Soaring demand for electricity in Northern Virginia is driving Dominion’s plans to build new transmission lines, submit to partial re-regulation, and embark upon construction of billions of dollars worth of new coal- and nuclear-powered generating plants. What would happen if future demand didn’t materialize as quickly as Dominion anticipated?

It’s well worth scrutinizing Dominion’s forecasts of electricity consumption. Are its forecasts simple extrapolations of past trends, or do they anticipate the changing economic landscape? I ask because we cannot assume that demand, especially in high-tech Northern Virginia, will continue to increase as it has in the past.

“Global electricity consumption by servers and ancillary equipment doubled between 2000 and 2004, estimated Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientst at Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory,” states an article in the Wall Street Journal today. But the computer sector is moving aggressively to curtail consumption. If Dominion extrapolates a continuation of the 2000-2005 trend, it may be overshooting the actual demand for electricity in the future.

Green Grid, a tech-industry consortium from California, was created to address the increasing power consumption of server systems and the data centers that use them. (Northern Virginia has a dozen or more of these server farms.) An immediate goal is to devise standard measures of power efficiency in computer rooms, thus eliminating a major obstacle to new energy-efficiency initiatives. One industry initiative, 80 Plus, focuses on the devices that convert alternating current into the direct current used by most computing equipment. The goal is to boost efficiency from 70 percent to 80 percent. The WSJ also reports that ColdWatt inc. is announcing a line of server power supplies that generate less heat and cut total server power consumption by 30 percent. Furthermore, as noted previously on this blog, Intel is rolling out a new, energy-efficient microchip this year.

Maybe Dominion is taking this entrepreneurial ferment into account with its forecasts, maybe it isn’t. But I am dubious that the policy makers who are rushing Dominion’s re-regulation bill into law know the answer. If Dominion’s forecasts are way off… if demand falls far short of projections… who picks up the bill under re-regulation for Dominion’s over-investment in electric capacity? The rate payers. If the people representing the rate payers aren’t probing aggressively into Dominion’s projections, they need to be. Knowledge is power.