Electricity
February 2022
We are all facing a significant increase in electricity charges at the moment. I’ve just signed a new twelve month fixed-rate contract that means my costs will increase by about 40%, and such is the state of affairs that I am congratulating myself that it wasn’t more.
You can blame all this on Russian gas supplies, or changes in the way we generate electricity, or Greta Thunberg, but I can’t help feeling that at the bottom of it all lurks old-fashioned supply and demand economics. When something is in short supply because of increased demand, the price rises.
Perhaps you didn’t think that your demand for electricity has grown, but think again. Part of the blame, I am afraid, must fall on our shoulders – that is, on the shoulders of anyone who uses computers and the internet, whether it’s for email, websites, running a company, designing spaceships, Netflix or anything else.
It starts at home. Your laptop may not look like much of a power vampire, nor your router, but it all adds up. One expert I consulted worked out my own usage. At the new price I am paying for my electricity, the rough annual charges work out like this: our two laptops are £75 each, our two tablets (mainly for reading the papers) are £30 each, my desktop is £200 and £15 covers the Wi-Fi router. Even charging our mobile phones once a day might add up to £10 over the year.
So that lot is already well over £400 a year before I even start thinking about TVs, sound systems, radios and the like. I must admit it took me by surprise.
This is important because thirty years ago, barely any of us would have been using electricity on that scale for household electronics; such equipment barely existed, beyond HiFi systems and televisions. I am afraid that we are all very much part of the increased demand for electricity which is helping to drive up the price.
However, we are just the start. The really big guzzlers of energy are the huge data centres and internet hubs that we all rely on to make the internet work at all; not many of them existed thirty years ago, either.
These data centres are huge windowless warehouses that have sprung up like giant carbuncles all over the world; they are filled with computers (‘servers’) which are both the blood stream and the memory of the internet. Most governments and companies, other than the giant ones (and not all of them) outsource their data storage to these specialists. So do you, if you use Gmail, for example.
It’s a huge industry that uses prodigious amounts of electricity, not just to run the servers, but then to cool them down. They are black holes for energy.
One of the bigger firms has estimated that three percent of all the world’s electricity is used by data centres. This is much more than all the electricity used by the whole of the United Kingdom for all purposes.
Just like our own household electronics, these centres are also entirely new users of electricity, adding to the demand.
The news is not all bad. It’s obviously in their interest to keep their energy usage down, and they are trying hard. Google, for example, publishes quarterly figure showing the effectiveness of their power usage, which is improving all the time. But the ultimate solution will be to build computers that use less electricity and also find cheaper ways of generating it.
In the meantime, remember that ‘standby’ power is a silent thief. Switch your machines completely off when not using them. As my Scottish father-in law, who abhorred wasted electricity, was fond of saying: ‘many a mickle makes a muckle.’
