From the "brown-outs" that rolled across California in 2001, to the massive outages that darkened the north-eastern U.S. in 2003, it's clear that--as much as we rely on the public utility grid--it is vulnerable.

As commerce and society march deeper into the digitally dependent age, we have increased our reliance on electric power at the same time that our demands are undermining the ability of the power grid to supply it. While government and public utility companies need to work on strengthening the grid, private-sector organizations must take responsibility for guaranteeing critical power to their own operations.

How Prevalent is the Risk?

According to a study by National Power Laboratories (NPL), the average power customer location can experience approximately 24 power disturbances each month. According to EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) research across all business sectors in 2001, the U.S. economy is losing between $119 billion and $188 billion a year to outages and other power disturbances.

Detectible power outages account for only a small percentage of those damaging and loss-producing power disturbances. Even under normal utility operations--with no storm or lightning in sight--enterprise IT systems could be bombarded daily by conditions that damage critical components.

Why Generators and Surge Suppressors Are Not Enough

Utility companies are not required to provide computer-grade power. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which coordinates and administers the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, defines the acceptable voltage variation on the utility to be typically in the range of plus 5.7% to minus 8.3% from absolute specification.

For example, utility service with 208-phase voltage can actually range from 191 to 220 volts. That range may well exceed manufacturer specifications for servers, storage devices, and networking systems--which are getting more finicky with each advance in miniaturization and processing power.

"Even though vendor specifications may say that a particular device behaves properly between 100-130V, for example, in my empirical experience, the equipment starts having trouble whenever you drop out of the normal 110-128 range," says Jim McQuire of The Power Place, an Atlanta-based power quality audit and consulting group. "The farther you stray from that normal range, the more problems you have. If you have 100V coming in, the equipment is not going to perform up to specifications."