Hot Diggety! On a bright and sunny day, Gregory Urban was rumored to have said..
Let's not forget that a/c units in data centers, NOC's, and customer service call centers have been running 24x7 as the night time temperatures have not dropped below 80 in many cities on the east cost for days (it's over 90 in DC at 1:00am). Units in commercial office buildings have shut down, and repair times are not good. The consequences of a failure are more obvious than the solutions for those running off of building a/c units and/or smaller individual a/c systems.
Hmm. Those folks might be better served by studying data center environments in the South or Southwest - ie Phoenix, Dallas, etc. Those folks generally don't seem to be unduly alarmed by operational impact since they've planned for it one way or another from day one, AFAIK. As a side note, I got hit by brief blackouts in my building that affected equipment not in the computer room (ie workstations; computer room on an industrial strength UPS - and I don't mean APS units :) ) yesterday - not sure, but suspect had to do with the rolling blackouts(?). As for the air conditioning units...good point. -Dan