California’s massive computing industry faced the prospect of sweeping changes at the hands of Golden State regulators worried that idle devices are drawing too much power at too great a cost.

“All computers sold in California could be required to adopt stricter state energy standards by 2018, cutting computer energy consumption by as much as half, according to new regulations being proposed by the California Energy Commission,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “The standards would apply to power use settings on both desktops and laptops, monitors and signage displays sold in California,” requiring “software and hardware settings controlling the amount of power used by the machines, especially when not in use, in a power period called ‘idle load.'”

The regulations have already been pegged to make a decisive impact on the manufacture and production of electronic devices in the U.S. “Given California’s size, market share and influence, the rules adopted by the CEC expect to trigger changes across the industry by mandating changes even the federal government has thus far avoided tackling,” U-T San Diego noted. But the federal Department of Energy has been tipped as next in line to consider applying such rules, according to the Bee:

“The regulations would save 1,913 gigawatt-hours of power used by computers and 588 gigawatt-hours from monitors and displays yearly, said Andrew McAllister, commissioner for the California Energy Commission. That’s estimated to reduce utility bills by more than $400 million annually by 2024.”

Costs and savings

With little if any organized opposition to the rules, outside of industry negotiations, the California Energy Commission would become the first state body to codify an energy-reduction agenda — at an initial cost to consumers. “The agency estimates it will add about $18 to the price of a computer but promises it will save customers and businesses much more in energy savings,” reported U-T San Diego. “But the commission estimates consumers will save $75.53 over the computer’s 5-year lifespan, due to energy savings.”

“California businesses will pay up to $62 million more per year in incremental costs for installing more efficient computers, monitors and electronic signs, but the CEC said businesses will reduce their electricity costs by up to $290 million per year once their equipment has turned over.”

Hitting the wall

Environmentalist groups have spearheaded the push for the new regulations, insisting that the energy savings translate into air cleaner enough to justify big changes. “Roughly 300 million computers in the U.S. spend from 50 to 77 percent of their time ‘on but inactive’ and devour $10 billion a year worth of electricity, the equivalent of 30-large power plants spewing 65 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution that contributes to climate change,” the Natural Resources Defense Council claimed. 

But some industry analysts have cautioned that, regardless of environmental objectives, the need for energy efficiency standards could be driven by an even simpler problem: current limits on the global capacity to produce energy. “The anticipated and growing energy requirements for future computing needs will hit a wall in the next 24 years if the current trajectory is correct,” according to Semiconductor Engineering. “At that point, the world will not produce enough energy for all of the devices that are expected to be drawing power.”

“A report issued by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Semiconductor Research Corp., bases its conclusions on system-level energy per bit operation, which are a combination of many components such as logic circuits, memory arrays, interfaces and I/Os. Each of those contributes to the total energy budget. For the benchmark energy per bit, as shown in the chart below, computing will not be sustainable by 2040. This is when the energy required for computing is estimated to exceed the estimated world’s energy production.”

A new report from state Auditor Elaine Howle is on the California Department of Consumer Affairs’ BreEZe System. It found:

Consumer Affairs failed to adequately plan, staff, and manage the project for developing BreEZe.

• It did not effectively assess the regulatory entities’ business needs to determine system requirements.
• Inadequate system requirements led to significant delays at key stages of the project.
• It relied on faulty assumptions in selecting a commercial “off-the-shelf” system as the foundation for BreEZe, which contributed to an increase in project costs—from $28 million in 2009 to $96 million as of January 2015 for half of the entities originally planned.
• It did not have adequate staffing to execute and implement BreEZe through critical project phases.

Note that increase in project costs — $68 million wasted. At the same time, because of Moore’s Law, private-sector computer costs were decreasing by up to half every 18 months (or computer power was doubling in that time). Just compare the cell phone you held in 2009 to the one you have now.

Some other cases of state and local government computer disasters, as reported previously at CalWatchDog.com:

• Last year, thieves ripped off $800,000 of computer equipment from San Jose State.
• Last year, Howle reported on the unreliability of state computer data.
• Just before that, a computer bug dumped some Covered CA applicants into Medi-Cal.
• In 2013, unemployment checks were delayed by a glitch in the computer of the Employment Development Department.
• In 1994, a $44 million DMV computer “debacle” struck.

Thieves ripped off $800,000 of computer equipment from San Jose State. The Contra Costa Times reported:

Without a central warehouse or reliable system for keeping track of the valuables arriving on campus, hundreds of wireless-access devices costing nearly $600 each started to disappear as early as 2012, and no one noticed — until January of this year. And it took months more for university officials to realize the equipment had been stolen. 

“There is no way to track what items were delivered,” reads a recently released university police report that summarizes a May interview with one employee.

This is the public university right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Incredible. Yet typical government incompetence.

And it was just a couple of days ago that I reported on state Auditor Elaine M. Howle’s report on the unreliability of state computer data.

Just before that, a computer bug dumped some Covered CA applicants into Medi-Cal.

A year ago, unemployment checks were delayed by a glitch in the computer of the Employment Development Department.

Then way back in 1994 there was a $44 million DMV computer “debacle.”

Of course, private companies also suffer thefts and glitches. But in those cases, the company itself pays.  With government problems, it’s taxpayers who make up the difference. And given that nobody really “owns” government property, fewer precautions are taken to keep equipment safe and programs running right.

Yet the government minutely runs our lives!

Ditching Los Angeles Unified’s new computer system, school counselors in the district found themselves reverting to the same paper forms they used two decades ago to schedule classes for kids.

Some students, teachers union leaders said, simply walked out of the first day at Verdugo Hills High School, because they couldn’t obtain class schedules or enroll due to glitches in the recently implemented record-keeping software, My Integrated Student Information System (MiSiS).

