Green Internet and Cyber-Infrastructure

How to make the Internet DNS green

2012-01-09T09:28:00.001-08:00

[The Dutch Internet registry SIDN has launched a unique program in partnership with CleanBits to identify what proportion of .nl domain names were hosted on a green or CO2-neutral basis.
The results show a strong trend towards the ‘greening’ of the .nl internet zone. Nearly 30 per cent of .nl names were found to have green hosts. That is more than twice the percentage identified in a 2009 survey, which revealed that 11% of the .nl zone was green-hosted. To be counted as green, a host had to use only green energy, or offset its CO2 emissions.

The Domain Name Systems is probably one of the most critical components of the global Internet, and yet one that could easily be made truly green by moving DNS servers to follow the wind/follow the sun architectures such as Greenstar. Because DNS relies extensively on local caching, as well as primary and secondary servers, it is an Internet application that could be easily adapted to this type of architecture. A typical DNS zone may process millions of DNS queries per hour representing, in aggregate, thousands of kilowatt hours and potential CO2 emissions.

The recent work undertaken by the Greenstar project could easily quantify these CO2 emissions and possibly someday make them eligible for cash offsets in the various voluntary markets .—BSA]
For more information please see:

SIDN and Cleanbits
https://www.sidn.nl/en/news/news/article/number-of-green-hosted-nl-domain-names-has-more-than-doubled/

Greenstar Follow the Wind/Follow the Sun
http://www.greenstarnetwork.com/
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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

A classic example of why energy efficiency never works

2012-01-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

If you live in the United States and value fuel efficiency, you might catch yourself looking longingly overseas at super efficient vehicle fleets and wondering, why not us?
One MIT researcher looked into the predicament and found that though it might not look like we are making strides, we are. The average, fuel efficiency for US vehicles actually increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 2006. The problem is that cars in the US got bigger (by 26% on average) and their horsepower increased (by 107 hp on average), which, when factored in, means that the average fuel efficiency of American cars only increased by a mere 15%. Almost all of the new technology went into making cars more efficient per pound of weight so that the cars could get bigger and still fit within average mile per gallon expectations.
Read more: MIT Researcher Explains Why Gas Mileage is Still Low Despite Advances in Fuel Economy | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

http://goo.gl/mL5Y0

Network and Telecommunication protocols for the Energy Internet

2011-11-22T05:52:00.001-08:00

[Bruce Nordham of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed some very exciting concepts on the networked and telecommunications protocols for the future “Energy Internet” or what he calls “Building Networks”.
He rightly recognizes that most of today’s “Smart Grid” protocols are focused around the needs of the electrical utility and its transmission system. While in reality we need a set of protocols that focus on much more distributed set of peer to peer energy sources and sinks. These protocols will be particularly important as the eVehicle becomes an alternate energy transport system to the electrical grid.

The challenge we face with the future Energy Internet, in many ways parallels the development of Internet protocols. On one hand you have the IETF which is focused on developing protocols that enable and empower the end user – which has resulted in an explosion of innovation and new products and services. In contrast you have the ITU whose focus has been developing protocols that enable and empower the telco/cableco to control and manage the customer experience(e.g. NGN), where the end user is seen no more than a dumb consumer. It is no surprise that most authoritarian governments and dictators favor the ITU approach.

We are seeing similar issues with the smart grid, where most of the standards development is focused on tools for the utility and grid operator to manage and control the flow of electricity to and from the grid. Utility are largely focused on reducing costs, and not reducing CO2 emissions, or god forbid empowering the consumer. That is why protocol work of “Building Networks” is so important. – BSA]

Beyond the Smart Grid: Building Networks
http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/nordman/docs/beyond.pdf

The Case against the Smart Grid
http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/nordman/docs/i4e02oct09.pdf

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Details on building an "Energy Internet"

2011-11-20T08:24:00.001-08:00

[I have put together a compendium of material on building the future “Energy Internet” which can be found at http://goo.gl/8HyNb.

There is a lot of interesting working going on in this field in New Zealand and China. Internet engineers have long recognized the value of packet based networks, as they have many advantages over circuit based network architecture such as the ability to easily route around failures, to make more efficient use of network resources and to put the user or end device in control of the network.

In theory, building packet based energy delivery systems would also potentially enable a variety of new economic models or services. But the biggest challenge is finding a technology that would allow large power loads to be delivered and routed independent of each other from supplier to consumer. It is hard to imagine building an Ethernet switch or router that can process and handle packets of several hundred kilowatt-hours of power. However a number of companies are recognizing that the electric vehicle may be the ideal “packet” based power delivery system, which has the added advantage of already having an existing network infrastructure in place made up of our roads and highways. Rather than charging the eVehicle from stationary charging systems at home or business using power from the utility grid as is done today, a simpler architecture would be charge the vehicle as it moves, either through induction coils, or ultra-capacitor discharge umbrellas located every few kilometers or at stop lights and drive-through fast food restaurants or banks.

Not only do these systems provide power to the transport vehicles they can also be used to store and forward, or route power with every passing vehicle to enable delivery of power from a given source to destination. To date the deployment and adoption of electric vehicles has been hindered as they been simply seen as a one to one replacement for the traditional gas vehicle. But if the eVehicle could also be used not only for transportation, but as a low cost alternative to the utility grid, then it might have a much greater take up rate, as well as eliminating range anxiety.
Some additional pointers:

• Green Investment Opportunity for small business - on the move electric car charging
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2010/04/green-investment-opportunity-for-small.html

• How California suburban sprawl could be the answer to global warming
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-california-suburban-sprawl-could-be.html

• Packet Based Energy Delivery Systems
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/09/packet-based-energy-delivery-systems.html

• The "Energy Internet" - how the Internet + renewable energy can transform the economy
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/10/energy-internet-how-internet-renewable.html#more

• Electric roads and Internet will allow coast to coast driving with no stopping and no emissions
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/05/electric-roads-and-internet-will-allow.html

• A new look at an old idea: Powering autos from overhead wires
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-look-at-old-idea-powering-autos.html

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Must watch video: on the move electric vehicle charging at University of Auckland

2011-11-10T04:45:00.001-08:00

[I am very excited to see the recent announcement from University of Auckland of their very innovative inductive charging system for electric vehicles.
This is something I have been blogging about for some time that car manufacturers are trapped in an old world thinking that vehicles must be stationary to be refueled. This was true when using fossil fuels, but with electric vehicles there is no reason why they cannot be charged while on the move. This technology also allows retailers such as drive through banks or fast food restaurants to offer free charging of your electric vehicles from their roof top solar panels – “will that be fries with your free electric charge”. It also enables the idea that the electric vehicle can be an energy transport system in direct competition with the traditional utility grid. More importantly it complements our existing suburban lifestyle. It is innovations like this that maybe, just maybe, might save us from the Armageddon of global warming. For more information please see following pointers – BSA]

@petergnz This is awesome - Auckland University company in $70m deal with Qualcomm for inductive car charging technology http://tinyurl.com/73pdksw

Green Investment Opportunity for small business - on the move electric car charging
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2010/04/green-investment-opportunity-for-small.html

How California suburban sprawl could be the answer to global warming
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-california-suburban-sprawl-could-be.html

The "Energy Internet" - how the Internet + renewable energy can transform the economy
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/10/energy-internet-how-internet-renewable.html#more

Electric roads and Internet will allow coast to coast driving with no stopping and no emissions
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/05/electric-roads-and-internet-will-allow.html

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

$1 Billion University Green program launched - CIO and NRENs could be big beneficiary

2011-11-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

[The $1 billion green challenge is inspired by the exceptional performance of existing green revolving funds operated by many universities worldwide.
Green revolving funds are either part of a university endowment program or publicly traded entities. They make investments in energy efficiency and GHG reduction initiatives. The pay back of the investment is through energy savings over several years or, in those markets that have cap and trade, through the sale of GHG offsets. The average return on green revolving fund is 32%!

As I have blogged many times, several studies in Europe, Canada and the US have shown that ICT can represent up to 40% of the electrical energy consumption at university, of which 15-25% can be in the campus data center alone, and another 15% in “closet clusters” scattered across the campus. In a recent study conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project, they claim that commercial cloud computing can reduce energy consumption and GHG emissions by as much as 50%.

