In New Zealand we do some demand management .....

nice article, but I haven't checked all the figures.

Just one point about demand management:

Here in New Zealand we have had a system for decades where the power company (or, before privatisation, the Power Board) can switch off the hot water cylinder at will, using a ripple control. This effectively means that the company can switch on the hot water during mid afternoon, and (mostly) between midnight and dawn. Most people have a big enough hot water cylinder to provide a full day's supply of hot water, so there is absolutely no effect on consumers, but it does allow some smoothing in demand, at practically no cost (hot water is close to half domestic demand).

(here in NZ, most electricity is hydro, and the rivers have to keep running at night, when the spot price of electricity drops to almost nothing).

Mark Lockett

Margins must be tight in cloud computing

Wow, margins must be tight in cloud computing if a tax rate of less than 10% is enough to close down a facility.

In computing, (what with Moore's law and rapidly changing technology), all the successful companies (Microsoft, Oracle, Sun) used to boast to their customers that if we implemented their latest release, whatever it was, it would have a payback of several months or less.

Don't Microsoft believe their own publicity any more? A few percent tax should not be enough to kill a good idea, if it is that good an idea .

can our current Windows even handle the existing hardware?

When I run Cognos Data Manager and various SQL Server processes the CPU ulitilisation is typically 12%. That is an eighth of all the CPU. it would appear that the bottleneck is CPU but the software cannot take advantage of the multi-processor, multi-core, multi-thread arrangements we currnetly have. If we are only getting 12%, will moving to a more modern server just give us 12% (or maybe 6% !) of a slightly more poiwerful CPU?