Energy Internet, Cyber-Infrastructure and eVehicles

Major New Funding Opportunities for Internet Researchers and R&E Networks- NAMAs

2013-05-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action (NAMA) is a new policy program that was developed at the Bali United Nations Climate Change Conference.

As opposed to the much maligned programs like CDM and other initiatives NAMA refers to a set of policies and actions that developed and developing countries undertake as part of a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also unlike CDM, NAMA recipients are not restricted to developing countries.The program recognizes that different countries may take different nationally appropriate action based on different capabilities and requirements. Most importantly any set of actions or policies undertaken by a nation under NAMA will be recorded in a registry along with relevant technology, finance and capacity building support and will be subject to international measurement, reporting and verification.

Already most industrialized countries have committed funding,or intend to commit funding to NAMA projects. It is expected that by 2020 over $100 billion will be committed to NAMA programs by various nation states.

As I have blogged ad nuseaum, I believe Internet researcher and R&E networks can play a critical leadership role in developing zero carbon ICT and "Energy Internet" technologies and architectures. ICT is the fastest growing sector in terms of CO2 emissions and is rapidly become one of the largest GHG emission sectors on the planet. For example a recent Australian study pointed out that the demand for new wireless technologies alone will equal the CO2 emissions of 4 1/2 million cars!

Once you get past the mental block of energy efficiency solves all problems, and realize that energy consumption is not the problem, but the type of energy we use, then a whole world of research and innovation opportunities opens up. More significantly, whether you believe in climate change or not, it is expected that within a couple of years the cost of power from distributed roof top solar panels is going to be less that that from the grid. This is going to fundamentally change the dynamics of the power industry much like the Internet disrupted the old telecom world. Those countries and businesses that take advantage of these new power realities are going to have a huge advantage in the global marketplace.

I am pleased to see that Europe is at the forefront of these developments with Future Internet initiatives like FINSENY.EU that is actively working with NRENs and Internet researchers to develop the architectural principles of building an energy Internet built around distributed small scale renewable power. My only concern is that Europe may screw it up, like they did with the early Internet, when most of the research funding went to incumbent operators.

The global Internet started in the academic research community and R&E networks. It would be great to see these same organizations play a leadership role in deploying the global "Energy Internet". Universities, in many cases have the energy profile of small cities, of which 25-40% of their electrical consumption is directly attributable to ICT. Most campuses also operate large fleets of utility vehicles that could easily be converted to dynamic charging to "packetize" power and provide it where needed and when needed on campus, especially when there is no power from the solar panels.

I dream of the day when a university announces it is going zero carbon and off the grid.

For more information:

High level architecture of Building Zero Carbon ICT: http://goo.gl/juWdH

Building the Energy Internet and Packetized Power with dynamic charging of eVehicles: http://goo.gl/lpyn1

NAMA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_Appropriate_Mitigation_Action

The Keystone XL Pipeline and the role of R&E networks

2013-04-09T09:34:00.002-07:00

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the environmental impact of the proposed Keystone-XL pipeline that is intended to carry heavy oil from the tar sands in Alberta to refineries on the US Gulf Coast.
I suspect at the end of the day the US government will approve the pipeline as GDP growth and potential job losses will always trump concerns over the environment.

However, the US government has been putting on a lot pressure on Alberta to improve its environmental standards as a quid pro quo for approving the pipeline. In response Alberta is exploring expanding their current CO2 emissions program to a $40/tonne carbon levy. In the past, all of the funds raised by Alberta’s carbon emissions program was returned to industry to invest in dubious energy efficiency programs. But Alberta could really have a much more meaningful impact in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, that would more than compensate the emissions from the oil carried in the Keystone XL pipeline, if it invested some of this money into its local universities and R&E network – Cybera.

Although on the production side the tar sands are one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions, the ICT industry, globally is the fastest growing and soon will be the largest source of CO2 emissions on the consumption side of the equation. ICT emissions are produced indirectly from the coal generated electricity that is used to power all of our devices. Currently it is estimated that ICT consumes around
10% all electrical power growing at about 6-10% per year. According to the OECD and other studies ICT equipment in our home now consumes more energy than traditional appliances.

New studies suggest that the growth in wireless networks could be the single largest component of that growth in CO2 emissions from the ICT sector. In a recent report by the Centre for Energy-Efficient Communications, at the University of Melbourne-based research centre claimed that by 2015, the energy used to run data centres will be a "drop in the ocean", compared to the wireless networks used to access cloud services. The report predicts that by 2015 energy consumption associated with 'wireless cloud' will reach 43 terawatt-hours, compared to 9.2 terawatt-hours in 2012. This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012, up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015, which is the equivalent of an additional 4.9 million cars on the road, the report states.

More worrisome is another report from Sweden KTH that predicts will need to increase the density of wireless base stations by 1000 times to meet the insatiable demand for the “wireless cloud”. If this came to fruition, it would be incredibly huge jump in the demand of electricity by the ICT sector.

The wireless industry in particular is an ideal sector to be powered by local renewable energy sources such as solar panels and windmills. Already many wireless towers in the developing world are powered by renewable energy (but unfortunately often with diesel backup). Because of it is inherently distributed, lower power architecture the wireless industry is ideally suited to be powered by local renewable energy.

I have long advocated that universities and R&E networks are the ideal environment for deploying wireless networks that are powered solely by local renewable power sources. By integrating WIfI and 4G networks with multiple over lapping cells it would be possible to provide seamless service zero carbon wireless services.

For more details please see:
High Level Architecture for Building Zero Carbon Internet Networks , ICT products and services
http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/2013/02/high-level-architecture-for-building.html

Alberta could be a world leader in deploying such zero carbon networks starting first at universities in partnership with Cybera. The global CO2 impact of developing such technology in terms of removing additional 4.9 million cars from the road would be much greater than expected emissions from the oil to be carried in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline

Additional pointers:

Cloud's real ecological timebomb: Wireless, not data centres
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/458439/cloud_real_ecological_timebomb_wireless_data_centres/

Thousand times greater density of base stations
J. Zander, P. Mähönen, “Riding the Data Tsunami in the Cloud – Myths and Challenges in Future Wireless Access“, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol 51, Issue: 3 (March 2013), pages 145-151
http://theunwiredpeople.com/author/jenz/

Solar powered WiFi allows control of bugs instead of using pesticides –
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/mobile/business/top-stories/Pest+control+wireless/8140245/story.html

ICT industry on track to be largest sector for CO 2 emissions
http://www.rackforce.com/green_it.html?loc=mainmenu

Solar Powered DIY Portable HotSpot
http://www.voltsxamps.com/?p=532

More on revenue opportunities for R&E and open access networks - building next generation "5G" wireless network
http://bit.ly/dck1kR

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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/
skype: Pocketpro

How Transport SDN could revolutionize R&E networks

2013-02-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

[It is exciting to see the recent announcements from ESnet and Infinera of their first Transport SDN demo.