In these days of severe financial constraint, NRENs and Campus CIOs have to find new ways to reduce costs. The obvious low hanging fruit is to move, as much as possible the closet clusters and campus data center facilities to commercial clouds. Not only will this save energy and GHG costs, but also will obviate the need for huge capital investment in computer hardware. Other obvious money saving practices are to power laptop and cell phone charging stations with roof top solar panels or micro windmills, deploy solar/wind powered WiFi nodes, and use on the move electric charging for campus utility vehicles, etc

As I have blogged in the past, those NRENs who have entered the market of brokering commercial cloud services, should be able to make those services plus the network connectivity almost free to the university by leveraging these green revolving funds and through the energy and capital cost savings enjoyed by the CIO.

However, one of the biggest challenges of tapping into green revolving funds, is that they are almost exclusively targeted at facilities people. Campus IT folk and NRENs need to educate managers of such funds the IT and networking can play a much more significant role in reducing energy consumption and GHG emissions then traditional facilities based solutions. Funding councils can also play a significant role by making commercial cloud costs an eligible research expense and promoting the development of research tools that use commercial clouds such as NSF XSEDE, Australian NeCTAR, Globus OnLIne, SURFconext, Galaxy, etc

$1 Billion University Green Challenge Launches
http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/23028

The $1 Billion Green Challenge, launched this week, challenges universities and other nonprofits to invest that amount in a revolving fund that finances energy efficiency upgrades on campuses. Harvard, Stanford, and other leading universities are the first to commit $65 million to to finance serious upgrades in energy efficiency. The Challenge is inspired by the exceptional performance of existing green revolving funds, which have a median annual return on investment of 32%, as documented by Greening The Bottom Line, a report published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute.
A bright spot in a rocky economy, these profitable investments are helping create green jobs in campus communities, while lowering operating costs on college and university campuses.
[..]
32 universities have announced they'll commit funds to the Green Challenge. In addition to Harvard and Stanford, Arizona State, Caltech, Dartmouth, George Washington, Middlebury, and others have signed on.

[…]
The Billion Dollar Green Challenge was launched at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference in Pittsburgh. With more than 2,500 participants, the conference is the largest gathering on higher education sustainability.

Blue-chip companies could reduce their carbon emissions by 50% if they migrate their data storage operations to the cloud, a new study says.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/07/cloud-computing-cut-carbon-emissions?newsfeed=true

The study conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project in London focussed on large IT companies in France and the UK and found that they could achieve large cost savings and carbon reductions by 2020 if they moved their IT systems to shared data networks.
Big IT companies are also the developers of cloud services and they are keen to see expansion of the services. The study follows a recent forecast that use of cloud services could triple in the next two years. The Open Data Center Alliance, an umbrella group of more than 300 companies including global banks, released a statement last week saying they had planned to adopt cloud services much faster than thought.
[…]
For example by 2020, large UK companies that use cloud computing could achieve annual energy savings of £1.2 billion (€1.39 billion) and carbon reductions equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles, the study says.

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle

2011-10-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

[Here is a great example of how countries like Canada, Sweden, Norway, etc could be the hubs of the future global green Internet.
Canada, in particular has an abundance of “stranded” hydro electric, power such as run of the river turbines, that are not connected to the electric grid which would be ideal for data centers. Given Canada’s proximity to the US, one would think Canada would also be a natural location for data centers for companies like Facebook, etc. But the biggest problem for Canada, as opposed to Sweden or Norway is our lack of cost competitive fiber infrastructure due to foreign ownership restrictions and lack of a national vision for broadband – BSA]

Facebook is to build a multi-million 'mini town' on the edge of the Arctic circle to house all its computer servers, which would us as much electricity as a town of 50,000 people.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8850575/Facebook-to-build-server-farm-on-edge-of-Arctic-Circle.html

Luleå is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle Photo: Alamy

The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US.
"The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers," said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a 'Node Pole', luring in other international computing giants.
"If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it's around 2C [35.6F]."
Luleå is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle.
Taking advantage of the rock bottom temperatures, Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields.
Even though they will rely on air cooling, keeping the servers humming will still require 120MW of power, enough to supply 16,000 detached homes, and costing some £45m a year.
These power needs will be met by renewable electricity generated by dams on the nearby Luleå river.
"The Luleå river produces twice as much electricity as the Hoover Dam does, so 50 per cent is exported from our region. There is a surplus of energy, and we can supply more data centres in this area easily," Engman said.
He said Facebook's engineers had also been attracted by the reliability of the local power grid, which has been built to supply the area's thriving iron, steel and paper industries, and also by Sweden's dense fibre-optic network.
"Sweden has the highest penetration in the world of fibre to households, so it is very well connected," said Engman. "You can get very easily through Finland into Eastern Europe and Russia."
Facebook becomes the latest to look to Northern Europe for server farms. Microsoft in 2007 said it was in discussions to build a sever farm in Siberia, but the deal has never materialised.
Google in 2009 bought a disused paper mill in Hamima in southern Finland, where it has been building a server farm, although it has been attracted more by the availability of cheap hydroelectric power.
Tom Furlong, Facebook's Director of Site Operations, is flying to Luleå today ahead of a press conference, when Facebook will give a full outline of its plans.
Mr Furlong's team looked at more than 40 sites in Sweden alone, before narrowing their list down earlier this year to a choice of Luleå and Östersund, a town in Central Sweden.
Mr Furlong led development on Facebook's first server farm in Prineville, Oregon, which also relies on air cooling, relying mainly on the town's chilly desert nights and cold winters, only using cooling during the summer days.

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

The "Energy Internet" - how the Internet + renewable energy can transform the economy

2011-10-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

[Here is a couple of interesting articles on topics on how the Internet + low carbon or zero carbon renewable energy architectures can transform the global society and economy.
As with the Internet in the 1980s which had to do an end run around the telcos, I believe if we are going to succeed in building a low carbon society we need to do a similar end run around the utilities. Surprisingly the automobile and our highways may be the answer. The same organizations that brought you the Internet – universities and R&E networks – once again can play a critical leadership role with the “Energy Internet”. For more background information on this topic please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/. Thanks to Kevin Barron and John Wilson for these pointers - BSA

Carlota Perez's "creative construction" agenda re global Internet, energy etc:
The theme of Internet / Energy convergence and the next epochal phase of General Purpose Technology:

http://www.schumpeter2010.dk/index.php/schumpeter/schumpeter2010/paper/viewFile/493/212

Beyond the Financial Crisis: Germany's Plan to Regrow the Global Economy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/germany-euro-economy-_b_1028736.html

[…]
While the rest of the world is in a near panic over the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, a fresh new economic wind is blowing across Germany. In discussions with German business leaders over the past several months, and in recent conversations with Chancellor Angela Merkel and key political leaders in Berlin, it has become clear that Germany is embarking on a journey into a new economic era. The German plan is based on the historical understanding that the great economic paradigm shifts in history occur when new communications revolutions converge and merge with new energy regimes. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the speed and complexity of commercial activity made possible by the new flow of energy. Today, the distributed Internet communication revolution is converging with distributed renewable energies, giving birth to a powerful Third Industrial Revolution that is going to fundamentally change German society.

The Merkel administration has launched an ambitious effort to transition the West's leading exporting power into a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR). The federal government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an "energy Internet" that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies onsite, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart utility network, just like we now share information online. Entire communities are in the process of transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants, and companies like Siemens and Bosch are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, and appliances that will merge distributed Internet communications with distributed energy to create the smart buildings, infrastructure, and cities of the future.
[…]
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Using the social Internet as a tool to reward consumers to use solar powered ICT devices

2011-10-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

[Here is a great example of how the Internet and ICT could be used as an incentive to get customers to reduce their carbon footprint from ICT devices.
The energy consumption and carbon footprint of ICT devices now exceeds that of traditional appliances in most Western homes according to reports from the IEA and other organizations. Unfortunately, so far the ICT industry has focused on the false path of energy efficiency to deal with this problem, whereas the more practical solution is to power these devices solely by small solar panels and/or micro windmills. Because most ICT devices only draw small amounts of current, they are ideally suited to be powered by solar panels or windmills. As the explosion of ICT devices in our homes continue to grow, we need solutions as outlined in this article, as opposed to focusing on energy efficiency. Some excerpts – BSA]

A social energy network turns to solar chargers & shopping

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/a-social-energy-network-turns-to-solar-chargers-shopping/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

Tech companies so far have stumbled when it comes to getting people to be mindful of their energy use and conserve. But a new German startup,Changers, thinks it’s come up with the right incentives to attract the do-gooder crowd: sell mobile solar chargers and build a social network around earning energy credits and online shopping.

