But you may be taking one vital resource for granted: electricity. Unexpected electricity supply interruptions — an outage in Silicon Valley last month blacked out 100,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers over three days — are early signs that the nation’s creaking power system may not be able to keep pace with the burgeoning electricity demands of e-business, experts say.

“The trend is for more frequent outages, and they will continue for some time,” said Mark Wilhelm, vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which conducts research on behalf of 800 utilities.

A confluence of trends threatens to strain the nation’s electricity supplies. For one thing, deregulation of the U.S. power industry is creating gray areas of operation, where it’s not clear which company — if any — is fully responsible for supplying power.

In the Northwest, the move to breach dams on the Elwah, Columbia and Snake Rivers in the name of saving salmon, as opposed to moving to stop blatant over-fishing by Indian tribes using gillnets, could bring the problem to a crisis point.
Utilities are reluctant to add capacity because of a burdensome environmental regulatory process which takes literally years to navigate, and because they no longer can count on regulators to approve rate hikes that cover their costs.
Meantime, the cooling demands caused by record high temperatures nationwide are sapping electricity capacity, and E-commerce isn’t just threatened by electricity shortages; it’s also contributing to the problem.