As many readers of this blog I have been a long advocate of Transport SDN – which is the fundamental design concept of UCLP (User Controlled Lightpaths). Transport SDN allows fiber infrastructure to partition their network into separate management domains OR create a single domain optical network that spans many separate independent optical management domains or infrastructure facilities.

For example, a major forward thinking R&E network is shortly going to make an announcement about how they are going to enter into a partnership with a commercial fiber supplier to partition the network into both a commercial and R&E facility. The commercial provider owns the fiber and the Transport SDN boxes, but will create two separate management domains – one for the R&E network and one for the commercial operator. The R&E network can populate the optical transport boxes with its own optical transport cards and manage them independently of the commercial cards with Transport SDN. Transport SDN also allows the R&E Network to integrate wavelengths or fiber from multiple suppliers to build their own topology with their own independent management and control planes at both the optical and IP layers. Major Fortune 500 companies who operate their own networks have been looking for this capability for years.

The big advantage of Transport SDN in partnering with commercial providers for R&E networks is that it can significantly reduce the cost of deploying an optical R&E network. It also allows national or regional R&E networks to share infrastructure with other R&E networks, but allowing each network to manage its own set of wavelengths as part of its management domain. In times of funding constraints partnering with commercials suppliers or regional networks can be a major cost saving, especially in less populated regions.

Transport SDN will also allow the creation of a global R&E network infrastructure that does not depend on a traditional telco hierarchical network infrastructure, to paraphrase Tolkien of “one network to rule them all, one network to bind them all”. Instead different single optical management domains can be created from wavelengths from participating R&E networks to create “discipline or application specific” networks. For example recently several international networks in partnership with Internet 2 have agreed to back each other up in case of an outage. With Transport SDN each network can extend its management and control plane across each other’s infrastructure in order to provide automatic re-routing and backup between what would normally be totally independent networks.

It goes without saying that Transport SDN is also the fundamental concept underlying the deployment of zero carbon optical networks.

For additional information on Transport SDN

ESnet and Infinera Announcement of Transport SDN pilot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_gYxGnU_IQ

Some earlier papers on Transport SDN:

http://www.uclp.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid=9

http://www.nren.nasa.gov/workshops/pdfs9/PanelE_UCLPv2-Figuurola.pdf

--BSA]

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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com

twitter: BillStArnaud

blog: http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/

skype: Pocketpro

Latest developments in dynamic charging for eVehicles

2013-02-18T09:53:00.001-08:00

I have put together a slide deck and the following pointers on the latest development of dynamic charging of eVehicles. Clearly Korea and China are the world's leader with actual working deployments.
Korea seems to be focusing on inductive charging systems while China is using charging umbrellas for bus systems in Shanghai etc

Latest developments in dynamic charging
http://goo.gl/lpyn1

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

• 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

High Level Architecture for Building Zero Carbon Internet Networks , ICT products and services

2013-02-01T11:08:00.003-08:00

Architecture for Building Zero Carbon Internet Networks , ICT products and services

Revised May 12,2013

1.0 Introduction
-----------------

One of the biggest challenges facing this planet is climate change. It is estimated that ICT consumes 5-10% of global electricity and contributes to 2% of GHG emissions. Greentouch predicts that ICT energy consumption is going to double in the next decade. As Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) stated in a recent report the current global rate of de-carbonization is .8%. We need to achieve a rate of 5.1% for the next 39 years if we are to keep global average temperatures increasing less than 2C. That means that we have to increase the rate of de-carbonization by 40 times, for all sectors of society including ICT, starting right now.

Greentouch claims that already ICT equipment is achieving 10-20% increase in energy efficiency per year. But given the growth of ICT of approximately 10% per year, overall efficiency is probably neutral.

Increased energy efficiency does not have a one to one correspondence to reduction in GHG emissions. The reduction in GHG emissions depends on the local energy mix. So for example in the US you need 30% increased energy efficiency to achieve 10% reduction in GHG emissions, as coal powered energy is 30-40% of the energy mix. Overall globally coal powered electricity is typically 50% of the electrical energy supply which means that you need a 20% increase in energy efficiency to achieve 10% reduction in GHG emissions.

To meet the PwC target therefore would require the ICT sector would have to achieve overall energy efficiency of 8000- 10000% per year!! Clearly to achieve this greater rate of de-carbonization we will need much more radical measures to reduce the contribution of ICT to GHG emissions. Efficiency on this scale essentially means we must build zero carbon ICT solutions.

Although ICGT contribution to GHG emissions is relatively small at 2%, it is one of the fastest growing sectors in terms of GHG emissions. For example, new studies suggest that the growth in wireless networks could be the single largest component of that growth in CO2 emissions from the ICT sector. In a recent report by the Centre for Energy-Efficient Communications, at the University of Melbourne-based research centre claimed that by 2015, the energy used to run data centres will be a "drop in the ocean", compared to the wireless networks used to access cloud services. The report predicts that by 2015 energy consumption associated with 'wireless cloud' will reach 43 terawatt-hours, compared to 9.2 terawatt-hours in 2012. This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012, up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015, which is the equivalent of an additional 4.9 million cars on the road, the report states.

More worrisome is another report from Sweden KTH that predicts will need to increase the density of wireless base stations by 1000 times to meet the insatiable demand for the “wireless cloud”. If this came to fruition, it would be incredibly huge jump in the demand of electricity by the ICT sector.

The wireless industry in particular is an ideal sector to be powered by local renewable energy sources such as solar panels and windmills. Already many wireless towers in the developing world are powered by renewable energy (but unfortunately often with diesel backup). Because of it is inherently distributed, lower power architecture the wireless industry is ideally suited to be powered by local renewable energy.