Changers, founded in 2010, hopes to build a community and marketplace of eco-conscious users and retailers through shopping and competition. Here’s the proposition: you buy a solar charging kit that, when connected to your computer, will allow you to upload data about the energy generated by the charger and stored in a battery. That data goes to your profile page on Changers’ website, where the energy, measured in watt-hours, will be converted into credits that you can use to buy actual stuff from online shops.
The solar kit charges at a rate of 4 watts per hour and can hold 16 watts in its battery, which can supply power for two iPhones. So you can charge up the battery during the day and then transfer those electrons to your cell phones, tablets or other gadgets at night.

Solar social network

Through your page on Changers, you can track you solar energy generation, the carbon offset created by the solar electricity (2 watt hours of solar electricity equal to 1 gram of carbon emission), and see how you stack up against friends, neighbors or those in other countries. The energy-to-money conversion rate could be different, depending on the retailers, said Hans Raffauf, head of communications at Changers.
The site’s first retailer is Holstee, which sells clothes, bags, coffee makers, sunglasses, ear buds, and other products made from recycled materials. To shop on Holstee, you will have to accumulate a minimum of 100 watts, which gives you a $10 voucher.

While the solar charging kit will cost you $149, joining the Changers community is free. Changers, which has raised an undisclosed seed investment of “a couple of million dollars” from German solar company Centrotherm Photovoltaics, wants to charge retailers in the future, Raffauf said. That won’t happen until Changers builds up a user base large enough to attract more retailers.

And, yes, sharing what your energy production and rewards via Facebook and Twitter is highly encouraged.

Web 2.0 launch
Changers hails from Berlin, Germany, but is launching its site in the U.S. primarily because it wants to start at a place with early technology adopters in order to get feedback and tweak its site. Raffauf said Germany could actually be a larger market – Germans are ahead of Americans when it comes to supporting solar electricity and emission-reduction plans.
[…]
Finding the right retailers and enough of them also will be crucial not just for Changers to attract initial users but also to sustain user interest over time. The challenge of sustaining consumer interest has been a big hurdle for many energy management hardware and app developers, some of whom mistakenly thought that consumers would continue to be engaged with their energy management tools. Google and Microsoft, for example, launched energy measuring tools only to pull them earlier this year.

[..]
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Hewlett Packard, AMD and Others Aim to Use Wind, Solar Power for Data Centers

2011-10-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

[A concept that originated with CANARIE funded Greenstar project, spearheaded in Quebec by ETS, PROMPTinc and CRC in Ottawa, is now gaining momentum around the world.
Large companies like AMD and HP see significant commercial opportunities with such zero or low carbon architectures. Excerpts from eWeek article – BSA]

Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett-Packard are teaming with the state of New York and Clarkson University on a research project to figure how best to use renewable energy to power containerized data centers.

Specifically, the researchers want to determine not only whether the data centers—such as HP’s PODS (Performance-Optimized Data Centers) can be run solely on wind or solar power, but also whether workloads can be automatically shifted between these energy resources without having to rely on a traditional electrical grid.

“The ultimate goal is to see if we can get 100 percent uptime using 100 percent renewable energy resources,” Steve Kester, AMD’s director of government relations and regulatory affairs, said in an interview with eWEEK.

The $674,000 project, with funding from NYSERDA (N.Y. State Energy Research and Development Authority) and private sources, was announced Aug. 1. It was developed jointly by Clarkson and engineers with AMD’s Research Labs. The project is entering its first stage, a 12-to-18-month phase where Clarkson students will experiment with managing data through a distributed network that is powered by renewable energy.
[…]
If the project works out, the end result will be highly flexible data centers that not only can powered by renewable energy, but can shift workloads between these energy sources as needed, according to Kester and Bryan Berry, project lead for NYSERDA. For example, if winds suddenly die down in one site in New York, then workloads can be automatically and reliably moved to another site in the state where winds are blowing, without incurring any service downtime and without having to rely on the traditional electrical grid.
“If the wind is blowing in Buffalo, but isn’t blowing in Albany, and we have [wind-powered data center] locations in Buffalo, we can shift the computational workload [from Albany] to Buffalo,” Berry said in an interview with eWEEK, adding that relying on wind and solar to this degree hasn’t been done before. “You have to be able to be a bit proactive, and you have to be able to respond to changes in the field.”
The challenge, AMD’s Kester said, is finding a way to reconcile the demand in data centers for constant uptime with the intermittent nature of solar and wind power. Sometimes the sky is cloud, and sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. If the project can determine methods for doing just that, it could go a long way in easing the increasing problem of power and cooling costs.
“We’re rapidly reaching the point where the cost of running the data center actually exceeds the cost of the technology in it,” he said.
[…]
“We know that renewable energy – solar and wind power – plays a major role in our future,” Alan Lee, corporate vice president of research and advanced development at AMD, said in a July 31 blog post. “How do we link this vital resource to the data center and I mean directly link power source to servers? (You know AMD is all about eliminating the bottlenecks!) That is one key issue—getting power from a wind turbine directly to a data center like an HP POD without building a traditional electrical grid between the two.”
For a state like New York, which trails only California in its concentration of data centers, a greater shift to renewable power sources could be significant. According to NYSERDA’s Berry, 3 percent of the energy consumption in the state comes from IT, and power consumption by IT in the state will double every three years at the current rate.
“We want to help [companies] run these facilities in efficient ways,” he said.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/AMD-HP-Others-Aim-to-Use-Wind-Solar-Power-for-Data-Centers-578864/

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

The rebound effect and ICT - why free energy may reduce CO2 emission

2011-10-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

[I have long argued that energy efficiency, as a primary objective, is not sufficient to slow down, never mind reduce CO2 emissions.
The pressing challenge facing this planet is not energy consumption but CO2 emissions. It is not the amount of energy we consume, but the type of energy that really matters. If we can adapt our society away from our current fossil fuel fiesta to use only renewable power like solar and wind, then global warming could be significantly slowed down. Our planet, in a few hours receives more solar energy than we consume from all traditional fossil fuel based sources in a year. The biggest problem with renewable energy is its unpredictably and variability. Part of the solution is on the supply side which is to develop continent wide grids and energy storage systems. But an equally important of the solution is on the demand side and that is to develop technologies and applications that can work with this type of unpredictable energy. ICT can play a critical role in developing such solutions. This is the grand challenge for the ICT industry. Rather than focusing on energy efficiency as the primary objective, ICT companies and researchers need to focus on how to develop services and applications, for all sectors of society, that work only with renewable energy resources. Many of the technology implementations are very similar for energy efficiency, but the overall architecture outcome is a lot different.

One of the big challenges of a primary objectives of energy efficiency, is something called the rebound effect, also known as the Jevons paradox or Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. In a recent workshop held at University of Concordia in Montreal, Stephane Lepochat gave an excellent talk on the implications of the rebound effect on ICT, as well as the 4 different types of rebound effect . Given the many other examples of rebound effect in other sectors of society there is no reason to expect that ICT will not suffer from the same phenomena. In another talk by Chris Phillips dramatically showed the challenges we face if we try to solve the environmental impact of ICT through energy efficiency as the primary vehicle.

Charles Despins of PROMPT inc gave an excellent talk on the socio-economic opportunities on a carbon focused Green ICT strategy, as opposed to energy efficiency – not only to reduce carbon impact of ICT, but to help all aspects of society directly reduce its CO2 impact. Quebec, through PROMPT, is probably the only jurisdiction in the world that is funding research along these lines. While the rest of the world is still focused on energy efficiency, Quebec researchers and industry is taking a world leadership role in addressing the real problem facing this planet. Companies and researches in Quebec are doing innovative research and development at using ICT to use renewable energy only. Zero carbon clouds and networks, pathway charging systems using renewable energy for vehicles and public transportation, etc are some examples.

This approach undertaken by Quebec through PROMPT Inc may end up the secret weapon against global warming. As noted, in the article below, solar panels could soon produce the cheapest form of electricity. As the cost of solar panels continue to drop simple extrapolations indicate that electricity from solar panels, could soon be “too cheap to meter”. While many may remember this phrase from the hubristic days of nuclear energy, it is not unreasonable to expect this will soon will be the reality for electricity from solar panels. Jurisdictions that focus on building technology socio-economic solutions using such renewable energy could be the big winners, because not will it virtually eliminate CO2 emissions, the power itself will almost be free.

