EleBlog

28 Dec, 2006

Nicholas, a male Asian elephant, is stranded. No one wants him, according to a Washington Post story (I don't know for how long you can access it at that link; perhaps you'll also find it here). If you thought a lot about this stuff, it might drive you a bit crazy.

By the way, The Elephant Sanctuary -- the top elephant link at right, and a recipient of charitable contributions from the chief blogger here -- has taken 11 elephants from the place where Nic is stranded.

28 Dec, 2006

"Unclogging The Data Center Power Drain" is the headline on a Wall Street Journal story (12/21). I found it via the Dept. of Energy's EERE Web site, which may mean you can access this WSJ page for free.

Here's the page at the DOE EERE site. I don't know for how long the data center item/link will be there.

28 Dec, 2006

I've been hearing whispers and shouts (both) that power plant construction is going to take off soon. This is a good thing for the country, but a bad (or at least indifferent) thing for the electrical industry. If a lot of power plants are built at one time, the shortage of skilled electricians is going to get A LOT WORSE.

In wandering through the Buildings Data Book (a Dept. of Energy publication), I came across this note:

Total electricity sales in the U.S. are projected to increase at an average rate of 1.9% according to the AEO 2005, from 3,481 billion kilowatthours in 2003 to 5,220 billion kilowatthours in 2025. With growing demand and the projected retirement of 43 gigawatts of inefficient or older technology, generation capacity is projected to increase significantly. To meet future electricity demand a total of 229 power plants will have to go on line by 2010, 751 by 2020, and 1102 by 2025.

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28 Dec, 2006

"DOE Study Finds Commercial LED Lamps Fall Short of Claims" is the headline on an item in a Dept. of Energy e-mail newsletter on energy efficiency. See the piece (which has links for more info) here.

Net-net: A pilot test of 4 LED lamps found they don't meet their claimed output. Claims: 36 to 55 lumens per watt. Test results: 11.6 to 19.3 lumens per watt. Roughly, the best-tested lamp came up about 50% short of the lowest lumen efficacy.

Hey -- EleBlog is NOT anti-LED. All this proves is that the technology as yet has a ways to go.

28 Dec, 2006

The Chicago Board of Trade's build is more than 76 years old. It's recently undergone a major renovation -- featuring "10 feeds form 7 different ComEd substations." See story here.

28 Dec, 2006

I'm just getting around to reading a newsletter from Parks Associates (a leading home automation/networking research firm) dated 6/06 -- "Key Takeaways from CONNECTIONS 2006." Connections is Parks' mega-event. Here's a trenchant observation from John Barrett, director of research:


As I noted -- trenchant!

28 Dec, 2006

Chain Store Age is a monthly magazine that serves readers in retailing. Obviously, from the name, we're talking about national and regional chains. Note that I once worked (for 4.5 months) for a no-longer-extant spin-off publication, Chain Store Age-Supermarkets. That was in 1979.

I receive the publication for a variety of reasons. It's an excellent trade magazine. There are some areas in common (not many) between what chain-store retailers do and what electrical distributors (guys and gals for whom I write) do every day. Plus, I like to take a look at the advertising in CSA . . . the electrically oriented stuff.

Because the "mid-December" issue's cover was "Retailers Embrace Green - Sustainability Gains Momentum," I thought I'd take you through the issue. The ads below are all full-page ads (unless otherwise indicated). I omitted one heck of a lot of construction ads; there was a statistical feature on "Big Builders," which drew in those companies. I also omitted HVAC-only ads.

Inside Front Cover (page 2) -- an ad from Rogers Electric of GA (www.lrogerselectric.com).

Page 3 -- ad for Emerson Climate Technologies ("it's time for Intelligent Store")

Page 4 -- Generac Power Systems ("no power, no customers, no revenue")

Page 8 -- ABCO Facility Maintenance (lighting maintenance is among 14 services listed)

Page 13 -- MC Sign Co. (includes "lighting repair & retrofits" among services listed)

Page 27 -- LightStat ad ("simple energy management")

Page 28 -- ImageCare Maintenance Services ("your experts in signage, lighting & disaster recovery")

Page 29 -- FI Companies, facilities services -- doesn't say electrical/lighting, but it's a poor ad. They meant to!