Achieving GHG reductions as suggested by PwC forecasts is not uniformly attainable across all sectors of society. Some sectors such as airplane travel will have extreme difficulty achieving any meaningful reduction. Fortunately the ICT sector, with the right architecture can possibly achieve the required GHG reductions and more, thereby compensating for those sectors. As well, the lifecycle of ICT products and services is very short, typically 5 years. By designing zero carbon solutions today, it is conceivable that within 5 years we will be able to achieve significantly better overall energy efficiency for the sector thereby helping other sectors less amenable to GHG reductions.

2.0 Purpose of this paper
-------------------------

The purpose of this paper is to lay out a possible zero carbon architecture for networks and ICT equipment. It is predicated on the following assumptions:

(a) Solar power will become cheaper than power from the grid within 2 years in Europe and 5 years in North America

(b) Most of the growth and availability in solar power will be from off grid, highly distributed and relatively small sources such as roof top and mobile systems.

(c) Even with low cost solar, for the foreseeable future utilities will continue to supply a major portion of their power from fossil fuel resources, because of sunk capital cost and reliability of such power.

(d) Renewable energy will constitute only a small portion of the overall energy mix and large scale storage is still a pipe dream.

(e) The use of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) from the utility will not reduce meaningful dependence on fossil generated fuel because of need for dependable and reliable power.

(f) In jurisdictions that have mandated the utilities to use renewable energy such as California at 30%, the utilities will be motivated to find customers who can use the unpredictable power feed represented by this renewable power.

The network architecture also assumes that small scale, low power computing devices will almost be universal and in the same cost range as a single solar chip e.g. Raspberry PI. In fact it is conceivable that some solar arrays will be manufactured with integrated computing, network processors and memory storage. As a result we may well end up with a surplus of distributed computing and storage whose availability will wax and wane depending on the time of day.

It is clear that any dependence on the electrical grid, which will still incorporate fossil fuels for the foreseeable future will make it impossible to achieve 8000-10000% energy efficiency never mind zero carbon solutions. Based on these assumptions this paper proposes a zero carbon ICT architecture that will primarily be based on a highly distributed, off grid, small scale solar power, sometimes supplemented by off loaded grid power in those jurisdictions that mandate the use of significant percentage of renewable power.

The architecture will involve different approaches for different ICT devices broken down as follows:

(a) Access Networks – Optical and wireless - Reverse passive optical networks (RPON) and wireless mesh networks with software defined radios

(b) Computing – Infrastructure powered solely by renewable energy and highly distributed computing as above

(d) Backbone networks, Base stations and routers– Solar panel arrays supplemented with autonomous eVehicle mobile storage systems

An overview of the architecture of each of the above categories is provided in the following sections.

3.0 Zero Carbon Access Networks
-------------------------------------

With zero carbon access networks, whether wired or wireless, the fundamental assumption is that all active network devices will have to move to the edge of the network, where the power is located. The core of the network, as much as possible, needs to be made up of passive devices. The best analogy is to apply the concept of BitTorrent discovery and routing to the physical infrastructure.

Considerable progress has been made in this space with wireless mesh networks. For optical networks RPON (Reverse Passive Optical Networking) is the proposed solution where all active lasers and DWDM equipment is located at the edge of the network on the customer’s premises integrated with, or powered by their solar panels. Not unlike wireless networks, multiple independent optical paths are maintained with nearby neighbors and central core optical switches. In fact, integration of both wireless and wired networks would make sense to achieve greater density and throughput.

All forwarding and routing would be done at the edge in the CPE equipment with multiple overlapping distributed forwarding tables using a Hadoop based routing table.

Solar powered, low powered GSM and Wifi is a well established technology. Solar powered Raspberry PI GSM,FTP and routing engines are also freely available.

Ultimately higher aggregation and routing would make sense at traditional routing nodes as described in section 6.0

This architecture can also be used on backbone networks as well, where the core backbone is only made up of optical amplifiers and wave selection switches.

4.0 Computing Infrastructure
------------------------------

A zero carbon computing infrastructure could be made up of two components – large scale infrastructure powered solely by renewable energy such as GreenQCloud and highly distributed computing and memory at the edge as described in the previous section.

Considerable research has already gone into these highly distributed computing architectures that need not be replicated here. The only significant difference is that in this situation is that storage, memory and computing is not persistent. For example see Green Hadoop and Greenstar.

5.0 Consumer Devices
-------------------------

Most consumer ICT devices, except perhaps for TVs and printers have internal battery storage. These devices could easily be charged with special charging systems that only renewable energy from rooftop solar panels such as Power over Ethernet (PoE) or multiplex power systems. TVs and printers would require some external storage device. Multiplex power systems provide both 400 HZ and 60 (or 50 Hz) power over the same copper wiring. They are currently used in aircraft and military systems. The 400 Hz power is only visible to special plug in adaptors 9 (or perhaps USB connectors) and is for the most part invisible to regular AC devices because of reactive filtering from transformers and motors.

For consumer devices the biggest challenge is not technology, but getting standards bodies to agree that all consumer devices should use charging adaptors that work only with PoE or Multiplex AC.

Universities and other public institutions could set up charging stations with multiple outlets that are powered solely by roof top solar panels and supplemented by autonomous eVehicle mobile storage, with powered delivered from garage or parking lot over AC multiplex systems or PoE.

Surplus grid power from renewable sources, made available because of mandatory requirements to carry renewable power could also be used. However, complex signaling and contract negotiation between grid operator, utility and customer to make this happen.

6.0 Backbone networks, base stations and core routers
-------------------------------------------------------

These devices are generally the most energy intensive in the ICT sector and because of their design require high reliability. Moving as much computing and routing to the edge, as described previously will help alleviate some of their power requirements but not all.

Thousands of solar and wind powered radio base stations and network nodes are already deployed. But diesel generators are the usual backup power supply in case no renewable power is available. An alternate approach is to use autonomous eVehicles for mobile storage. The vehicles could be moved from site to site based on predicted power load etc. For the most part autonomous vehicles would be parked at base station or network node and charged from surplus power generated locally by solar panels or windmills. But in the event of predicted severe climate or long periods of cloudy, windless days, autonomous eVehicles could be directed to drive to nearby roadside solar arrays or energy routing exchanges to pick up additional supplemental power.