There is every expectation that energy consumption will continue to grow, especially as the developing world adopts western lifestyles. For this reason, I think it is simply illogical to expect that energy efficiency to be the primary objective in reducing CO2. A far more effective objective is to find ways to use renewable energy only.

Chris Phillips, University of London, UK
Dynamic Energy Management for Wired Communication Networks
http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~al_shaik/EJC_2011/Slides/Phillips_EJC_2011.pdf

Stéphane Lepochat, EVEA, Nantes, France
Taking into Account the Rebound Effect in LCA: Necessities and Difficulties
http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~al_shaik/EJC_2011/Slides/Lepochat_EJC_2011.pdf

Charles Despins, Prompt-Quebec and ETS
Socio-economic opportunities for a carbon-focused Green ICT strategy
http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~al_shaik/EJC_2011/Slides/Despins_EJC_2011.pdf

C. Despins et al., Leveraging Green Communications for Carbon Emission
Reductions: Techniques, Testbeds and Emerging Carbon Footprint Standards,
IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 49, no. 8, August 2011, pp. 101-109

Four different types of rebound effect
- Direct Rebound Effect (substitution effect, pure price effect) :
Greater efficiency may lead to a lower price of the service (or product or technology) which in turn
may induce an increased use of this cheaper service.
- Indirect Rebound Effect (income effect, secondary effect) :
If prices of other commodities and income are constant, the reduction of costs for one commodity
due to a particular efficiency increase implies that consumers have more money to spend on other
goods.
- General Equilibrium Effect (economy-wide effects) :
The direct and indirect rebound effect lead to changed prices and consumption throughout the
economy, which may increase or decrease production in distant sectors and changes the
production functions.
- Transformational Effect :
This includes changes in consumer preferences, alteration of social institutions, and the
rearrangement of the organization of production.

Solar PV rapidly becoming the cheapest option to generate electricity
http://www.grist.org/solar-power/2011-10-11-solar-pv-rapidly-becoming-cheapest-option-generate-electricity

For a long time, the holy grail of solar photovoltaics (PV) has been "grid parity," the point at which it would be as cheap to generate one's own solar electricity as it is to buy electricity from the grid. And that is indeed an important market milestone, being achieved now in many places around the world. But recently it has become clear that PV is set to go beyond grid parity and become the cheapestway to generate electricity.

Whenever I say this I encounter incredulity, even vehement opposition, from friends and foes of renewable energy alike. Apparently, knowledge of the rapid developments of the last few years has not been widely disseminated. But it's happening, right under our noses! It is essential to understand this so that we can leverage it to rapidly switch to a global energy system fully based on renewable energy.
At a very large scale, the cost of manufacturing anything drops to just above the cost of its base materials. As scale goes up, per-unit costs come down. This is known as a "learning curve" -- the price per unit of capacity comes down by x percent for every doubling of cumulatively installed capacity. For solar PV modules, the learning rate has been exceptionally high, averaging 22 percent for the past two decades. The cost of the "balance of system," i.e., all other components needed, follows this trend line closely. So this is what we see happening now in PV:

Costs vary per country, and fossil fuels mostly don't get the right costs allocated for their CO2 emissions, but let's take two recent studies for the U.S. here. The Brattle Group published theConnecticut Integrated Resource Plan [PDF] in 2008. They found levelized cost per kWh for natural gas-fired power plants to be $0.076 to $0.092, and for coal, $0.086, both without carbon capture and storage. And in 2009, MIT issued its Update on the Cost of Nuclear Power [PDF], in which they found levelized cost per kWh for nuclear's competitors of $0.062 (coal) and $0.065 (natural gas), without any charge for CO2 emissions.
The cost of wind energy is already close to competitive with gas and coal. The recent Global Status Report [PDF] by REN21 states its kWh-cost for suitable locations as $0.05 to $0.09, for an average of $0.07. Wind power cost is still decreasing, due to learning effects, but at a much lower rate than the cost of PV.

It is highly unlikely that fossil fuels will get away without any charge for CO2 emissions in the long run. In a growing number of countries, such as the 27 countries of the European Union and Australia, this market distortion has already (mostly) come to an end. But let's assume that the cost of solar PV electricity needs to drop to below $0.06 per kWh to live up to the claim that it's the cheapest source of electricity. In sunny regions, we will need to halve the cost of PV power again to make that happen. Three doublings of cumulative capacity will do, since, according to PV's rapid learning curve, every doubling of capacity leads to a cost reduction of 22 percent. After three doublings the cost will be multiplied by 0.78 * 0.78 * 0.78 = 0.47.

Cumulative installed PV capacity globally was 40 gigawatts (GW) at the end of last year. Three doublings mean this has to grow by a factor of eight, to 320 GW, to achieve the necessary halving of cost. From 2005 to 2010, PV capacity installed annually grew by an average of 49 percent per year. Even if this slows down to 25 percent per year in the near future, we will reach 320 GW in 2018 -- that's only seven years from now!

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Scant CO2 Benefit from China’s Coal-Powered Electric Cars

2011-10-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of China’s big push to build and deploy 1 million electric vehicles a year by 2015. The move will help cut smog and oil imports. Less has been made of the scant impact this is likely to have on the country’s emissions of carbon dioxide, given its enduring reliance on coal for most of its electricity.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/scant-co2-benefit-from-chinas-coal-powered-electric-cars/

Packet Based Energy Delivery Systems

2011-09-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

[Internet engineers have long recognized the value of packet based networks, particularly those that support the end to end principle.
Packet based networks have many advantages over circuit based network architecture such as the ability to easily route around failures, to make more efficient use of network resources and to put the user or end device in control of the network.

In theory, building packet based energy delivery systems would also potentially enable a variety of new economic models or services. But the biggest challenge is finding a technology that would allow large power loads to be delivered and routed independent of each other from supplier to consumer. It is hard to imagine building an Ethernet switch or router that can process and handle packets of several hundred kilowatt-hours of power.

However a number of companies and green advocates are recognizing that the electric vehicle may be the ideal “packet” based power delivery system, which has the added advantage of already having an existing network infrastructure in place made up of our roads and highways. Rather than charging the eVehicle from stationary charging systems at home or business using power from the utility grid as is done today, a simpler architecture would be charge the vehicle as it moves, either through induction coils, or ultra-capacitor discharge plates embedded in the road bed every few kilometers or at stop lights and drive-through fast food restaurants or banks.

Existing stranded or stand alone green energy sources such as roadside windmills or solar panels could be used to provide power to the induction coils or ultra-capacitor discharge plates (sometimes referred to as pathway charging). Similarly these devices could be used to store and forward, or route power with every passing vehicle to enable delivery of power from a given source to destination. For example a fully charged eVehicle arriving at a stop light with an embedded induction coil or ultra-capacitor discharge plate could offload a significant portion of its power to another vehicle that might be passing through the same intersection on another route. The signaling and destination address of each “power packet” would have to be carried out of band by the automobile wirelessly communicating with the road embedded ultra capacitor or induction coil.

To date the deployment and adoption of electric vehicles has been hindered as they been simply seen as a one to one replacement for the traditional gas vehicle. But if the eVehicle could also be used not only for transportation, but as a low cost alternative to the utility grid, then it might have a much greater take up rate, as well as eliminating range anxiety. Imagine if your car could be used to deliver free, or almost free green power, from remote stranded power sources such as windmills and hydro facilities, not only to power the car, but also upon arrival at your destination, to power your home or business as well.

Mitsubishi, Honda and a few other eVehicle car companies are already starting to think along these lines. – BSA]

For more details please see:
Green Investment Opportunity for small business - on the move electric car charging
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2010/04/green-investment-opportunity-for-small.html

How California suburban sprawl could be the answer to global warming
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-california-suburban-sprawl-could-be.html

Pathway Charging and Why Energy needs to be Free to reduce CO2
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-energy-needs-to-be-free-to-reduce.html

Electric roads and Internet will allow coast to coast driving with no stopping and no emissions
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/05/electric-roads-and-internet-will-allow.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreenIt%2FbroadbandAndCyber-infrastructure+%28Green+IT%2FBroadband+and+Cyber-Infrastructure%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Bombardier’s Primove
http://www.bombardier.com/en/transportation/sustainability/technology/primove-catenary-free-operation

Honda’s Roadside Electric Vehicle Charging
http://www.plugincars.com/honda-explores-electric-vehicle-solar-charging-106587.html

A new look at an old idea: Powering autos as they move
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-look-at-old-idea-powering-autos.html

Mitsubishi wants to use electric vehicles as mobile battery banks
http://www.greentelecomlive.com/2011/08/21/mitsubishi-wants-to-use-electric-vehicles-as-mobile-battery-banks/comment-page-1/#comment-75614

Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsubishi Electric, and Mitsubishi Corp., is set to trial a new energy storage system that will use electric vehicles as battery banks when they are parked.
The project, dubbed “V2X,” will be rolled out in a trial deployment at the parking facility of Mitsubishi Motors’ Nagoya plant by March 2012, and will use the batteries of electric vehicles as storage for energy generated by a set of solar panels on the roof, according to this report by Utility Products citing Electric Daily News.