“There was no way for our teachers to be prepared for our students on the first day of school,” United Teachers Los Angeles representative Colleen Schwab said. “Teachers could not be trained because the system did not work, so they sat in training for hours, for no reason.”

At Taft Charter High School, Schwab said, some 400 pupils stood in line waiting to be placed in classes for the 2014-15 academic year. At other schools, classrooms sat nearly empty, because students weren’t yet enrolled.

That comes after last year’s canceling of $208 million in DMV computer upgrades “because little progress was being made.”

Also last year, the Employment Development Department delayed checks to the unemployed because its system couldn’t compute, either.

And at the federal level, just last month reports surfaced on new problems, as reported by AP:

WASHINGTON — After spending nearly $300 million on a new computer system to handle disability claims, the Social Security Administration still can’t get it to work. And officials can’t say when it will.

Six years ago, Social Security embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. But the project has been racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency.

Today, the project is still in the testing phase, and the agency can’t say when it will be operational or how much it will cost.

In the meantime, people filing for disability claims face long delays at nearly every step of the process — delays that were supposed to be reduced by the new processing system.

What’s the solution? If a government agency can’t get its computer system to work, then the whole agency should privatized — immediately.

Privatize the LAUSD by returning parents’ tax money to them, then letting them choose the best schools for their kids.

Privatize the DMV by privatizing all the roads.

Privatize the EDD by cutting taxes and government so private industry flourishes and creates enough new jobs.

Privatize Social Security by allowing people to opt out, and use the taxes now going to that to set up individual, private retirement and disability accounts.

Government clearly doesn’t compute. Let us then switch to non-government solutions.

By Chris Reed

Friday’s news that state Controller John Chiang had fired the second contractor hired to upgrade the state government’s computer payroll system for incompetence and poor work — a few years after the first contractor was fired for the same reason — is an amazing commentary on the disconnect between the genius of California’s private sector and the stupidity of Sacramento.

This is where the information technology revolution began! And we have a payroll system built on punch-card computers from the 1970s? And after nearly a decade of trying to fix it, we’ve made no progress???

“This is the home of Silicon Valley; it’s so embarrassing,” said Debra Bowen.

But that wasn’t Bowen in her present role as California’s secretary of state. That was what she said in 1999, when she was a state senator commenting on another computer debacle.

In April 2012, I whined about a Sacramento Bee report which (my description) warned that “the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was having so many problems with its new $514 million computer system that some retirees are getting notices that their health insurance policies are being canceled because of CalPERS’ nonpayment of premiums.”

Computer debacles the Sacramento norm

As I detailed then, this was nothing new:

“In 1994, a state audit found the Department of Motor Vehicles wasted nearly $50 million on a computer ‘modernization’ project that would actually have yielded a slower computer system than the relic it was to replace.

“In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis canceled an $18 million state program to integrate computer systems tracking welfare and social services recipients because it offered no hope of progress – the fifth failed effort at the same task that decade. The state ended up paying fines of nearly $1 billion for delays in meeting a federal mandate to have a functional computerized system to track child support payments.

“In 2005, a Sacramento Bee report found that efforts to implement reforms of the state prison system were impossible to evaluate for their effectiveness because the state Department of Corrections – despite huge budget increases – had never set up a central computer database to track individual prisoners and employees as it was directed to do in 1992. This poor tracking led to more violence in overcrowded prisons and to arguably higher recidivism because of an inability to evaluate which prisoners would respond to programs meant to help them integrate back into public life.”

This next paragraph involves the project where Chiang fired the contractor Friday:

“In 2009, efforts to furlough state employees and reduce their pay were called impossible by experts in and out of state government because the state payroll system relied on decrepit computers using half-century-old programming language. The ’21st Century Project’ upgrade of the system – originally bid out to a contractor at $69 million – now seems likely to cost $500 million.

“In 2011, a state audit lambasted a planned statewide computer system meant to link courts in all 58 counties. The audit said the system could end up costing $1.9 billion – seven times the original $260 million estimate.”

Do you, yunno, see a pattern here?

I see this as part of a larger continuum in which California Democrats and much of the media who constantly and at times correctly rail against the private sector for corruption, cutting corners and being amoral completely absolve the public sector when seeing similar epic fiascos. Why? Do even Democrats believe the cheap jokes about “government work”? Apparently.

It’s 2013, and even after spending more than $250 million, California has a payroll system based on computer programs from the 1970s. The same California where computer geniuses have changed the world with their hardware and software breakthroughs since the 1970s.

Write your own punchline.

Over the years I’ve written many times how it  remains a mystery that the state that continues to produce the Internet Revolution can’t get its government computers to work right. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about how the public and private sectors operate. The private sector innovates, the public sector is incompetent.

About 15 years ago I wrote about how the state wasted something like $70 million on a computer system that didn’t work. Things haven’t gotten better, as Dan Walters notes:

When State Auditor Elaine Howle excoriated the state court system for mismanaging a very expensive computer system this month, it was a new chapter in an old and sad saga.

California, the home of cutting edge technology, has a very checkered history of using it effectively for government.

The “statewide case management project,” managed by the Administrative Office of the Courts, is the current poster child for rising costs and questionable utility.

Its costs, Howle noted, have escalated sharply and now are expected to hit $1.9 billion by the time it’s completed four years hence – not counting tens of millions of more that local courts will have to spend to use it. Meanwhile, many local judges are complaining that it doesn’t work well and is consuming funds that would be better spent offsetting budget-related cutbacks in court operations.

This is occurring in a state that houses the HQ of Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Intel, etc.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we just abolish the state government, and let these competent high-tech firms run things?

Feb. 18, 2011