PWC study on de-carbonization

http://greenmonk.net/2013/01/25/pwc-low-carbon-index-report-is-a-call-to-arms-for-decarbonisation/

Greentouch ICT energy statistics

http://www.greentouch.org/index.php?page=how-the-ict-industries-can-help-the-world-combat-climate-change

UBS study that solar will be cheaper than grid power

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/01/23/unsubsidized-solar-revolution-starting-ubs-reports/

Reverse Passive Optical Networking (RPON)

ftp://cs.cinvestav.mx/jorge/bib/webservices/gridcontro4opticalnets.pdf

Green Hadoop

http://gigaom.com/2012/05/08/a-green-hadoop-could-manage-solar-powered-data-centers/

The myth of population density and the high cost of broadband

2013-01-31T12:55:00.002-08:00

One of the enduring myths that is used by apologists for incumbent broadband operators as to the high cost of broadband in Canada and the US is our low population density.
Since Canada and the US have low population density compared to The Netherlands or South Korea, they argue that therefore the cost of delivering broadband will be significantly higher because of the much greater distances that need to be covered.

While this may be true for rural and remote broadband services, most Canadians and Americans (over 80%) live in urban areas. The cost of deploying broadband in urban areas is almost the same anywhere in the world. The bigger factors that affect the cost of broadband deployment in urban areas is whether the fiber is buried or put on poles. Most urban communities in North America are serviced by poles and therefore cost of deploying fiber should be a lot cheaper than, for example in The Netherlands where it is mostly buried.

Canada and the US have almost the same urban density as The Netherlands (82%) and South Korea (83%). As such,in urban areas there is no reason why the cost of broadband should not be the same as The Netherlands or South Korea.

Clearly other factors (hint: lack of competition) that are play in keeping broadband speeds and prices much higher in Canada and the US than many other advanced broadband countries.

Netherlands to deploy worlds first mobile charging system - energy Internet

2013-01-28T12:08:00.001-08:00

[Here is a cool project in the in the province of Branbant in The Netherlands that embodies many of the ideas I have been talking about in terms of using eVehicles as a competitive alternative to the electrical grid.
Starting in mid -2013 the demonstration project will use inductive charging to charge vehicles as they drive a special lane in the highway.

The current vision for most eVehicles is stationary charging at home or at the office. But with mobile charging, the eVehicle can be charged as it is travelling along the highway using power from roadside solar panels and/or windmills. The eVehicle can then be used to deliver this energy as a backup or primary power source at the home or office. The eVehicle then would become a competitor to the electrical grid for delivering renewable energy.

If the burghers of Branbant are smart, they should work with the network research organization SURFnet to explore how mobile charging and autonomous vehicles can be used to take power from campus eVehicles and network equipment on university campuses.

With eVehicles used to transport energy, we can start thing of "packetized energy" where familiar Internet concepts of packet forwarding and routing can be applied to the Internet.

Thanks to Ali Farshchian for this pointer.

For more details please see on the Netherlands project please see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBTx87xiscs

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/glowing-roads/

For more details on the energy Internet and mobile charging:

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

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

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

Recharge Your Electric Car Through Its Tires for Mobile Charging

2013-01-28T09:23:00.001-08:00

Given the shortcomings of vehicle batteries–their high cost, the time it takes to recharge them, and the fact that they store less energy as they age (they’re expected to lose about 20 percent over 8 years)–many researchers are looking for alternative ways to power electric cars.

Powering them from overhead lines, the way many city buses get power now, doesn’t seem practical. But some researchers are suggesting embedding wireless power transmitters into roads that could top off a battery as a car drives over them. This would make it practical to use smaller, cheaper batteries that could be replaced every few years.

Normally, such systems would require bolting a power receiver to the bottom of a car. Now researchers at Toyohashi University of Technology have demonstrated that power can be transferred from electrodes buried in a road to the steel belts inside tires. That power was used to propel a scale model of an electric vehicle (according to Green Car Congress). The researchers say the energy transfer is as efficient as charging and discharging a lithium ion battery.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508621/recharge-your-electric-car-through-its-tires/

Taking on established battery makers and making electric vehicles mainstream will require far more radical advances

2013-01-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

Good article from MIT press. Taking on established battery makers and making electric vehicles mainstream will require far more radical advances. http://techre.vu/X8f4bt

I have been making this argument for some time. Conventional thinking about batteries and energy efficiency will not get us anywhere close to meaningful carbon reduction.

As I have blogged before eVehicles may be the ideal energy storage and transport medium, as they enable the concept of "packetized energy" to retrieve power from renewable sources along roadways and deliver it to specific destinations. An eVehicle energy distribution system would be a lot smarter than today's dumb electrical grid and its tight integration with dirty power plants. Just as importantly they also address the demand for individual transportation in the developing, as well as the developed world.

Large scale automobile ownership and road infrastructure is seen as the epitome of first world living standards. Most people, regardless of where they live in the world aspire to the freedom and flexibility of owning their own car. eVehicles powered by renewable energy may be the answer. But rather than charging the eVehicle from stationary charging systems at home or business using dirty 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.

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.

The advent of autonomous vehicles means that when the eVehicle is not being used to transport humans it could continue to be used, in off peak times, as an energy transport system transferring renewable power from remote locations to homes and businesses within cities. Less complex "on the move"charging systems could also be deployed.

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

Autonomous Vehicles as mobile energy storage systems

2013-01-23T16:48:00.003-08:00

[Readers of this blog are probably well aware that I have long argued that any scheme to mitigate or adapt to climate change must provide tangible benefits to consumers.
Citizens are only prepared to make minor sacrifices to their current lifestyle in order to save the planet and benefit future generations. Pursuit of GNP growth will always trump any costly and hair shirt strategies to reduce GHG emissions.

This is even more acute in the developing world. To deny to the developing world the potential to enjoy the energy rich lifestyle that we enjoy in the first world because we have already poisoned the planet is simply unconscionable and politically unpalatable.

As a result energy consumption is going to increase dramatically as the developing world pursues the same lifestyle that we take for granted in the developed world. And until they achieve approximate lifestyle parity reducing global GHG emissions will always be a secondary priority.

That is why I have long argued against energy efficiency as a path to reducing global GHG emissions. Given the projected growth of energy consumption by the developing world, energy efficiency, at best, will only slow down the rate of GHG emissions. We need to more than slow GHG emissions, but virtually eliminate them all together. How do we do that when over half the population on this planet has yet to come close to adopting energy intensive developed world living standards?

