Hugh Pickens writes "Traditional peak power hours — the time during the day when power demand shoots up — run from 4 pm to 7 pm when air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home but utilities are now seeing another peak power problem evolve with a second surge that runs from about 8 pm to 9 pm when people head toward their big screen TVs and home computers. "It is [not] so much a peak as it is a plateau," says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy web at Pacific Gas & Electric. "8 pm is kind of a recent phenomenon." Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. Efforts to reduce demand are already underway with TV manufacturers working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma while Intel and PC manufacturers are cranking down computer power consumption. "Without a doubt, there's demand," for green PC's says Rick Chernick, CEO of HP partner Connecting Point adding that the need to be green is especially noticeable among medical industry enterprise customers."
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