Power, in the sense of electrical power, (rather than the economic, political and social power).

I took this picture yesterday on the DLR from Beckton to Tower Gateway to illustrate one of the great big problems looming up for technical infrastructure - and by definition, lots of things that depend upon it (like economic, social and political power) - electricity.

power.jpg

Some of this should be obvious - mobile phones won’t work in power cuts because although they’re ‘mobile’ the networks rely on fixed infrastructure and, guess what, electricity to function. In the event of power cuts, no mobile phone calls.

Now, more critically, there is the problem of a urgent need to address the issue of global warming. But the development of all these computers, phones, HDTV etc is creating an ever greater demand for energy to make them work.

In that strange way that serendipidity works, since taking the photo there has been the above story in www.computing.co.uk and this story in zdnet about the amount of power servers in the USA require.

Here’s a story about Canary Wharf and potential power shortages there.

Is this the end of bloated computing? Can an environment be sustained whereby organisations just keep stacking up servers or do they need to start thinking about what they keep and destroy so they might be able to reduce their capacity?

Or do we need a wider view of this. Michael Kidron writing in ‘Capitalism and Theory’ in the early 1970s argued that around 40% of the US economy could be categorised as ‘waste’ - i.e. it was production that was of very little, if any, social value (nuclear weapons and armaments are part of this because by definition, if you think about it, they’re extraordinary anti-social). This was before any consideration was given to social as opposed to private control of production.

If such a large part of economic production is waste - and if this could be properly addressed - then the demand for energy (even when it was equalised so that there was a global energy grid which provided equal power for Kinshasa and Mexico City as Kensington and Chelsea or Manhattan) would fall.