It's part of the company's voluntary emergency conservation efforts in response to the state's energy crisis. What better emblem of California's bizarre energy pickle: 6,000 workers at the chip giant that creates the silicon that powers the very engines of the new economy -- the future! -- working in the dark.

"It still leaves enough light to work by. It's not dangerous," says Richard Hall, the company's director of corporate government affairs. "It's one specific measure that we've been taking every workday in the last four weeks."

The Folsom office turns out 50 percent of the lights during the peak electricity-consumption time of 4 to 7 p.m., when overall demand is at its highest as people get home and turn on the TV, the stove, the dishwasher and the microwave.

Last week, Hall went to Washington to meet with federal regulators and staffers from the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to explain why Intel workers are laboring over their monitors under mood lighting, and to find out what the government plans to do to assuage California's electricity woes. After helping drive California's high-tech and dot-com boom, Intel is now in the weird position of lobbying the government to help it turn the lights back on.

"Some people say, 'You guys helped create the Internet economy, and the Internet economy runs on electricity.' Yes, guilty as charged. We did, and it does," says Hall. "The issue is really the Internet economy."

Can California's power grid handle the Net? "The electric system in California was not originally designed for a high-tech industry. As the high-tech industry has grown, so has the level of technology that we have to provide, or try to provide," says Scott Blakey, a spokesman for PG&E, one of the state's largest utilities. "You've taken what essentially is a 19th century system of poles and wires, and using late-20th century technology you've tried to meet the needs of what is going to be a 21st century industry."

Some analysts, bolstered by a study declaring that the Internet is responsible for fully 8 percent of all national electricity consumption, assert that the Net itself is responsible for spiking demand to unprecedented heights. The new economy, it seems, is an energy hog. Never mind that other researchers have debunked the 8 percent figure as absurdly inflated. President-elect George W. Bush has already touted it in discussing his energy policy. What better reason could there be to allow oil drilling and coal mining in virgin wildernesses than the need to keep the Net running?

That's right. There's a convenient new villain in the California energy crisis, and it's not the utility companies that can't meet demand, crying bankruptcy and begging for a bailout by the government. It's not the greedy oligopoly of power generators cashing in on the state's failed, half-baked deregulation scheme. It's not even the environmentalists, whose green-friendly regulations make building a power plant in California about as easy as trying to raise venture capital for an e-tailer in 2001. Nor is it the conservation-clueless customers who can't even be bothered to turn off the lights when they leave a room.

No, it's the Internet. In addition to taking the heat for everything from kiddie porn to the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, the Net is now at fault for overloading our national power infrastructure.

But wait a minute. Wasn't the Net supposed to conserve energy by making businesses run more efficiently? Don't computers use relatively little energy compared with refrigerators and cars and washing machines? How much power does it really take to run the global computer network?

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.