The system is designed to take the energy generated by the solar panel and then store them in the batteries of the vehicles. While I’m not absolutely sure on the technical details, but the system seems to work by ensuring that none of the power generated by the solar panels are wasted by storing it inside the vehicles. The installation includes built in units that draw power from the vehicles as the grid requires power, including converting it to alternating current for general use.

I’m assuming that the system will have control mechanisms in place so it doesn’t drain the vehicles completely – so employees can get home, and that the vehicles will come into the facility with sufficient [empty] storage capacity to make a difference.

Still, it is an interesting concept. After all, electric vehicles do have the potential to transport energy from one place to another. For example, all parking lots can have solar powered roofs, which will charge the vehicles during the day. Once fully charged, the vehicles can then be configured to pipe some of that power the home in the evening when the use gets home. That would enable every home with an electric vehicle to benefit from renewable energy to some extent – now that would be pretty cool.

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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If you have no power, energy efficiency is irrelevant

2011-09-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

[There are dozens, if not hundreds of research initiatives around the world looking at improving energy efficiency in computers and networks.
Greentouch, Greenlight, GreenICT, etc are some typical examples. It is important to note that with energy efficiency we will only hope to reduce energy consumption and thereby lessen our dependence on coal and other dirty fuel sources. In the case of IT however, given its dramatic growth rate, the best we can hope for, in the short term, is to slow down the rate of growth of energy consumption.

But all these initiatives suffer from a single fundamental flaw in thinking – and that is the assumption that power from the grid will always be available, on demand and effectively unlimited.

In a rapidly warming world, with a growing dependence on renewable energy, means the reliability and availability of power from the grid is going to be less certain. Many jurisdictions such as California for example are committed to have 30% of their power from renewable resources. This means that on cloudy, windless days, the utilities will be scrambling to purchase power from out of state or shed low priority customers. Countries like Switzerland and Germany are also facing an impending power shortage because of their commitment to abandon nuclear power and to rely increasingly on renewable energy. While energy storage and integrated grids will help mitigate some of the challenges of dealing with a greater percentage of renewable power in the energy mix, new energy architectures are needed on the demand side of the energy equation. So our future challenge will be more than simply reducing energy consumption but living in a world with frequent power outages as more of our energy comes from renewable sources.

A good example of this forward thinking of energy outages versus energy efficient is a recent project be undertaken by AMD, Hewlett Packard and Clarkson University funded by NYSERDA in New York State to carry out research in follow the wind/follow the sun cloud networks. One of the challenges facing New York state is the number of stranded wind power assets that exist in the state, because “Nimbyism” has prevented the deployment of high voltage power lines to connect these facilities to the grid. As a result the state is funding this project to explore the idea of deploying small computing pods at each windmill linked together by fiber to build a follow the wind/follow the sun cloud/network.

Similar initiatives are the “Free Lunch” program at Cambridge University. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/www/files/publications/public/sa497/akoush-hotos11.pdf

And, of course, the Greenstar network – the world’s first zero carbon cloud and network is built around the same principle of solely using intermittent renewable energy to power the cloud/network.—BSA]

Some pointers:

Greenstar Network
www.greenstarnetwork.com

A great demo of how a follow the wind/follow the sun network would operate can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFPvBjURlHA

GreenEnergies
http://greenergies.blogspot.com/

Green ICT emissions
http://green-global-economy.blogspot.com/

Computing for the Future of the Planet
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/research/wiki/CFTFP

AMD Teams With NYSERDA, HP, and Clarkson University for Sustainable Data Center Energy Research
Investment Will Fund Study on Clouds Fueled by Wind and Solar Power

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amd-teams-with-nyserda-hp-and-clarkson-university-for-sustainable-data-center-energy-research-2011-08-01

SUNNYVALE, CA, Aug 01, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- AMD AMD -0.29% today announced its participation with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), HP and Clarkson University in a significant research project that looks at the industry-wide challenge of channeling renewable energy directly to data centers.

"The distributed computing model of the cloud parallels the distributed power-generation model of solar and wind energy. Directing power to data centers from these emerging renewable energy resources without relying on a large-scale, traditional electrical grid is a key challenge," said Alan Lee, corporate vice president of Research and Advanced Development, AMD. "One ultimate goal is the co-location of dynamic energy sources with dynamic computing resources to improve the economics, performance, and environmental benefits of both infrastructures."

Because wind and solar-derived energy can be intermittent, this study will also examine critical questions of how to automatically shift a compute load between data centers and maintain reliability.
Backing from NYSERDA and additional private funding sources are enabling this proposal, developed by AMD engineers in conjunction with Clarkson University, to enter the research phase. Students will begin experimentation on effectively managing data through a distributed network based on renewable energy. The second phase of the project plans to incorporate hardware elements, including HP's Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) based on the AMD Opteron(TM) processor, purpose-built for energy efficiency and cloud computing.

HP POD Technology HP's POD portfolio includes the industry's leading energy-efficient, modular data center. Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, HP POD technology provides clients currently burdened with aging infrastructure, limited space and shrinking budgets the agility needed to rapidly scale and meet increasing capacity demands. According to HP, the newest solution in the HP POD family, the EcoPOD, can offer 95 percent greater energy efficiency when compared to traditional brick-and-mortar data centers.(1) HP will offer this project its POD expertise in energy-efficient data center design that delivers maximum density with greater serviceability.
The AMD Research Office AMD Research conducts work on next-generation computing questions in the areas of systems and technologies, network infrastructure and power, among others. It also collaborates on projects with leading universities, public sector organizations and commercial labs worldwide.
-
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
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Modeling the economy in a changing climate

2011-08-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

As society adjusts to the knowledge that our climate is changing, policy makers are faced with a difficult question: how can they use policy to help prevent and cope with climate change, while minimizing the damage to their nation or organization’s economic health?

For example, “one policy that has been considered and proposed is carbon taxes and taxes on carbon-emitting industry,” said Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory. “The question is: will that tend to drive dirty industries offshore in a way that will perhaps increase the total emissions and harm US industry at the same time?”
Two years ago, Foster and several other computer scientists joined forces with economists, climate scientists, and geophysicists to create a computer modeling framework that could help decision makers answer these sorts of questions.
Foster and his colleagues called the first version of their model CIM-EARTH (a Community Integrated Model of Economic And Resource Trajectories for Humankind). Already, several related papers have been published, and in February 2011, a larger group of researchers launched the Center for Robust Decision-Making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP).
Modeling the unpredictable
Computational methods have been used to simulate a variety of complex systems, from black holes to human biology. But all of these have one thing in common: they are all models of physical systems, governed by physical laws.
The same cannot be said of the economy. It’s true that the economy can be constrained by physical limits such as the quantity of a resource that exists on our planet, or the rate at which we can extract it. But with those few exceptions, the economy is governed by collective human behavior – and we can certainly rely on humans engaging in irrational and unpredictable behavior.
“On the other hand, economists do know a lot about how society responds and the economy responds to various pressures,” Foster said.
As an example, he described an approach to economic models called “rational expectations.” The simplest economic models assume that the public will behave as though they knew nothing about the future. But that’s wrong; in reality, we modify our behavior based on what we expect to happen. Rational expectations models attempt to emulate that by assuming that the public has perfect knowledge of the future. The result is a more accurate, effective model – one that will likely only improve as it evolves to assume imperfect knowledge of the future.
Assembling a model
The computational economics community is small, according to Foster, but growing. Historically, they’ve had access to very limited resources. But with the CIM-EARTH model, and other projects launched by RDCEP, economists have the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with experts in optimization, numerical methods, and more.
“Our models have some new features relative to the old ones,” Foster said. “They can run with greater detail, with smaller time steps, they can incorporate factors that are not in the previous models because we have more modern numerical methods.”
[..]
For the future
RDCEP, which was launched using a five-year $6 million National Science Foundation grant, has nearly five years remaining to continue to hone, improve, and add to their modeling framework.
“We did one first study that was looking at the sensitivity of the core economic model to some of the input parameters,” Foster said. Next, they plan to do a large study of scenarios in which crop land use changes.
“What we want to do there is actually take an agricultural model and build up a big database characterizing the agricultural output that would result for different land types under different climate scenarios and that would then be used in other studies,” Foster explained.
Another avenue they are exploring is how an increased demand for biofuel might affect land use. For example, will the demand be sufficiently high that forests will be cut down to make room for
[..]