The problem facing this planet is not energy consumption, but the type of energy we are using. If we could convert all energy consumption to clean, renewable energy sources then we would not have a climate change problem, regardless of overall energy consumption. The problem with renewable energy sources such as the wind and the sun is their unreliability and unpredictability. Eliminating fossil fuels entirely will require the ability to store large amounts of energy.

As I have blogged before eVehicles may be the ideal energy storage and transport medium, as they enable the concept of "packetized energy" to retrieve power from renewable sources along roadways and deliver it to specific destinations. An eVehicle energy distribution system would be a lot smarter than today's dumb electrical grid and its tight integration with dirty power plants. Just as importantly they also address the demand for individual transportation in the developing, as well as the developed world.

Large scale automobile ownership and road infrastructure is seen as the epitome of first world living standards. Most people, regardless of where they live in the world aspire to the freedom and flexibility of owning their own car. eVehicles powered by renewable energy may be the answer. But rather than charging the eVehicle from stationary charging systems at home or business using dirty 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.

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.

The advent of autonomous vehicles means that when the eVehicle is not being used to transport humans it could continue to be used, in off peak times, as an energy transport system transferring renewable power from remote locations to homes and businesses within cities. Less complex "on the move"charging systems could also be deployed.

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

Building networks and cyber-infrastructure to survive climate change - lessons from Sandy

2012-11-04T14:01:00.002-08:00

[Hurricane Sandy has been a badly needed wake up call for the Internet community as to the threat of climate change.

Although most people have forgotten, Sandy is the second hurricane to hit New York in as many years with Irene last August and a third tropical depression headed to New York at the time of this writing. Two, supposedly once in a hundred year storms, within such a short time frame should even make the most die-hard denialist that something’s afoot.

Although the networks and data centers in New York and New Jersey survived relatively unscathed, with only a handful suffering significant outages, most of the data centers and network facilities in and around New York had to be powered by diesel backup generators for several days. Fortunately none of the nearby refineries were seriously affected by the storm so fuel deliveries for the generators were not seriously delayed. It is expected that some data centers, especially in lower Manhattan may have to be powered by their diesel generators for sometime as it will take the electrical utility days if not weeks to replace much of the flooded electrical infrastructure. But imagine the consequences if those refineries were also seriously damaged and there was no fuel to power the backup generators for the data centers and networks.

Flooding from storms like Sandy, and droughts, are forecast to increase significantly in the coming decade. As Jim Hansen, the famous NASA climate scientist has pointed out, simple statistics show that the probability severe weather is going to increase exponentially with increasing global temperatures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8

Unfortunately most research and development efforts with respect to the Internet, or any other aspect of climate change, are still focused on energy efficiency or measuring energy consumption. People still don’t realize that we have already lost the battle to prevent the planet from getting warmer. We now need to focus on how we will survive climate change.

Hurricane Sandy has shown us the consequences of severe weather as a result of climate change. Energy efficiency, or measuring energy consumption is irrelevant if you are sitting in the dark without power. By now most of us seen the pictures of citizens of New York scrambling to find sites where they can re-charge their cell phones, or struggling to find a cell phone signal.

As I have written many times in the past, the Internet and cyber-infrastructure are going to be critical for society to survive future severe weather patterns. Rather than focusing on energy efficiency, in the vain and forlorn hope that making the Internet more energy efficient will somehow change the direction we are headed, we need to focus on how to build an Internet and cyber-infrastructure eco-system that can survive climate change. Solar powered Wifi sites, open access wifi, ad hoc wireless networks, solar powered optical networks, building highly distributed clouds with renewable power ( and low cost) computational devices like the Raspberry Pi built on the Greenstar network architecture are examples of such approaches.

Some pointers:

Sandy Prompts Louder Calls For Free Wi-Fi http://t.co/PJSTniEv

Greenstar network – www.greenstarnetwork.com

--BSA]

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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com

twitter: BillStArnaud

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The next big challenge in computing and networking: increasing on demand electrical consumption

2012-08-14T06:29:00.002-07:00

[There is an excellent article in this week’s Economist on the difficulties Germany electrical grid and power plant operators are facing as the amount of renewable power on the grid approaches 20%.
The biggest challenge facing these companies is how to provide standby power on cloudy days with no wind or alternatively, how to distribute the surplus power that is dumped on the grid on sunny Sundays or in the middle of the night. The economics of building gas stand-by power plants to sit idle most of year, in anticipation of cloudy, windless days does not make sense, and this does not address the problem of what to do with surplus renewable power. The alternative solution is to build massive pan-national electrical grids to distribute renewable energy from the windy north coast of Denmark and Germany balanced with similar large distribution grids from the sunny Mediterranean. These electrical grids will be massive multi-billion dollar investments and will likely run into strong opposition from those who don’t want this ugly infrastructure running through their backyards. Energy storage is also another potential solution for surplus power, but these technologies are still in their infancy.

Rather than building hundred million gas plants to sit idle most of the year, or multi-billion dollar electrical grids or storage systems, a more elegant solution is to adjust the demand supply of power equation. Demand-response systems in industry have been around for a long time for reducing consumption on days of high power load, but as a far I know, no one has looked at building “consumption-response” systems to consume surplus power. In either case, neither technology has yet to be deployed in any significant way in the ICT community. Considering the fact that data centers consume around 2% of electricity , that ICT in general represents 6-10% of all electrical consumption, and that in many western homes aggregate ICT electrical consumption exceeds that of traditional appliances, ICT could perhaps play a significant role in both the demand and consumption of electrical power.

I have long argued that there is a potential of strong symbiotic relationship between the growth of clean, renewable electrical energy sources and the future of broadband, Internet, cyber-infrastructure (eInfrastructrue) and ICT in general. Through the Internet, computing and network data loads can be rapidly shifted to different places around the world and as such rapidly change the power profile at different sites via fiber networks rather than shifting power across ugly, expensive transmission lines. The Greenstar project is an early example of this type of architecture.

It has long been recognized that ICT and Internet could be used to reduce energy consumption through smart metering, intelligent appliances, etc. But ICT and Internet can also be used to increase power consumption when required, to do useful work when there is surplus power on the grid from renewable energy sources. For example, it may be cheaper for a power utility to operate a data center in stand-by mode to use surplus power rather than trying to export or dump the power onto the national grids. The availability of the data center VMs could be quickly advertised or brokered to the global network community at a low cost. Chargers for computers, tablets, etc could be signaled to operate in fast re-charge mode and also do archiving or backup of files. Sensor and wireless networks could be configured to start transmitting stored data during periods of surplus power, and so on.