Page 30 -- half-page ad for Genesis Facility Management. (six bullets -- #6 is "plumbing & electrical")

page 31 -- Academy Fire Protection ("fire alarms, fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers")

page 33 -- Johnson Controls/York ("York's National Accounts Group") -- most know that JC uses ECs as subs.

page 63 -- SES ("we don't make signs, we make them bigger")

page 64 -- Universal Electric Corp. -- Starline Track Busway ad ("improving the way retailers design electrical outlets")

page 65 -- NEST International -- ("your complete facility solution for" . . . electrical services, fire safety compliance, HVAC listed among 20 specifics)

page 68 -- City Lighting Products -- ("our lighting designers transform stores into shopping experiences")

page 69 -- Retail Service Solutions -- (bullet #2 of 3 = "electromechanical" - bullet #3 = "lgithing management")

page 72 -- Calico Building Services -- (copy indicates they do electrical)

page 73 -- Eaton/Cutler-Hammer -- ("are you ready for the next power outage")

page 75 -- First Service Networks -- facilities management co. Lists HVAC, Pluming, Electrical, Refrigeration as 1st 4 of 13 services.

page 81 -- Prenova, energy process management solutiosn ("there's finally a way to predict and prevent energy-related asset failure")

8-page insert - Tarrant Lighting -- ("it's here! the fixture heralded as the next great thing in retail lighting has arrived")

page 96 -- Southwest Signs

page 99 -- Colite International -- ("signature LEDs")

4-page insert -- Barlo Signs International

page 107 -- GE Lighting ad ("green is green")

page 111 -- Facility Solutions Group ("around the clock lighting and electrical service")

page 117 -- North american Signs

page 120 -- National Sign Systems

page 131 -- US Signs

# # #

22 Dec, 2006

Integrated Electrical Services, the only real pure-play electrical contractor in which you can easily invest, emitted a press release on Q4 + FY06 results yesterday. I've read it several times. There's a particular sentence that I've actually read EIGHT times.

First, see the release here. Second, here's the segment (in the IES release's first few paragraphs) that I'm choking on. I've taken the liberty of putting the sentence that's distracting the heck out of me in bold:

"Fiscal 2006 was a year of transition for IES," stated Michael Caliel, IES' president and chief executive officer. "The financial restructuring was a pivotal step in strengthening the foundation this company needs to be successful in the future. We still have much to do in order to reach our goals. However, in the first full quarter as the new IES, we generated positive operating income from Continuing Operations and with the continued support of our customers, we produced double digit growth of new work in backlog.

"More importantly, during the fiscal fourth quarter, our management team invested significant time assessing the operations to better understand the capabilities and potential of this organization. Based on our findings, we embarked on a comprehensive program that we believe will allow IES to more fully capitalize its potential.

"Our focus is on building the company's core competencies, such as estimating, project management and supply chain management, as well as removing costs that do not add value. We are also focused on cash management, and we have implemented very aggressive programs aimed at improving our cash flow."

- - - - -

Here's my understanding of IES, in a nutshell:

1. It was assembled in the 1997-2001 period, during the contractor roll-up mania.

2. Companies acquired by IES mostly had several items in common. They were big independents. They were non-union. And they were, generally speaking, well-run (i.e, they generated a profit).

3. In the past two years, IES has revamped itself. It has sold off supposedly less-than-stellar local operations -- contracting companies that it bought earlier. In many cases, the buyers were the very people from whom IES bought the things! Additionally, thanks to a brief trip into Bankruptcy, and emergence via what's called a "pre-pack" (pre-packaged bankruptcy solution), IES has cleaned up its balance sheet, shedding debt.

4. A simple diagnosis of IES is that it is a roll-up that failed. The act of taking a bunch of successful local electrical contractors and fashioning them into a national unit is (apparently) very, very difficult.

5. However, I have been under the impression that the various units of IES knew their business. That is to say, I thought companies such as Daniel Electrical Contractors (Florida) and Primo Electric Co. (Baltimore) knew what the heck they were doing. In fact, before reading the bold-faced sentence above, I would have CERTAINLY told you that the basic "blocking and tackling" of electrical construction was NOT a problem at IES.