Modeling the economy in a changing climate
http://www.isgtw.org/feature/modeling-economy-changing-climate

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SURFnet pilots green cloud service for Dutch universities using lightpaths

2011-08-22T14:41:00.001-07:00

[I recently received a fascinating e-mail from Rogier Spoor at SURFnet on an exciting initiative they have undertaken to pilot a green cloud service for Dutch universities using a lightpath connection to Iceland.
The Netherlands and Australia are probably the two most likely countries to suffer from the deleterious effects of global warming (For more details please see (http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/green-it-overview-jan-6-2011) so it is good to see young engineers and researchers thinking about their nation’s future. As I have blogged about several times optical networks and green clouds located at sites in the world that use carbon free energy could be one of the major applications of future R&E networks. With his permission here is some extracts from Rogier’s e-mail
--BSA]
Dear Bill,
About half a year ago we spoke about cloud opportunities and the
option to start a community based cloud which should offer IAAS services
to the research and educational community. I just have read your blog
and discovered that Internet2 is working on such a topic as well. That's
interesting to know!
Hereby I'll give you a short status update about our progress.
Our initial idea was to startup a IAAS cloud that would be based on the
overcapacity of servers in existing university datacenters. However
after talking to some universities we didn't get any commitment to move
onto this path.
So we changed plans, and are now investigating how institutions could
have resources in the Netherlands (brokered or federated IaaS cloud
services via SURFnet), or have them available via other commercial cloud
offerings outside the Netherlands. For that we're collaborating with
GreenQloud at the moment: a company based in Iceland with a focus on
doing their operations "Truely Green" as they call it. Energy and
cooling are available with a much smaller footprint, and we think there
are many applications that are suitable to run outside our country.
(Also think about desktops, and experimental machines from students.)
GreenQloud and SURFnet try to make this cloud easily available by having
logins via our SURFfederatie, and allow people to work in groups that
can span our universities as well.
[..]
We're also working on a lightpath between the Netherlands and Iceland.
This will make it possible for a Dutch university, to connect to their
own VM's in Iceland as if their are running in their own LAN (and ip-space).
Our work in this IAAS community cloud area is officially only for pilot
purposes. I expect there is a positive business case in which we can
broker IAAS cloud services from existing market parties, preferably as
green as possible.
[..]
.
cheers,
Rogier Spoor

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
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Clouds would reduce carbon emissions equivalent to 16.8 million cars

2011-08-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

[An excellent article on the carbon reduction potential of clouds. And one of the few analysis that distinguishes between energy consumption and efficiency versus carbon footprint.
The two are often not related. Now if there were only a tax on carbon emissions, the business case to move to clouds would be very compelling – BSA]

http://www.itincanada.ca/index.php?cid=452&id=14519&np=1

[..]
the renewable vs. fossil fuel impact can be significant: “For example, data centers in the US Northwest (where hydroelectric generation is common) run on power with roughly half the carbon intensity of the electricity that powers data centers in the Midwest (where coal power is common). For a large data center with 50,000 servers, the difference can be equivalent to the carbon emissions from thousands of cars.

[..]
So what are the broader implications of these findings? Moving from micro to macro, Verdantix researchers have built a model that extrapolates these results to the US economy as a whole – or at least to the impact that would be created through cloud adoption by 2,653 global firms with US revenues in excess of $1 billion – an exercise that presents a compelling argument for widespread cloud implementation. According to Verdantix, a “US cloud computing adoption forecast shows a big economic saving – $12.3 billion a year by 2020,” based on reduction of electrical costs only (excluding other savings included in the case study as this would be too complex), as well as “potential carbon reductions of 85.7 million metric tons per year by 2020, equivalent to the annual emissions from 16.8 million passenger vehicles.” These forecast results are impressive – and should offer makers of cloud components and service providers everywhere a strong, independent statement of the “twin eco” benefits of cloud
[..]
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

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Open Flow in the real world: Carriers, clouds and follow the sun/wind networks

2011-08-16T05:16:00.001-07:00

[It is exciting to see the concept of software controlled networks pioneered by CANARIE and CRC (UCLP) and other researchers such as Nick Mckeown at Stanford starting to gain momentum.
NEC should also be applauded for recognizing one of the important applications of Open Flow is follow the wind/sun networks where the network becomes a service under control of the user. A great presentation on this subject can be seen at the Future Internet Assembly in Budapest http://www.fi-budapest.eu/presentations/THU_Figuerola.pdf - Some excerpts from GigaOm article --BSA]
http://gigaom.com/cloud/openflow-in-the-real-world-carriers-clouds-and-more/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

The shift in networking and the hype around the OpenFlow protocol has led to a lot of confusion and overinflation of what OpenFlow can do. To get a bit more grounded in reality, I spoke with Don Clark, director of business development at NEC. NEC is a vendor deploying switches that use OpenFlow and a member of the Open Networking Foundation, the group spearheading the standardization of programmable networking.
Programmable networks are about agility and automation
For those just tuning in, OpenFlow is a protocol that allows a server to tell a switch what to do. It’s revolutionary only in that most switches historically have had their own proprietary software inside the switch telling it what to do. With OpenFlow and other programmable networking efforts, the decisions on how to build out a network and how to move packets is taken away from the box that actually moves the packets, and placed on a server. Now, someone can program the network independently of the gear inside the data center and the software on the switch.
It’s a simple idea with big implications for the industry. Clark says that since unveiling OpenFlow-enabled switches at Interop in May, NEC has learned a few things. Much like server consolidation was a large driver behind virtualization in the early years, software-defined networking will have its own impetus, and Clark believes that will be the ability to take the people and time out of network configuration. This allows folks operating clouds or platforms as a service to be more agile and respond to changes in their underlying infrastructure without changing and reconfiguring the network — resulting in fewer errors and improved speed.
“Right now the network equipment does a lot, but with OpenFlow it allows us to ask the hardware to do much less than it does today,” Clark says. “So moving it out from the equipment to the application stack, then the equipment’s job is simplified, and then on the controller side, networking becomes an application that is integrated with other business processes in the application stack.”
Clouds and carriers are low-hanging fruit
Today, Clark says most of NEC’s customers have a cloud or are building a cloud and want to offer the same kind of automation on the network side as they do on the cloud side. Clark says this can lead to faster provisioning (which is why most people are looking at programmable networks today) to follow-the-sun application models that could move applications from data center to data center based on reducing the amount of compute energy consumed. I’d love to see companies build out models and methods for helping companies like Google or Facebook send low-priority compute jobs to places where they could be completed using renewable energy.

[…]
So far, Clark says cloud providers are the most keen on using OpenFlow, but carriers represent another potentially huge market. The ONF counts Deutsche Telekom and Verizon on its executive board. Clark says the carriers are looking at adding OpenFlow to add functionality to their networks that today they get from several independent gear providers from Cisco and Juniper to Sandvine and Acme Packet, for example. “On the service provider side, we’ve seen a lot of unique apps that they are looking to deploy OpenFlow with,” Clark says. “A lot of the equipment carriers’ use is specialty equipment and they are excited about general purpose equipment that can handle specialty tasks.” This could disrupt the gear market.
The shift from selling switches to selling services
Because NEC has a business selling switches, it’s in a similar position to Cisco, Juniper or other vendors that might find their margins eroded by the emergence of what would become commodity switches. Clark isn’t as concerned about that, because NEC is busy building services, features and add-ons to its gear to accommodate the growth of OpenFlow and programmable networking. “We have a solutions practice and we’re very excited about what this networking model allows solutions providers to do,” Clark said. Namely, he’s trading high-margin switching for high-margin consulting, a tack that many in the open source world have tried. For example, look at what Rackspace is trying to do with OpenStack.
[…]
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

World's first zero carbon video conference using follow the wind/follow the sun

2011-06-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

[At this week’s CANARIE annual general meeting the Greenstar team demonstrated the world’s first zero carbon video conference using follow the wind/follow the sun technology.
Although video conferencing technology is often touted as way to reduce carbon emissions from airplane and car travel, the carbon footprint of the video conference equipment and network can also be quite significant. This is especially true if the video conference equipment is used infrequently and, in most cases, always left on. The Greenstar demonstration this week clearly proved that we can run applications like video conferencing that need extreme reliability on a network that uses only highly unreliable renewable energy such as wind and solar power. This type of architecture will not only save network operators millions of dollars in energy costs but also significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the global Internet – which is the fastest growing carbon emissions sector in the world today.