One company that is ideally positioned to take advantage of this intersection of electrical consumption and Internet is Google. Google operates large wind and solar power facilities and are a major seller of renewable power into the US electrical grid. At the same time they operate a large distributed cloud as well as deploying an innovative fiber to the home project in Kansas City. I don’t know if they have yet squared the circle on linking these initiatives together, but for example, a major source of revenue for the Google Fiber project may be the local power utility. Rather than buying expensive peak power, or building standby gas power generators, installing on demand consumption and response systems as part of the fiber project may pay for the entire deployment itself. While fiber is not necessary for on demand response-consumption systems (simple low bandwidth ZigBee is just as effective) the cachet of Gigabit to the home may persuade customers who are concerned about privacy, security and external agencies controlling their appliances and computing equipment. Australia, Singapore and New Zealand, given their national broadband initiatives may also be well positioned to make this strong linkage between electrical power and Internet – BSA]

Germany’s energy transformation --Energiewende
German plans to cut carbon emissions with renewable energy are ambitious, but they are also riskyhttp://www.economist.com/node/21559667

Greenstar
www.grenstarnetworks.com

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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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How Quebec can be a world leader in next generation zero carbon transportation systems

2012-06-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

[It is exciting to see Quebec make a significant commitment to spend $2.7 billion on climate change efforts.
Given this is an election year Quebec and given that the province as a host of other problems it is unlikely much of this commitment will be converted into real programs. But regardless of how many funds are committed to climate change Quebec has a unique opportunity to be a world leader in next generation zero carbon transportation systems.

The transportation sector creates nearly half of Quebec’s greenhouse-gas emissions and Quebec plans to spend two-thirds of the promised $2.7 billion on transportation measures. A large part of this money will be earmarked for the usual anodyne solutions such as improving public transit, carpooling, taxi-sharing and active transportation like walking and cycling. But the Quebec government also has an opportunity to make Quebec a world leader in next generation zero carbon (or low carbon) transportation systems much in the same way it has made Quebec a world leader in Green ICT through the $60 million Green ICT program being deployed PROMPT Inc – a industry/academic ICT consortia.

In term of zero or low carbon transportation most of the world is focusing on electric cars and light vehicles. But 25-55% of transportation emissions come from commercial and heavy duty trucks. The wide range of GHG emission estimates from transportation reflect various debates in whether light trucks should be counted as commercial or passenger vehicles. It is also interesting to note that although emissions for passenger vehicles have stabilized or declined, overall emissions from the transportation sector continue to grow.

Finding solutions for commercial and heavy duty trucks is going to be required if we are going to have any meaningful hope of slowing down emissions from the transportation sector. Conventional solutions for eVehicles with large battery banks will be impractical and unaffordable for commercial and heavy duty trucks. But dynamic power and charging of trucks is a possibility. Street cars and trolley buses have used dynamic power with overhead wires for over a century. It is a well proven technology.
Integrating dynamic power with on relatively small on-board battery banks would allow commercial and heavy duty trucks to also be powered electrically. However, rather than having miles of ugly overhead wires and costly electrical infrastructure , “charging umbrellas” could be located at periodic intervals of several hundred meters to several kilometers to recharge the truck’s batteries as they travel along the roadway. Shanghai has had such a system in place for several years for the city’s public transportation system.
The technology for building “charging umbrellas” is well established. What is undeveloped and will require some R&E is the ICT infrastructure to control, manage and bill users of the charging umbrellas. Life was easy when overhead wires were only used to power street cars. But with many vehicles accessing charging umbrellas, smart ICT will be needed for the grid to manage the load and also integrate power from roadside solar panels and windmills. ICT solutions will be required so trucks can negotiate on the fly request for a charge and appropriate billing as they approach a charging umbrella at 100 km/hr.

Quebec is home to one of the world’s largest transportation companies – Bombardier. It would make sense for Quebec to once partner with PROMPT Inc – who has the Green ICT expertise – to build the necessary ICT solutions in partnership with the various transportation companies to make Quebec a world leader and exporter of this technology. Bombardier has already done considerable work for dynamic charging systems for streetcars using inductive techniques. But I suspect charging umbrellas will be more practical for trucks.

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

• 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

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Quebec+pledges+billion+tackle+climate+change/6723749/story.html#ixzz1xVVEpiZs
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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Hewlett Packard and other companies deploying zero carbon data centers

2012-06-04T09:26:00.002-07:00

[I am pleased to see that several companies are starting to recognize that building zero carbon data centers is a more sustainable direction rather than focusing on energy efficiency (i.e. PUE).
As China, India and the rest of the developing world starts to deploy data centers GHG emissions will continue to increase in portion to the number of data centers regardless of the PUE. But building zero carbon data centers powered only by renewable energy means that as the world deploys many more hundred of data centers GHG emissions will remain virtually unaltered and close to zero.

The other attraction of these types of solutions is that they are much more adaptable and survivable in an era of severe weather due to climate change, when the existing coal powered electrical grid is likely to be seriously compromised. This is the type of thinking we need in all sectors of society if we are going to meaningfully address climate change. Hewlett Packard is also involved in GreenCloud project in NY state – which is a distributed follow the wind/follow the sun zero carbon data center project similar to the Greenstar program. -- BSA

Infinity Carbon Data Center
http://www.infinitysdc.net/inovation/

Much has been said about green energy for data centres over the last three years, but to date nothing has become a reality in the UK. By partnering with a local agricultural co-operative, Infinity have been able to deliver true carbon neutral energy. This scheme uses on-site generation in a scalable modular manner, which is both innovative, economic and manageable in the long term.

The use of an anaerobic digester plant at Infinity Martlesham will provide our clients with a golden opportunity to truly address the challenge of reducing the carbon footprint of their biggest carbon source; IT in the data centre. With the introduction of the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme bringing not only ‘carbon taxation’ but the public ‘naming and shaming’ of the most significant energy users and carbon producers, Infinity’s green data centre campus provides the means to meet that challenge.
Whilst most other green energy developments require massive upfront investment with long lead times to deploy, Infinity’s solution is simple and reliable and comes in a proven scalable package used widely across Europe.

