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5

The Magic of

“Incentive”—The Role of

Electric Utilities

“Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) helped
gather the nation’s utilities together in order to curtail
energy demand in the Information Technology industry.
The Utility IT Energy-Efficiency Coalition is comprised
of over 24 utilities from across the U.S. and Canada that
are primed to address the high tech, data center, and IT
infrastructure markets.”
ptg
—San Francisco News Item, March 2008

Energy corporations, especially electric utilities, have an interesting role
in the establishment of green data centers. On one hand, electric utilities are
for-profit corporations that make money by selling electricity—so the more
electricity they sell, the more profit they make. On the other hand, electric
utilities have a significant interest in avoiding having to build new electric
power plants to meet peak demand. New power plants are extremely expen-
sive—and the strict emission controls for coal-fired plants greatly add to the
expense. New nuclear power plants face even more hurdles—although dur-
ing 2008, for the first time in 30 years (since the Three Mile Island disaster),
the United States has seen requests to build new nuclear power plants.
Most electric utilities in the United States are for-profit. (One exception is
the state-run utility in North Dakota.) All are under the control of a Public
Utility Commission (PUC), and all PUCs are now at least starting to push
utilities to establish rate-case incentives for energy conservation. Also, a pub-
lic relations incentive for energy corporations helps erase their (sometimes
undeserved) corporate “bad boy” reputation as lacking environmental
concern.

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