The demonstration linked 4 sites across Canada using the Greenstar follow the wind/follow the sun infrastructure riding on the CANARIE network. A video conferencing software called Isabel developed in Spain was deployed on a Virtual Machine VM running Isabel Flow-Server. The VM was moved from one site top another across the CANARIE network. To make it feasible for the limited time (1 hour) of the AGM meeting and for people to be able to feel the demo, the Controller was prompted to move the VM each 15 minutes simulating the loss of the actual renewable power at each of the participating sites.
The ISABEL VM that is roaming the GSN network was also running dual stacked reachable by both via IPv4 and IPv6.

Unfortunately there is very little details about this ground breaking demo at either CANARIE or Greenstar web site, other than a brief mention on the CANARIR site. Hiding major world changing innovations seems to be a Canadian trait.

www.greenstarnetwork.com
http://www.canarie.ca/static/docs/AGM.pdf
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time

2011-06-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.

Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Could+killing+planet+search+time/4891461/story.html

Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

Sure, it's not a lot on its own — but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you're making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers.

The Internet has long promised a more efficient and greener world. We save on paper and mailing by sending an email. We can telecommute instead of driving to work. We can have a meeting by teleconference instead of flying to another city.

Ironically, despite the web's green promise, this explosion of data has turned the Internet into one of the planet's fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. The Internet now consumes two to three per cent of the world's electricity.

If the Internet was a country, it would be the planet's fifth-biggest consumer of power, ahead of India and Germany. The Internet's power needs now rival those of the aviation industry and are expected to nearly double by 2020.

"The Internet pollutes, but people don't understand why it pollutes. It's very, very power-hungry, and we have to reduce its carbon footprint," said Mohamed Cheriet, a green IT expert and professor in the engineering and automation department at Montreal's Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS).

The bulk of all this energy is gobbled up by a fast-growing network of huge "server farms" or data centres that form the backbone of the Internet. They are hush-hush facilities, some the size of five Wal-Marts, packed from floor to ceiling with tens of thousands of computers.

These are the computers that make the Internet run — routing traffic and storing much of those ever-expanding heaps of data.

Say you do a Google search. Your query kicks into action about 1,000 servers at various Google data centres. Those computers scan billions of web pages already in Google's archives and spit out an answer.

Total time elapsed: 0.2 seconds on average. Meanwhile, Google's data centres are also constantly combing the Internet to update their archives of web pages.

All those computers have a voracious appetite for energy, especially for cooling equipment to prevent overheating.

Apple's 46,000-square-metre iDataCenter is set to open in North Carolina this spring with a price tag of $1 billion U.S.. It will use an estimated 100 megawatts of power — as much as about 100,000 Canadian homes.

Apple's mega-facility is part of a cluster of gigantic new data centres coming on line in North Carolina that are powered largely by cheap and highly polluting coal power. Google has a 44,000-square-metre data centre in the state that eventually will consume an estimated 60 to 100 MW. Facebook has a 28,000-square-metre facility under construction there that will eat up 40 MW.

Greenpeace calls the three facilities "North Carolina's dirty data triangle." Coal, it says, is the most polluting of all fossil fuels and the world's single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

"The technologies of the 21st century are still largely powered by the dirty coal power of the past," the environmental group said in a report card on the IT sector in April, titled How Dirty is Your Power?

"People are pretty concerned about it," David Kessler, a Greenpeace spokesman in San Francisco.

In Lenoir, North Carolina, Google's $600-million, super-sized data centre offers employees the kind of unusual perks that were the hallmark of the high-flying dot-com era.

But Google chose Lenoir for more than just some nice handouts. It also wanted cheap electricity for those power-hungry servers.

North Carolina offers industrial customers one of the lowest electricity rates in the U.S. — 5.8 cents per kilowatt hour, versus the U.S. average of 6.7 cents.

It just so happens that the state's electricity is also some of the dirtiest in the country. Nearly two-thirds of the state's electricity comes from coal.

The IT industry is now responding by starting to improve the energy efficiency of its data centres.

But that's not enough, said Bill St. Arnaud, an engineer and green IT consultant in Ottawa. The Internet is growing so fast, he said, it's overtaking such efficiency gains. Besides, efficiency improvements alone won't wean the IT industry from using inexpensive and polluting coal, he said.

The real solution, he said, is for governments to impose measures like carbon taxes and emissions caps that make dirty energy less attractive financially.

"The planet is warming up, and it's going to get very bad. We need a price on carbon. It's the only way to get people to move off coal because coal is currently so cheap," he said.

"We have to move from this fossil fuel fiesta to a smarter economy."

Some seeking to reduce the Internet's carbon footprint point to a homegrown solution: the GreenStar Network.

GreenStar, which is based at Montreal's ETS, is an alternative Internet that runs on small data centres powered solely by cleaner renewable energy, like wind, solar and hydroelectric power.

GreenStar is growing quickly because of the huge worldwide demand for green IT, St. Arnaud said. Since being launched last fall with a core of five green data centres in Canada, the network has expanded to include 15 other data centres in Europe and the U.S., mostly at universities and a few small industrial partners. Others are planned for China and Africa.

"Our biggest problem is meeting demand. We've demonstrated that we can build an Internet that's as reliable as the normal Internet, but without using dirty energy," St. Arnaud said.

The province says the market for green IT will be worth $600 billion annually worldwide by 2013.

Far-flung data centers could use otherwise unharvestable renewable energy for computation.

2011-06-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Really Remote Data

Far-flung data centers could use otherwise unharvestable renewable energy for computation.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37460/page1/

Researchers at Cambridge University want to put data centers in places so remote they aren't on any power grid. Their models indicate that moving data-hungry computation to places such as scorching deserts, windswept peaks, and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—all rich in sunlight and wind energy—could allow this otherwise unharvestable energy to do useful work.

In a paper to be delivered at the 13th annual HotOS conference in May, the authors offer an extreme model of how cloud services could incorporate remote data centers powered only by renewable energy. Their scenario sites one solar- and wind-powered data center in the desert of southwest Australia and a second one in Egypt, on other side of the planet. This placement is no accident: putting them in different hemispheres, on opposite sides of the earth, maximizes the solar and wind energy they can harvest.

One catalyst for such a radical rethinking of how data centers can be sited and powered is the increasing availability of advanced fiber-optic networks. Connecting a remote renewable-energy plant to a power grid remains prohibitively expensive, reasoned the researchers working on this project—Sherif Akoush, Ripduman Sohan, Andrew Rice, Andrew W. Moore, and Andy Hopper—but running fiber-optic cable to such a plant would be relatively easy and cheap.

"We envisage data centers being put in places where renewable energy is being produced and you could never economically bring it back to heat a house," says Andy Hopper, senior author on the paper and head of Cambridge University's computer science department. "But you could lay a fiber and use energy that is otherwise lost, in that it's not economically transportable." One way to think of the underlying principle, he notes, is that it's easier to move bits (made up of photons) than electrons.

Jonathan Koomey, a researcher and consulting professor at Stanford, cautions that a number of real-world factors could render the Cambridge team's hypotheticals invalid. While data centers are costly, Koomey explains, the value they create is so far in excess of those costs that anything that reduces their effectiveness would reduce their net benefit to society.

"If the actions you take to save costs would also cut into the number of computations that you can then deliver, you'll reduce economic benefits from data centers, and that's presumably not what the authors had in mind," says Koomey.

Hopper, however, points out that the larger effort of which this paper is a part—the Computing for the Future of the Planet project—takes it as a given that more computing is always good, because the virtualization of goods and services displaces more energy-intensive activities in the physical world. He says that a system like the one he proposes would be implemented only at either "no cost to overall performance [of a cloud computing system] or at an attractive cost to performance."

The future of Green IT is Survivable IT

2011-05-30T10:13:00.001-07:00

[Before the first battle has hardly begun we have already lost the war on climate change.
We are already committed to a 2C average global temperature due to the CO2 that has been pumped into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age. What is now more worrisome is that CO2 Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency.
We are only now starting up the curve of the temperature hockey stick where we are starting to experience severe weather patterns commensurate with climate change. The tornadoes in the US, floods in Australia, forest fires in Russia are only a harbinger of much worse weather that will soon effect all of us.

