Of parties and power shifting

[sawyl]

Arrived back at work in time to go to the chief executive's Christmas event, complete with awards ceremony. Despite having to be forceably dragged off to it, I had a good time. I had a piece of the giant cake to celebrate the success of the olympics and got into an interesting discussion with a colleague about power shifting.

Having read an interesting piece about a startup called Stem who are using batteries and clever software to shift the electrical loads of buildings to allow them to minimise their exposure to peak cost electricity, they were wondering whether we couldn't use the same technology to minimise the costs of the computer facility. It's an interesting idea, even if the numbers don't work in our case and the technology doesn't seem to match terribly well with a UPS.