- - - - -

That last bit is the reason I've read the sentence above 8 times in less than 2 days. If you read it in context (which is why I provided all of the material that appears above the bold-faced sentence), the official quote from the boss at IES seems to say:


- - - - -

Holy moley! Perhaps I'm misinterpreting what I'm reading. But: No matter how I parse it, that sentence says that IES management is "reviewing core competencies" -- estimating, project management, and supply chain (relationships with distributors, reps, and manufacturers).

There is an obvious inference: The company's leaders do not think it is doing estimating, project management, and buying of installables (and more) all that well.

Unfortunately, I can't speak with any expertise. I don't know the facts from inside the company.

However, it is startling -- at the very least -- to think that after shedding a bunch of money-losing operations, IES had to go back to Square One -- "this is a football" -- with the people and units that remain with the company.

- - - - -

How could such a thing come about? I can hazard some guesses, which I present here as independent alternatives.

Either:

The really good people left IES in droves, including estimators and project managers who knew what they were doing. The local operating units do not have an "institutional memory" of how to go about doing first-class estimating and project management (which I think most of them DID at one time have).

This seems the best possible explanation.

OR

Despite the fact that it sold off a big bunch of money-losing local contracting units, IES has found a wide variance in the skill levels of estimators and project managers that it employs all over the U.S.

This would be dismaying.

OR

Someone at IES HQ thinks there should be an "IES way" to do things, uniformly, throughout the country. So estimating must be done "according to the book," and project management, and everything else. If this is true, even Heaven won't be able to help this company.

You're probably laughing about this, but it's precisely what I saw from Waste Management, Inc., in the 1980s. This not only didn't work, it hurt the company.

OR

A final alternative is: The people at IES HQ (management) do not know what the heck they are doing. Despite the fact that the words above came from the company's official release, these folks are so damn dumb that they are unaware they are spending money to make themselves look like a gang of idiots.

Now, I guess, you see why I keep re-reading the sentence.



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20 Dec, 2006

One of the things I like about Network Computing magazine is its evaluations of equipment. Recently, the pub evaluated the NetTool Series II Pro from Fluke Networks. I'm certainly no expert on the Fluke tool, but I found the 1,200-word NwC evaluation interesting reading. Find it here.
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20 Dec, 2006

From Educaitona Week (www.edweek.org), 10/25: "The percentage of public schools using wireless systems has increased fourfold between 2001 and 2005, accoridng to a report by Market Data Retrieval . . . [Shelton, Conn.]" More than 45% of public schools reported having wireless networks in 2005.

20 Dec, 2006

From the 11/10 Times-Picayne newspaper (of New Orleans) comes a story about too few applicants for trainee programs.

"Officials with Louisiana community colleges and trade unions with appenticeship programs that benefit from the federal financing say they have many more openings than applicants -- a situation they blame on the continued shortage of viable housing in the New Orleans area . . . 'We have people calling from as far away as Maryland and as close as Mississippi who want to go through the training . . . But the problem is that they have nowhere to live'." [the direct quote is from Lauren King, dean of workforce development at Louisiana Technical College's Region I.

LA Tech "has secured federal financing to train 700 people for consturction jobs, but so far has trained only 19, with an additional 50 now attending classes."

Note: This story didn't run in November 2005, just weeks after Katrina. This story appeared just a few weeks ago -- 14+ months after the hurricane.

20 Dec, 2006

Here's the money paragraph:


Find the rest here. 

20 Dec, 2006

One of my non-electrical/elephant interests is Biblical Archaelogy. Yes, it's a weird one. The folks at the Biblical Archaeological Society send me a news-filled e-mail (yes, news about what went on 2,000-2,500-3,000 years ago!). The latest includes a link to a really neat Web app.

Assuming you access the Web with a reasonable amount of bandwidth, you can "scroll through" the Isaiah Scroll online. Don't miss the Zoom feature, which is on the lower right. http://www.bib-arch.org/bswbFisaiahscroll.html

18 Dec, 2006

Things ARE slowing down. McGraw-Hill Construction's monthly analysis of the $ value of contracts for new construction showed they fell 4% in October (see story here). The information from Hubbell (see previous EleBlog post) dovetails with that. The gummint's figures for employment in construction are down a bit.

