digital Power Forum. At this same conference, AMD’s Larry Vertal and Bruce Shaw sat down with Paul Perez (my former VP) and I to discuss the idea of starting a consortium called the Green Grid. Ten months later the Green Grid was officially announced with one of its first whitepapers evangelizing metrics and in particular PUE.

and Christian, takes times to reflect.

So our industry woke up in 2006 and while the Gartner graph does show we have work ahead of us, I do think we can say that in less than four years the industry has made great strides (and perhaps I shouldn’t complain so much!).

What we need from Christian is Part 3 on what his prediction of the future is as he is already proven to make history.

He did do this in 1998 and ten years later. /2008/03/christian-belad.html

Mar 27, 2008

Christian Belady's Bottom Line Opinion 10 years ago, We Need A Better System

Microsoft's Christian Belady was going through his old presentations and found a public presentation on The Big Picture, A Philosophical Discussion to Make US Think. Download Cbelady.pdf The presentation is an accumulation of predictions he was making in the late '90s as part of making a case for more efficient computing while at HP.

…

Summary
Power is not just a….
•component problem
•System problem
•Data center problem
•Utility Infrastructure problem
We have a huge opportunity to solve these problems as one system and optimize the solution.
WE NEED A BETTER SYSTEM!

Big Picture
Bottom Line
We need to cooperate to solve these problems on a much larger scale.
Develop consortiums to address these global issues and influence the industry, government and culture proactively.
We need to ensure that we have a better world.

Data Center energy use growing while overall industrial use declines

November 30, 2009 Dave Ohara

WSJ had an article on weak power demand.

Weak Power Demand Dims Outlook

By REBECCA SMITH

Electricity sales remained weak in the third quarter, prompting speculation that the sluggishness could persist even after the U.S. economy rebounds. Some utilities don't expect power sales to recover to pre-recession levels until 2012 -- if at all -- because so many factories have closed.

Getting a read on future demand is crucial for utilities because they require long lead times to build power plants and make other upgrades. Declining sales put pressure on utilities to raise prices, cut costs or make other adjustments to bolster profits.

Associated Press

Workers last month in Charlotte, N.C., home of Duke Energy.

The sector began to feel the recession, which started in late 2007, later than many others. Sales held up well in the first half of 2008 but then declined and have continued falling this year, though some regions are reporting an uptick. The federal Energy Information Administration expects overall electricity sales to decline 3.3% this year and grow modestly next year, but many utilities anticipate far larger declines for the year.

Duke Energy Corp. said its energy sales to the textile industry based in the Carolinas fell 20% in the third quarter, versus a drop of 13.7% for sales to all industrial users. For the first nine months of 2009, electricity sales to the textile industry were down 23.5%, from the prior year, and overall industrial sales were down 15.8%.

American Electric Power Co. of Columbus, Ohio, which owns utilities in 11 states, saw industrial electricity sales plunge 17% for the third quarter versus the year-ago period. Chief Executive Mike Morris said his company is counting on industrial demand recovering about a third of the lost ground in 2010.

There is no decline in the overall use of data center power, and John Rath has a post on European data center revenue doubling 2010 – 2015.

European Data Center Revenue May Double
November 30th, 2009 : John Rath
Several stories from recent weeks highlight the vibrant data center industry in Europe. Here’s a roundup:

European data centre revenue set to double
A report published by Tariff Consultancy Ltd notes that European data centre revenue is “set to more than double over the five year period from 2010 to 2015, with net raised floor space to increase by 70%, driven primarily by price increases.” The report gives pricing and forecasts for 19 of the EU25 countries and analyzes pricing of a standard 19″ rack, a small cage space and a 50 KVA suite of space for each of the countries. It also dives into trends impacting data centres such as raised floor capacity in markets, revenue per square meter forecasts, electricity pricing, pricing per rack and cage, and the most expensive data centre countries.

Next big Oregon Data Center customer? well-funded, well-known

November 23, 2009 Dave Ohara

updated Jan 22, 2010

Company X is Facebook /2010/01/facebook-data-center-115-pue.html

DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Company X Plans for Oregon Data Center.

Company X Plans Oregon Data Center
November 23rd, 2009 : Rich Miller

The city of Prineville, Oregon is negotiating with a large, secretive company that wants to build a data center in its enterprise zone.

A “well-funded, well-known company” is negotiating to build a large data center in central Oregon, and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations has folks in the town of Prineville wondering who it might be. Officials in Prineville have been negotiating with Vitesse LLC, a company performing site selection for the unnamed end user that would build operate the data center, according to local media reports.

The site is several hours from an existing Google data center in The Dalles and a Boardman site whereAmazon is said to be resuming construction on a major data center project. Like those projects, the process in Prineville has been cloaked in secrecy.

Hints of the company are hard to find.

Oregon business registration records indicate that Vitesse LLC was registered Oct 21 and shares a San Francisco address with the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofksy & Walker. Attorneys with Paul, Hastings have data center site acquisition experience, including past engagements with large financial companies and Internet companies.

The proposed facility would be located near the Prineville Airport in an enterprise zone, which allows the city to waive property taxes for eligible projects. Tomorrow the Prineville City Council is scheduled to consider selling a 1-acre piece of property to Vitesse for $50,000, annex two adjacent properties to the city and approve a 15-year property tax exemption for the company that would operate the data center.

I am off to Oregon for Thanksgiving this weekend and we are planning our own tax-free purchases compared to Washington’s high state sales tax. But, I wouldn’t do that because I would have to pay the sales tax anyway when I brought the goods back to state of Washington. :-)

DataCenterKnowledge makes the same point for data centers and state sales tax.

Washington Repeals Tax Break
In late 2007 Washington State ruled that data centers aren’t manufacturers and were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment. This prompted protests from Microsoft and Yahoo, who said they had relied upon the tax break in their decision to build facilities in Quincy.

In a letter to legislators, Yahoo co-founder David Filo said the withdrawal of the sales tax incentive “swings the decision strongly in favor of freezing construction in Washington, and building instead in Oregon (which has no sales tax), as some of our competitors are already doing.”

Microsoft subsequently migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy to another Microsoft facility in San Antonio.

How important is it to blog about this problem of Washington State Sales Tax? A funny piece of data for me is Google Search has my one of my blog posts #9 for “Washington State Sales Tax”