One of the largest utilities in California does not foresee energy prices go down any time soon. At least not in the next six months, according to a representative of PG&E who spoke at a data center industry event in Silicon Valley Thursday.

"It's best to assume energy is going to be the price (it is) today or more," Bill Dunckel, senior project manager at PG&E, said about California energy prices six months from now. Dunckel sat in on a panel at the Energy Savings Now seminar in Santa Clara, sponsored by four data center infrastructure, monitoring and control vendors and the Northern California chapter of the industry group 7x24 Exchange. 

Not only are energy prices not likely to go down in the foreseeable future, they will also become more dynamic overtime, Dunckel said, because of the peak-day pricing program PG&E has implemented. While participation in peak-day pricing today is voluntary, it is likely to become mandatory in the future. 

Dunckel also delivered a keynote address at the event, which he used to suggest a new management model for data center operators ÔÇô management by learning, instead of constant crisis management. "Get out of the crisis-management world," he said. 

Dunckel put a lot of blame on the expression "mission critical" for creating the mindset that drives data center management decisions in the majority of cases. "We scared ourselves" by using the expression, he said, which lead to "managing these critical facilities based on fear." 

Characteristics of the crisis-management approach include reactive, externally driven, simplistic actions that provide short-term fixes without taking the future into account. Management-by-learning entails preventive actions based on long-term goals that are more internally driven and involve complex solutions. 

The vendors that sponsored the event were Raritan, Federspiel Controls, Teladata and Power Assure.