By working directly with the local agricultural community farmers benefit from additional income and access to natural fertiliser for crop production at lower cost than ‘inorganic’ fertilisers and without the pollution.
Further efficiencies can be gained by combining ground source heat pumps into the mechanical system to allow even greater energy and cost savings.

http://t.co/dmnheKS2
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/05/30/hp-developing-net-zero-data-center-concept/

Can existing strategies be combined to create a “net zero” data center that requires no net energy from utility power grids? HP Labs said this week that it is developing such a concept, which is being tested at a 3,000 square foot facility at the company’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif.
The HP testbed brings together a photovoltaic power array, a cooling system that can use either fresh air or mechanical cooling, and consolidation strategies that boost server utilization to reduce power demand. The secret sauce is management software that can orchestrate the energy supply and demand to maximize the use of renewable power and minimize dependence on the utility grid.

The proof-of-concept confront challenges often seen in solar implementations, including the array’s limited capacity of 134 kilowatts and a limited window of generation hours – namely, when the sun shines. This was used to power a testbed comprised of four ProLiant BL465c G7 servers, each with two 12-core 1.8 Ghz processors and 64 GB of memory and a total of 48 KVM virtual machines.
Matching Workloads to Daytime Power Availability
A key component of HP’s strategy is using a mix of critical and non-critical workloads that are managed by service level agreements. The HP Labs software estimates the output available from the solar array and the power required to run the applications, and then schedules workloads to take advantage of the daytime power peaks from the array.
This approach may not be suitable for many facilities requiring round-the-clock availability and the ability to scale workloads up and down. But HP said it could be attractive to users with mixed workloads, particularly companies in international markets.
“Information technology has the power to be an equalizer across societies globally, but the cost of IT services, and by extension the cost of energy, is prohibitive and inhibits widespread adoption,” said Cullen Bash, distinguished technologist, HP, and interim director, Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group, HP Labs. “The HP Net-Zero Energy Data Center not only aims to minimize the environmental impact of computing, but also has a goal of reducing energy costs associated with data-center operations to extend the reach of IT accessibility globally.”
HP Labs researchers will present a new research paper, “Towards the Design and Operation of Net-Zero Energy Data Centers,” tomorrow at IEEE’s 13th annual Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electrical Systems. Here’s a video overview from HP Labs of the net-zero concept. HP’spresentation
.
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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Globe and Mail: Only radical thinking will solve environmental problems

2012-05-31T05:18:00.002-07:00

The Globe and Mail has a good article on why we need to get away from our traditional thinking in terms of addressing climate change:

“The World Bank estimates that a more conservative 200-million new cars will be on the road in India by 2040, meaning that a new car enters the system every five seconds. In contrast, Mr. Condon considered his recent LEED Gold project, four years in the making, which saves an impressive 450 tons of carbon dioxide annually. Every eight minutes, that accomplishment is cancelled out by the CO2 output of new cars in India. “In the time I’ve been speaking to you, four years of efforts at reducing greenhouse emissions from one project have gone,” he says.”

Although there are some worthy attempts at energy efficiency, most people don’t understand unless we find solutions that enable the developing world – particularly India and China- reduce their emissions, then pretty well anything we do in the developed world is meaningless. But we also need to understand that we need to “sequester” carbon. Building more energy efficient cars or avoiding travel in the developed world does not or slow down the rate of GHG emissions in the developing world.

I was recently at an ITU sponsored Green ICT where I heard the usual platitudes from various well meaning people on how they were going to reduce emissions. One speaker from a major telco mentioned how their organization had saved millions liters of transport gasoline and hundreds of millions of air travel through the use of tele-commuting and video-conferencing. The telco falsely claims they have saved thousands of tons of CO2. I asked where are those millions of litres of gasoline and the empty planes sitting on tarmacs as a result of these policies? If you can’t sequester the carbon then that means those millions litres of gasoline and empty seats can be resold to someone else ( perhaps at a cheaper price) and the CO2 impact remains the same.

That is why I argue that only meaningful measurement standard to genuinely prove that you are helping the environment is ISO 14064. With ISO 14064 you must go through a rigorous process to prove carbon sequestration. And that is why, to date, virtually no “energy efficiency” project, or applications such as video conferencing, telecommuting etc has been able to meet the ISO 14064 requirements.

In the ICT world there have been some incredible claims by SMART 2020 and IEA that ICT can save 15-20% of all CO2 emissions – but with no rigorous ISO 14064 methodology. I suspect, as with most other such energy efficiency claims these will all turn out to be bogus. If we continue on our current path ICT is not going to be a green champion but the ultimate environmental bad boy. It is already the fastest growing sector in terms of GHG emissions.

It is also interesting to note that the Carbon Disclosure Project estimates that collectively corporations and governments spend $690 billion per year mostly on energy efficiency and yet global GHG emissions continue not only to rise, but are now accelerating.

There is a message here.

We have to stop this mantra of green washing and tokenism of energy efficiency. We need to focus on radical solutions that genuinely can be measured and certified to reduce or eliminate GHG emissions. That means we have to focus on the real problem – which is the type of energy we use and not how much we consume. It is dirty energy that produces CO2. That is why we need ICT solutions that will only use renewable energy. The Greenstar project is one great example. Using eVehicles for energy transport and building Energy Internet is another. For more examples please see.

Globe and Mail: Only radical thinking will solve environmental problems
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/growth/only-radical-thinking-will-solve-environmental-problems/article2447562/print/

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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Guardian - Until we get a 100% decarbonised grid, the marginal impact of efficiency is always to add more coal to a power station

2012-05-28T07:17:00.004-07:00

[There is a great article in today’s Guardian about understanding the real challenges of decarbonizing our society with respect to the recent decision by Germany to shut down its nuclear plants- http://goo.gl/e6WCF.
“to meaningfully measure the impact of any action on a climate change, you need to recognise that the world is interconnected and measure the effects as widely as possible….The core point is this: until we get a 100% decarbonised grid, the marginal impact of turning off any existing low-carbon electricity source – or indeed adding to demand by switching a light on – is virtually always to add more coal to a power station.”

