Power Fund, L.P.

The Power Fund seeks to capitalize on the unprecedented degree of innovation and investment that needs to take place in order to improve power quality in the United States and other industrialized nations. The increasing appetite for a new metric of power reliability presents a significant problem for the United States and the world because the existing infrastructure simply is not designed for the power demands of this new era. As Energy Secretary Bill Richardson stated in The Wall Street Journal on May 11, 2000, "America is a superpower, but it's got the grid of a Third World nation."

The existing power grid was essentially designed for light bulbs, refrigerators and HVAC. This is a far cry from today's servers, base stations, web hosting centers and data centers that may suffer costly downtime even if power is interrupted for just one clock cycle - about 8 milliseconds. It is not unlike the trap facing the legacy and/or copper telecommunications infrastructure since it was designed to deliver voice but has been increasingly asked to squeeze data and multimedia files through its bandwidth-limited network. The transition to a world of high 9's will play out over the next decade or more and will require significant amounts of capital which will be spread across a wide variety of companies and their respective technologies. The Advisor and Subadviser estimate that these opportunities represent an industry with a potential marketplace in excess of $100 billion by 2010. The privately held companies that are addressing this problem with innovative products and services are the focus of the Power Fund.