At some point in the near future, when the planet’s weather is constantly causing havoc and destruction, there will be a global realization that as quickly as possible we need to stop all new CO2 emissions. There will be a tipping point in public attitudes as we have seen in Germany with nuclear power where there will be a public outcry for governments to ban the mining of any more coal or digging up tar sands for dirty oil.
I am constantly amazed at how few people appreciate the seriousness of global warming. While many accept the science of climate change (although it is startling how many closet deniers who still exist even at our universities) very few understand the magnitude of the weather extremes we are going to experience in the coming decade. Some people think climate change is something that is not going to really affect us until 2100, while others see it as a problem like acid rain or ozone that can quickly be corrected through collective global action. But token steps at energy efficiency or recycling paper will have little effect on the imminent threat that is facing us.

The challenge facing us now is not mitigation i.e. trying to prevent climate change, but adaptation i.e. how will we survive climate change and the last minute desperate attempts by governments to do something about it by shutting down all fossil fuel energy production.

All of us will be affected by these coming monumental changes in weather patterns and energy. Those of us in the IT sector, especially at universities, I believe have a moral responsibility to be at the forefront of changes needed adapt to this changing world. –BSA]

Some pointers:
A good overview of the science of climate change and weather variability
http://www.skepticalscience.com/the-critical-decade-part-1-the-science.html

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpower

The future of Green IT for R&E networks is Survivable IT
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/cisco-green-tnc-8023193
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Green Cloud Apps will be future killer apps for the Internet

2011-05-20T02:12:00.000-07:00

[I recently stumbled across a very cool app called EchoSign that allows for electronic transmission and signature of all sorts of documents such as NDAs, expense claims, contract revisions, patient signatures, etc.
It really simplifies the process of getting documents signed. But besides being a very cool app, this cloud app is 100% powered by wind through use of renewable energy credits (RECs). Although I am not a big fan of RECs I see them as a first step to moving their application to a zero carbon Internet infrastructure like the Greenstar network. Given the huge power consumption of cloud services, building apps that can use clouds powered solely by wind/sun will dramatically reduce costs and also help save the planet. If you check out the Greenstar web site you can see a demo of a how a HD video server is moved from site to site on the Greenstar network depending on the availability of green power at any given site without causing a single disruption in the video stream to the end user. If we can move video servers around the world without effecting the quality of video stream, imagine what types of other apps can be supported on such an infrastructure. It is green apps like this that represent the future of the Internet! – BSA]

EchoSign Web site
http://www.echosign.com

How EchoSign is 100% wind powered
http://www.echosign.com/public/static/windPowered.jsp

Greenstar video server demo
http://www.greenstarnetwork.com/content/european-partners

Technical Details on video server demo
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/cisco-green-tnc-8023193

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Obama orders all US departments and suppliers to develop climate adaptation plan

2011-05-16T12:21:00.001-07:00

[This is big news. Developing a climate adaptation plan is a lot harder than making vague commitments to sustainability.
IT companies that supply services to US government will now have to put some real effort into understanding impact of climate change – claims of energy efficiency will be of little value when energy infrastructure starts to breakdown due to impact of climate change and as bulk of energy supplied comes from unpredictable and unreliable renewable resources. The Mississippi floods and droughts in the West are only a precursor to what is going to happen in the next few years. We are at the curve in the hockey stick where climate is going to get a lot worse in the coming years. – BSA]

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1tU8go/www.good.is/post/obama-s-secret-climate-adaptation-plan/
Obama's "Secret" Climate Adaptation Plan
•
On March 4th, in a move surely designed to side-step Congress, Obama's Council on Environmental Quality issued instructions to all federal agencies on how to adapt to climate change. All agencies, from the Food and Drug Administration to the Department of Defense, will be required to analyze their vulnerabilities to the impacts from climate change and come up with a plan to adapt. Thousands of governmental employees will be trained on climate science, like it or not.
The changes aren't limited to just federal agencies. Countless numbers of private businesses that sell, build, provide logistics or maintenance, or anything else to the government will be forced to comply with new Federal climate adaptation guidelines—all because of Presidential Executive Order 13514.
At first glance, President Obama's little-reported Executive Order 13514 (PDF) is a straightforward, environmentally-friendly one-two punch that boosts the sustainability of our government. The Order aims to lower the amount of greenhouse gases that the Federal Government emits, reduce environmental pollution and waste, and establish a permanent Sustainability Officer in each agency. It also "requires Federal Agenciesto set a 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target within 90 days; increase energy efficiency; reduce fleet petroleum consumption; conserve water; reduce waste; support sustainable communities; and leverage Federal purchasing power to promote environmentally-responsible products and technologies."
But tucked into EO 13514 is a provision that requires all Federal Agencies to also adapt to climate change. The Order's brief Section 16 (PDF) will have profound and long lasting effects on how our Federal Government responds to climate change. For here, each agency is required, among other things, to:
• Appoint a Climate Adaptation specialist
• Establish an Agency wide Climate Change Adaptation Policy and Mandate by June 2011
• Participate in Climate Adaptation workshops and then educate all employees throughout 2011
• Identify and analyze climate vulnerabilities that would interfere with accomplishing the Agency's mission by March 2012
• Implement the adaptation plan by September 2012

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
Bill@St-arnaud.org
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

UK Government report on how climate change could ruin the Interent

2011-05-13T10:08:00.001-07:00

[The UK government recently issued a report outlining the impacts of climate change on the Internet.
While the report largely focuses on the impact on Wifi, climate change is going to seriously impact Internet in a number of aspects. Many climate researchers including President Obama’s National Science Advisor stress that we now must put equal emphasis on adaptability as opposed to sustainability in terms of planning for the future. Unfortunately, most Internet engineers and researchers are still focused on sustainability such as virtualization, energy efficiency and lower PUEs.

But we need to quickly change our direction of research to adaptability. We have already seen the impact of major flooding have had on research networks such as AARnet in Queensland –whose primary network links were knocked out for several days and it took a number of weeks to restore full service. Climate models predict that within the next decade most of central and southern Europe and Western US will experience droughts on a greater scale then is experienced in Sahara today. But, at the same time the Benelux and Nordic countries are expected to suffer severe floods on a greater scale then we are witnessing today in Mississippi and Australia. On one hand power plants in parts of Europe may run out of cooling water as happened in France last year, while at the same time electrical distribution infrastructure in other parts of Europe may be under water causing a severe strain on the electrical distribution network in Europe. Combined with the shutdown of nuclear plants in Germany, rolling brownouts or blackouts may be a common feature in the coming decade. But networks and eInfrastructure will even be more critical than ever in such emergencies for supporting critical modeling and emergency services. We have to start redesigning the Internet, and most importantly the research network to survive climate change , of which the most important aspect will be to build networks that can function solely with unpredictable and unreliable renewable energy as for example the Greenstar Network and European Mantychore. Integrated North American cyber-infrastructure, or Europen eInfarstructure where computation and network facilities are located at sources of clean renewable power will be essential. Open Lightpath Exchanges and facilities like GLIF will critical for interconnecting these facilities to researchers around the world. Mary Jander, of Internet Evolution, will be hosting a live session on this topic on Monday (see below) and Cisco will also be holding a 2 day session on this topic at the Terena Network Conference next week. This is a very important topic and one that needs to be understood by network engineers and researchers. It also represents a huge new business opportunity for IT companies on a scale orders of magnitude greater than the year 2000 scare. I must applaud Quebec government and PROMPT as being the first jurisdiction in the world to recognize this opportunity and help support their IT industry in moving in this direction – BSA]

Mary Jander Blog on Green IT

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=625&doc_id=175801

Smart and Green Infrastructure Symposium 2011

http://www.cisco.com/web/offer/emea/14181/site/index.html

Climate Change could ruin the Internet

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-05-09-climate-change-could-ruin-the-internet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/09/climate-change-wi-fi-connections

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/23/uk-infrastructure-climate-change

Design principles for building networks to survive global warming

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/02/design-principles-for-building-networks.html

Smackdown: climate science vs. climate economics and impact on ...

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/02/smackdown-climate-science-vs-climate.html

Preparing for the next 911 event - climate catastrophe

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2008/12/preparing-for-next-911-event-climate.html

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com

Bill@St-arnaud.org

twitter: BillStArnaud

blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/

skype: Pocketpro