When Utilities become expensive

A recent posting in Nicolas Carr's Rough Type reminded me of a meeting with an entrepreneur from Mexico. Most of our talks were about his ISP and web-hosting business. I was wondering whether Mexican web hosting faced similar issues as Israeli hosting services - mainly competing with the dropping prices and increased bandwidth and storage of US based hosting companies.

What he told me was surprising. As, indeed, competing with commodity hosting was becoming more difficult, he was turning to a new line of business. Natural Gas based power generators. I assumed his target market would be IT, as a support measure for UPS systems, but I was wrong.

Electricity is charged by different rates at different times of the day. Natural gas is cheaper and has a fixed charge. Businesses and homes use those power generators to reduce or eliminate grid charges at peek times.

This is not only an environmental issue. I think it calls to question what we call GPT (General Purpose Technologies) which we today assume to be Utilities, and take for granted, such as our power grids.