Here's what's potentially scary:

1. Yes, housing is down. McGraw-Hill's not-seasonally adjusted dollar figures for 2006, through 10/31/06, show residential building contract values down 9%. What's scary here: What if this is, as some people think, just the beginning?

2. What was remarkable about Hubbell's revelations the other day was not the residential dip, or the utility problems the company had, but the drop in non-residential (40% of that company's business). Most people assumed non-residential, which has been UP (and up big) for much of 2006, would pick up the slack in construction.

3. McGraw-Hill's numbers show nonresidential construction up 12% for the first 10 months of 2006. However, the figure for October itself (which IS seasonally adjusted) was down 4%. The verbiage (use the link above) indicated that Bob Murray, the MHC veep, thinks the down month was a blip.

What does EleBlog think? The worries are that housing's decline gets a lot worse, and nonresidential construction stagnates or falls. I don't know enough to assert that these things are happening or about to happen. But I know what label to apply if they do -- Recession.

18 Dec, 2006

I'm not certain, but it appears that Congress has extended the Commercial Building Tax Deduction for energy-efficient equipment (including lighting) by one year. Set originally to expire when 2007 ended, it now expires when 2008 ends. See the ARI release pasted below.

Several points:

a. The deduction shouldn't be limited at all. The original legislation that created the two-year deduction was chock full of multi-billion-dollar benefits for the energy industry. It makes no sense to short-shrift efficiency. In fact, it's crazy.

b. I can't tell from reading the release below whether the Senate and House passed this legislation, or what. It's hard to read.

c. If the legislation did pass, and is signed into law -- essentially, the Congress of the U.S. exerted itself to pass two pieces of legislation that created a three-year energy-efficiency tax deduction. Isn't that ridiculous?

ARI Applauds Extension of the Commercial Building Tax Deduction

ARLINGTON, VA— Just one day after the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute (ARI) called on Congress to extend the Commercial Building Tax Deduction, lawmakers passed the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 (H.R. 6111), which contains a measure extending the deduction for one year.

ARI and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) sought an extension for the deduction, originally provided in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, because it was set to expire at the end of 2007. In a jointly sponsored Capitol Hill briefing held on Dec. 7, ARI and ASHRAE explained to congressional staff that the 2-year lifespan of the deduction was too short a period for commercial builders to take advantage of it.

"We asked Congress to give these incentives time to work and they have given us another year, but this still falls short of the four-year extension we believe is needed," said ARI General Counsel Stephen Yurek. "ARI and ASHRAE will continue to work in partnership to strengthen and extend energy-efficiency tax incentives during the next legislative session."

For commercial buildings, the incentives provide a deduction up to $1.80 per square foot for buildings designed to use 50 percent less energy than required by the model commercial building energy code (ASHRAE 90.1). Before the extension, the deduction applied to buildings placed in service between Jan. 1, 2006, through Dec. 31, 2007.

18 Dec, 2006

Square D (a unit of Schneider Electric) planned to open a store in the Orlando area last month, accoridng to a news report in CE Pro magazine.

What's the big deal? Probably it's NOT a big deal. But:


Find the story here.

18 Dec, 2006

Should a given company outsource a data center -- or not? The answer is complicated. Most likely, outsourcing will be more expensive, according to a story found on "The Business Process Management Supersite." But maybe there are reasons to pay. See the story here.

18 Dec, 2006

T&B has introduced a product that it says is "the first device to enable disconnection of power to fluorescent lighting fixtures without exposure to live wires" -- and is said to be the first to be UL-listed. A PDF of the release can be found here.

16 Dec, 2006

What's really happening? I try to follow stuff in the electrical market VERY closely. Writing about it is how I earn my bread. I've been wondering about "things" in general lately -- and in the past week, I received two direct answers.

