Ten years ago, hardly anybody knew the Internet existed. Now billboards touting websites are everywhere, and Internet traffic is doubling every three months.

By its nature as a giant computer network, the Internet's existence is based on a simple fact: it takes electricity to create, move and store bits of data in the form of electrons. No electricity, no electrons. No electrons, no Internet.

The Internet is growing like a weed. It now connects over 100 million computers. And over 20 million new computers are going online every year and electricity demand is growing right along with the Internet. In the 1990s, the digital decade, electricity demand grew 25%, a phenomenal rate, while non-transportation oil demand actually fell 9%.

The Internet already draws 290 billion kilowatts of electricity in the United States alone. 290 billion kilowatts... That's 8% of U.S. GDP, an enormous draw on the aging United States electricity grid.

Thanks to the Internet, electricity is now the most important form of energy, the crude oil of the twenty-first century. Electricity is the largest commodity market in the United States several times over. At over $220 billion a year, it is five times the size of the crude oil market, and it's still growing.

To the power company, every large website is like a small village contained in a single building Maybe that's because for every computer on every desktop, two or three more pieces of hardware are 'out there,' on the network somewhere. Hubs, servers, routers, repeaters, amplifiers, remote servers, etc. All of them use energy in only one form: electricity.

How much electricity? Take Yahoo, the most visited site on the Internet.

We managed to wrangle some information from the local electric company in Santa Clara, California for just one of Yahoo's office suites. The suite gets four different monthly electric bills. The one we learned about averages $18,000 on electricity every month. That's about 360,000 kilowatt hours each month. Enough juice to light up 360 single family homes.

And Yahoo is not alone. Right now, at this early stage of the Internet's development, there are about 17,000 pure dot-com companies online, each of them either with its own electricity-guzzling building, or totally dependent on one. The Internet's demand for electric power is staggering.

And remember, we only looked at one of the many electric bills Yahoo must pay each month. The total electric draw of a giant website like Yahoo, or a big e-tailing firm like Amazon.com is 1 megawatt. That'd keep the lights on in a thousand single family homes. To the power company, every large site on the Internet is like a small village contained in a single building.

More juice with your chips?

But let's face it. A computer doesn't have to be wired to the Internet to use electricity. Right now, there are over 250 million computers in private homes and businesses. Nearly 40 million new computers are sold annually, with half of them getting wired to the Internet, and the more powerful the machines get year after year, the more electricity each one uses. Inside each machine it's hot--really hot...

In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the transistor density on a microprocessor would double every 18 to 24 months. He was right, and microprocessors continue to become twice as dense about every 18 months or so. What he didn't tell anyone was that the amount of energy on computer chips would also become denser.

The new chips do more work by packing the same amount of energy into a smaller and smaller area, not by using less energy. As a result, the new chips are running hotter all the time and using more electricity than ever before.

How much more? The Semiconductor Industry Association says the latest integrated circuits have as many as 21 million transistors on a single wafer of silicon. They run at a speed of 400 megahertz on 90 watts of power. Within 10 years, those chips will run at 1,800 megahertz and contain 1,400 million transistors. Instead of 90 watts, they'll draw 175 watts, almost double the power. Bigger chips, more juice.

Of the 250 billion chips produced annually, 200 billion are microprocessors that will make their way into all kinds of new applications and appliances, from cell phones to aircraft engines. Every single one is useless without electricity.

'Fab' appetites drink as much juice as a steel mill

It's not just the demand for electricity to power the Internet that's growing, either. It's the electricity it takes to manufacture all that hardware in the first place. It takes an awful lot of kilowatts to crank out computers day after day, you can run your computer for a whole year on the electricity it took to make it. A typical computer manufacturer draws 10 to 15 megawatts, about as much as a steel minimill.

Perhaps you've heard of Nucor (NUE: NYSE), the steel minimill. When Nucor's giant electrodes pump a million volts into a pile of old Cadillacs to melt them back from whence they came, the lights dim in the town 7 miles away.

The manufacturers -- called 'fabs'-- of computers and other Internet boxes are the minimills of the New Economy. There are over 300 of them dimming the lights across the United States.

Where's all this new electricity going to come from?! There is only one solution to the growing need for electric power: build more power plants. Entrepreneurs -- and their shareholders -- who invest in new power plants will be rewarded handsomely.

To make electricity you need fuel. Today coal is the fuel that produces 56% of our electricity. In addition to coal, there's another electricity fuel you'll need to know about to reap triple-digit gains, like the 146% (and counting) that we've made on EOG Resources (EOG)...

Well that's most of the news, I cut most of the crap out of it for you all!.

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