First, here's what I've been wondering:

a. There are a number of LARGE electrical, datacom, and electrical/datacom distributors. They have names like Graybar, Anixter, Wesco, USESI, Rexel, Crescent, Sonepar, Home Depot Supply . . . and more. Most of these companies (all of them, except Graybar) have been buying other companies. So you can't take the results of any of these companies over a period of time (say, since 2000) and compare the numbers. Except for Graybar, they don't compare. Yet the sales of many of these companies are UP -- the result of acquisitions AND the impact of higher prices for raw materials (i.e., copper, and some other stuff).

b. What about Graybar? It appears the company is headed for almost $5 billion in sales in 2006. That's the figure the company achieved in 2000. As we all know, $5B isn't worth the same in 2006 as it was in 2000. It's also notable that Graybar is the only company that hasn't gone crazy buying other distributors.

c. There are two electrical contractors of any size that are public. One of them is Integrated Electric Services; it has spent a good part of the past two years shedding operating subsidiaries (selling them back to the people from which IES bought them). It's impossible to get an apple-to-apple comparison with IES. The other is EMCOR Group. EMCOR's sales haven't been soaring. My back-of-the-envelope computations say EMCOR's sales are up maybe 25% since 2002.

d. Then there are the suppliers. There's consolidation on the supplier end. And there are two types of supplies: There are suppliers whose products include a lot of copper and plastics (and nickel and tin, etc.) . . . and those who sell stuff (like lighting fixtures) that doesn't necessarily include a lot of those materials. From my reading of what's gone on, it appears that some suppliers aren't going gangbusters.

e. I want to come back to materials prices, especially copper. Copper was 65 cents/pound in 2001, and now it's $3.00/pound. In the interim, it actually got to $4/pound this past spring. Yike! Remember: A lot of what's sold in the electrical market is copper. I recently saw data from an international electrical distributor on its sales through Q3 of 2006: Copper goods sales were up 68%, everything else was up in the mid-teens. Yike!

So what I want to know is this: If you take the acquisitions and the copper OUT of the figures from the distributors (which is where the rubber meets the road, you know) . . . are volumes UP, FLAT, or DOWN in the electrical biz?

- - - - -

As I said, I got two answers.

1. Recently, I had a sit-down with a guy who knows the industry -- all off-the-record. I trust this person -- to tell me the truth AND to know what's gong on AND to tell me he doesn't know if he, indeed, does not know. I laid the above scenario out for him. His answer was a simple sentence:

"Oh, yeah -- volume is down."

2. Also in the past week, the folks at Hubbell were forced to puke in public. They issued a press release (read it here) lowering 2006 sales and earnings projections . . . just two months after providing expectations*. According to the release:


THIS IS A HUGE WOW. Hubbell's ops are widespread; the company is in every market. Read that Hubbell release carefully; the boss, Tim Powers is an honest guy.

What was interesting to me was not only the news itself -- which qualifies as shocking -- but the reaction. If you go to this page on the Yahoo! Finance site, you can get access to news reports on the Hubbell release of 12/11 (at least, I hope they are still there). Read the analyst opinions embedded in these reports. They basically cover 2 items:


I don't necessarily know that the analyst opinion is Wrong. But it sure as heck looks like a knee-jerk reaction, not analysis. The obvious answer to the question -- what's REALLY happening -- might be, at this point . . . we don't know . . . but we have suspicions!

- - - - -

* What Hubbell has officially said, 55 days apart:


A 27-cent to 32-cent earnings haircut as the result of a shortfall in one quarter seems pretty goshdurn serious, doesn't it?

It's actually MORE serious than it looks. Through 9 months of 2006, Hubbell posted earnings per share of $2.10 (fully diulted). With an end-of-year goal of $2.80, that means it was expecting 70 cents of Q4 earnings (on the low end). It has now trimmed that to 43 cents (on the low end). That's a 38.6% shortfall. Pretty goshdurn serious, no?
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16 Dec, 2006

Construction Today magazine did not put the 892-word story online (so there's no link here!), but the November issue contained a profile of "teamwork specialists" at Cherry City Electric (Salem, Ore.). Among other interesting stuff:

• CCE "says it has earned a 96% client retetion rate."

• 50 out of 120 projects the company works on in a typical year are design/buld.

• The company says it spends more than $1 million annually in safety and training. "That trianing saves both us and our customers that [amount] many times over," GM Ray Ellis told the magazine.

An interesting sidelight touched on the use of 3-D design by CCE and Total Mechanical on the construction of a 5-story courthouse for the U.S. government. The General Services Administration (the gummint's real estate arm) oversaw the construction. According to a quote from GSA, the coordination "at the subcontractor level -- allowed the team to really see what was in the tight spaces before [the building] was built . . . administrative levels had les sthan two feet of space between the ceiling and post-tensions slab. In this narrow space, there are [variable air volume] boxes and ducts, heating and chilled water piping, plumbing, conduits, cable trays, l ighting, and security control devices."

Thanks to the 3-D design, GSA said, "the stakeholders in the MEP disciplines [had to] provide accurate shop drawings early in the process."

Note: MEP = mechanical, electrical, plumbing.

16 Dec, 2006

I'm not sure what to make of this release from Convia, which is a "new" company under the Herman Miller banner. As far as I used to know, Herm is in the furniture business.

Here's the headline of the release -- the reason I'm posting it here, and why I'm going to re-read it again: "An Electrical Evolution: Convia . . . Electrifies Greenbuild 2006 withi Programmable Power and Data Infrastructure for Sustainable Spaces and Design Freedom."

Are they talking about doing away with electricians (again) . . . ? I don't know. The release is almost 1,500 words. Click here to read it yourself.

16 Dec, 2006

EMCOR Group is in three businesses: Electrical contracting, mechanical contracting, and facility services. That last arm is the weakest of the three, in terms of annual sales. CEO Frank MacInnis likes it for, among other things, the fact that it's not subject to the roller-coaster ride of boom-and-bust as are the construction divisions.

As the company has often related, it picked up the idea of getting into the facilities services biz from operations it acquired in Britain. Was it a good idea? Will it be? Maybe so. A story on the Buildings.com Web site (see it here) says IFMA surveyed its members, and found 15% of respondents are now outsourcing. In 1993, the response was 3%.

16 Dec, 2006

"Power Distribution Must Accommodate Change" is the headline on an article in the November Energy & Power Management. First, the headline doesn't "tell all" -- it is, indeed, about data centers. Second, a disclaimer: I work for E&PM (although I had nothing to do with this fine 1,316-word article).

Find the article here. You might have to register (it's free) to see it.

Among other things, the article's lead paragraphs refer to a survey of data center owners/operators by AMD, the chip-maker:
. . . and that's only the beginning.

16 Dec, 2006

Housing 2007 -- Nightmare Or Not?
http://www.tedmag.com/common/printthis.asp?currentpage=3612

Six Predictions for 2007
http://www.tedmag.com/common/printthis.asp?currentpage=3566

Liquid & Vapor -- about the "sea of liquidity" on which our prosperity floats.
http://www.tedmag.com/common/printthis.asp?currentpage=3557

Copper: Topping . . . or Bottoming?
http://www.tedmag.com/common/printthis.asp?currentpage=3495

13 Dec, 2006

Two days ago, I posted something here about a free reply of an Eaton Webinar on UL508A.

"Standard for Safety for Industrial Control Panels" is the official name of that standard. Back in May, Plant Engineering magazine ran a 2,280-word story on UL508A -- which you can access here. Yes, 2,300 is a lot of words for a single article -- and the PE story is well-written, so it covers a lot of ground.

Consider the following small slice of the article. Note that the "Pauley" quoted is Jim Pauley, a Square D veep (and one of the more respected manufacturer participants in the code and standards process, from my understanding).

13 Dec, 2006

LEED = Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It's a "green building rating system" from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Why do you need to know this? Quite simply, because many of your customers and those working with them -- from architects and engineers to large project developers and owners, down to the average homeowner -- are thinking, talking, and ask for "green" construction.

What the heck is and isn't "green" from an electrical, datacom, or building systems contractors point-of-view? I don't know. I'm working on it.

If you don't already know everything above (and more) . . . you need to know what LEED is all about, and NOW is not a moment too soon. To get a start, go to this page on the USGBC's Web site -- and follow all of the links.

13 Dec, 2006

An article in the 10/06 Security Distribution & Marketing goes into the media for security cabling -- with the candidates including coaxial cable, Category 5e, and fiber optics. According to SDM: "The fluctuating price of the copper used in coaxial and network cable in some casese is justifying a move to FO cable, especially over loing runs."

A quote from a security distributor deep into the piece: "The increase in copper prices has caught every [security] dealer off guard. We've had dealers walk away from jobs because the cost of the infrastructure is now more than they collected for the jobs. The budget was cut so tight that a 30% to 40% increase in cable cost caused a lot of people to pull back."

The article includes a sidebar providing installation tips. Here's a link -- but you'll probably have to register at the site (free) to see it.

13 Dec, 2006

No -- I'm not telling you to "google" energy efficiency. A story in Network World notes that Google "actually is wading into a large industry-wide power saving movement." The company "estimates that if its internally developed power efficiency technology, which Google uses in its server famrs, were deployed in 100 million PCs running for an average of 8 hours per day, it would save 40 billion kWh over three years, or more than $5 billion at California's energy rates."

See the full story here.

13 Dec, 2006

I've added a new category, posts on Data Centers. Here's the first one: Panduit has licensed a water cooling technology from IBM. This "Rear Door Heat eXchanger" thingamabob uses water -- yes, water -- to keep computers cool.

What's the buzz? Data center operators are finding that plain old air conditioning isn't enough, given increased density of servers, to keep their equipment cool. I heard this from American Power Conversion's speaker at a NECA Show workshop in October. Note that the Panduit-IBM deal is old news (from late September), but I just ran across it -- and thanks to that APC session, it rang a bell. See the release here.

13 Dec, 2006

With the 2006 racist rants by various Hollywood types -- ranging from Gibson to some supposed comedian -- racism has been more in the news than most of us would like. Related to that: A 7/10/06 q-and-a with Marshall Purnell, who was recently elected President of the American Institute of Architects. His comments to Architectural Record included this:


See the full q-and-a here.

13 Dec, 2006

I've combined the 38 posts from October + November in a single, downloadable MS Word document. Download it from here.
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11 Dec, 2006

Leaving aside many of the problems Louisiana still has, it's Dec. 11, 2006. Katrina hit in September, 2005. I saved a clip from New Orleans City Business, dated 9/25, that said "Storm Damages Still Plague 23 Pump Stations in Orleans Parish."

I wanted to update the sitch. I noted that Matt McBride, "a Broadmoor resident, Corps critic, and self-described 'drainage advocate' who has led the charge to repair pump stations" (as the biz publication described him) has a blog on the subject.

So I went to his blog (so can you, here). McBridge posted a PDF of the repair schedule on 12/8, a post in which he noted: "


He's right. Two years to repair the pumps?

11 Dec, 2006

Don't take it personally -- everything I know is wrong, too.

I printed an article from CIO Today out a few weeks ago, and have re-read it several times (maybe 5). I'm not kidding. Here's the headline: "MIT Working on Broadcast Power."

Perhaps because I went to a technical high school (Brooklyn Tech), I have an extreme amount of respect for anything (or anyone) coming out of MIT. But this is beyond the pale. I've been working with electrical contractors and electricians since 1979, more or less -- and now someone is talking about WIRELESS POWER.

Here's a link to the story.

Here's a paragraph that breaks my rice bowl:

"Scientists have known for nearly two hundred years that energy can be transferred without wires. This wireless transfer of energy, such as light energy from the Sun for solar power or the transfer of microwaves from transmitters for communication, involves relatively low levels of energy."

I did a bit of digging and found a link to what I think is the paper on which the article is based -- a 17p PDF titled "Wireless Non-Radiative Energy Transfer." [The words were italicized in the original]

So . . . everything I thought I knew (for sure) turns out to be wrong, maybe. You, too?

11 Dec, 2006

Network World ran an article last week on "The Total Cost of a Wireless Network" (TCO = total cost of ownership). It includes a downloadable Excel spreadsheet, which can be customized -- "to help you work out your own deployment costs."

Electrical folks who want to do wireless installs would do well to read up on this. Find the article here; it's serious -- it weighs in at more than 3,700 words. Don't forget to download the spreadsheet!

11 Dec, 2006

A Dec. 6 article in New Orleans City Business quotes Robert Retz, an electrical contractor, in a story headlined "Louisiana Construction Costs Increasing." Here are quotes from Retz, and stuff attributed to him:

The cost of "doing construction business, including insurance and wages, has increased 40% since Katrina."

"If you are lucky enough to find a top-level guy, you've got to pay his friends top rate to keep him."

"A good employee before the storm was getting paid $18 to $20 [an hour], and now you better come up with at least $25, and you better have overtime for them or they're not staying."

"The presidsent [i.e., GW Bush] burns me up when he says [illegal aliens] are doing jobs Americans won't do. But that's half a statement. It should be finished up with 'at this price.' As long as they keep those borders open, they are going to keep coming . . . I went to the gas station at Vets and Causeway to hire some guys. There were about 50 guys who came over to my truck. I said I need two people legal. At least 38 of them walked away."

11 Dec, 2006

The folks at Eaton Electrical have posted (free access, apparently) a Webinar (from 8/9) on the UL508A standard, which affects industrial control panels.

Focus of the session (from the Eaton Web site):

• The role of the NEC and of Underwriters' Laboratories (UL)
• What is new in the UL508A Standard
• How panel short circuit current ratings are established
• How components are applied
• Eaton resources for short circuit current ratings and questions about the UL508A standard.
  

To access the page, and get to the Webinar -- you'll probably have to register -- go here.

11 Dec, 2006

An e-mail today announced the September report on copper was available (an 11p PDF) from the U.S. Geological Survey. Most of it is data. Here's the verbiage:

Average daily mine production of copper in September was essentially unchanged from that in August, according to data compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey. Mine production for the first 9 months of 2006 was up by only about 2% from that in the same period of 2005, despite the 6-week strike at ASARCO Incorporated that reduced its output during the third quarter of 2005.

Production at Phelps Dodge Corp.’s (Phoenix, AZ) U.S. mines for the first 9 months of 2006 declined by about 6% compared with production for the first 9 months of 2005.

At Kennecott Utah Copper Corp.’s (Salt Lake City, UT) Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, copper and gold production benefited from higher ore grades, and production during the first 9 months of the year was up by 18% and 32%, respectively, compared with production in the first 9 months of 2005. The copper millhead grade averaged 0.64% copper during the first 9 months of 2006, compared with 0.53% for the comparative period in 2005. Molybdenum production rose by 14% owing to improved recovery rates (Phelps Dodge Corp., 2006b, p.10; Rio Tinto plc, 2006, p. 4, 14).

In September, smelter production of copper fell by almost 27% and electrolytic refinery production fell by about 4% from that in August owing to a 45-day planned maintenance shutdown of Kennecott’s Garfield, UT, smelter. Year-to-date smelter and refinery production remained about 4% and 13%, respectively, above that for the same period in 2005 (Rio Tinto plc, 2006, p. 4).

Update: On November 19, Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. (New Orleans, LA) and Phelps Dodge announced that they had signed a definitive merger agreement under which Freeport-McMoran would acquire Phelps Dodge for approximately $29.5 billion in cash and stock. Under terms of the agreement, Phelps Dodge shareholders would receive a combination of cash and stock worth about $126 per Phelps Dodge share, which represented a 33% premium based on the November 17 closing price of Phelps Dodge stock.

The combined company would have the largest annual copper mine production of any privately held copper company in the world. Combined production of the two companies in 2005 totaled about 1.5 million metric tons of copper.

While Phelps Dodge had copper mines in North America, South America, and Africa, Freeport-McMoran’s only mine (copper-gold) was the Grasberg Mine in Indonesia. The corporate headquarters would be in Phoenix, though management of Grasberg would remain in New Orleans. The merger was subject to approval of shareholders and receipt of regulatory approvals, and was expected to be completed at the end of the first quarter of 2007 (Phelps Dodge Corp., 2006a).

References Cited

Phelps Dodge Corp., 2006a, Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold to acquire Phelps Dodge, creating the world’s largest publicly traded copper company: Phelps Dodge Corp. news release, November 19, 5 p.

Phelps Dodge Corp., 2006b, Phelps Dodge reports record quarterly net income of $888.0 million, or $4.36 per share, for 2006 third quarter: Phoenix, AZ, Phelps Dodge Corp. news release, October 24, 16 p.

Rio Tinto plc, 2006, Third quarter operations review: London, United Kingdom, Rio Tinto plc news release, October 18, 18 p.

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NOTE from EleBlog: Further update on the Freeport/Phelps Dodge acquisition -- news came out today that a hedge fund that holds 5.1% ownership of PD doesn't like the price (it says the offer undervalued Phelps Dodge). See the news here.

11 Dec, 2006

Yes, I've been swamped with work -- and play. Bad news for a blogger. I hope to do better in the coming weeks.