There are a lot of meaningful and well intentioned people doing some very creative work in terms of reducing energy consumption in all walks of life. But even though you may reduce your own consumption that does not mean that dirty coal plants will reduce their power output. If anything because you have reduced demand, that dirty power will be delivered to some other customer displacing some lower carbon alternative increasing overall GHG emissions. Because coal plants operate most profitably at 100% utilization there is a big incentive for operators to keep them operating at full output. If demand slackens it is much easier to spin down a gas turbine or reduce the import of power. The counter argument to that is if enough organizations in a country reduce their energy consumption then collectively we can reduce total consumption and therefore begin to shut down coal plants. And that may very well work in the West, particularly as we export manufacturing to China, India and other developing countries, but global GHG emissions will continue to rise.

Airplane engines are a good example. Aircraft manufacturers are going to great lengths to make airplane engines more energy efficient. In the West, this may result in overall emissions from aircraft declining, but more likely it will reduce cost of flying and increase emissions. But both scenarios are irrelevant when compared to China’s plans for its aircraft industry. In the next 20 years China plans to invest over three quarter trillion dollars in the aviation industry, build 100 airports about the size of Heathrow and deploy over 5000 new planes in addition to their existing fleet in the next 15 years. The emissions from all these new planes will dwarf any energy savings we may realize in the West. And this is only China. India and many other developing nations have similar ambitious plans.

A little known fact is that in the IPCC climate forecasts and discussion about “wedges” to reduce GHG emissions, no allowance is made for the billion people on earth who currently have no access to electricity or the additional billion and half who have intermittent electricity service. All of the IPCC and IEA models on energy efficiency assume that at least two and half billion of the planet’s population will remain in extreme poverty with little or no access to electricity. Do we expect these people not to have to the same lifestyle as we do in the developed world? What will happen to global emissions as they start to move out from subsistence style of living to enjoying the fruits of a modern western lifestyle?

It for these reasons I continue to argue that any effort focused on energy efficiency is doomed to failure and is virtually meaningless in terms of reducing GHG emissions. We need to focus on how to decarbonize our energy sources. But there is virtually no incentive for the global electrical power plant operators to reduce their dependency on coal. Even with a global carbon tax, the utilization profiles of coal plants and the plentiful availability of coal will insure that coal powered electricity will be our dominant form of global energy production. That is why we need to develop solutions that work independent of the electrical grid. This has the added benefit that if we start to experience severe weather disruption to the grid because of global warming, a distributed independent power system using only renewable energy will likely much more survivable and reliable.

The ICT sector should be leading the world in decarbonizing our society, not through meaningless energy efficiency, but build products and services that only work with renewable energy sources disconnected from the electrical grid. Please see my talk for the ITU symposium on greening IT for more information http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/why-adaptation-is-more-important-than-mitigation
--BSA]
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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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When India and China are adding a coal plant a week, energy efficiency in the western world is meaningless

2012-05-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

[I am constantly amazed how the western world continues to focus on energy efficiency, smart meters and other energy silliness to address the problem of climate change.
While these technologies may save money and assuage an individual’s conscience about doing something good for the environment they are absolutely irrelevant and meaningless when the developing world is adding approximately a coal plant per week. As long as we continue to increase the OVERALL number of coal plants in the world GHG emissions will continue to rise, regardless of what efficiency strategy we adopt in the western world. As long as the developing world rightly and deservedly desires a western lifestyle, their energy consumption will increase – even if they are using the most energy efficient light bulbs, computers and HAL like super smart meters. Given the abundance of coal reserves their first choice will be coal powered electricity.

A big, and the fastest growing , part of this electrical consumption will be to power ICT equipment. Currently somewhere between 6-10% of electrical consumption is for ICT.

So what are we to do?

First we have to understand the scale of the problem. Roger Pielke Jr has done an admirable job in his book “The Climate Fix” in describing the enormity of the challenge. According to Dr Pielke’s analysis we need to build a nuclear plant (or the renewable energy equivalent) EACH AND EVERY day for the next 50 years just to stabilize global temperature increase to 2C starting from a baseline of 9 years ago!! We are already over 3000 nuclear plants (or the renewable energy equivalent), give or take, behind schedule!! Every 10 days a new nuclear plant has to be built solely for the ICT sector for the next 50 years.

Second we have to look at what works. The biggest reduction in GHG emissions from the electricity sector in North America was not smart meters or energy efficiency, but the ongoing switch from coal power to gas fired electrical plants. Changing the type of energy on the supply side of the equation has a far greater impact on GHG emissions then anything you can do on the demand side. But gas is only a half way measure. Although its better than coal, gas still has a significant GHG footprint. The obvious end game is to use 100% renewable energy. And of that renewable energy solar power is likely to be the most common source. Electricity from solar panels is on track to be cost competitive with coal within the next 5-10 years.

But the biggest problem with renewable energy, particularly solar and wind is its unreliability and predictability. Most places that have deployed considerable renewable energy such as Denmark are still reliant on coal plants for 80% of their electrical power. As long as you are connected to the grid you can’t get rid of the coal plants. Energy storage is part of the solution on the supply side. But building solutions that can live with this unreliable power on the demand side will probably be a lot more effective. This is the real problem we need to solve – not energy efficiency. This is where ICT can play an important role – firstly in moving ICT products and services off the grid and secondly in helping other sectors of society move off the grid. Building a distributed energy system that only uses renewable energy, with no coal plant backup, is our only hope.

Why is it so important that we disconnect from the electrical grid?

If you are realist and looking at the odds of building a new nuclear power plant (or the renewable energy equivalent) each and every day for the next 50 years, then like me you have to conclude that we are whistling past the grave yard. We need to focus on adaptability – and learn how to live in a much warmer climate. But a warmer climate means a lot more severe weather patterns. The probability of an extreme heat wave has increased enormously… by about 40 times (4000%) in the last 50 years. http://www.slideshare.net/Revkin/a-defense-of-jim-hansens-climate-conclusions/download . And this is just the beginning. Extreme heat wave and conversely flooding is going to be very disruptive to the electrical grid – and eventually I think the public is going to start demanding the shut down of coal plants around the world. If they are willing to shut down nuclear power plants in Germany and Switzerland, then it is only a matter of time when the public will starting demanding governments to start to shut coal plants. If this starts to happen you had better have a strategy to get off the grid. If there are widespread protests and shutdown of coal plants there are likely to be rolling brown outs if not black outs.

If hope against hope, we do develop a global strategy to combat climate change, solar power will likely by the primary source of energy. Whether it is for adaptation or mitigation building ICT solutions that only use unpredictable and unreliable renewable energy, with no back up from coal fired grid, will produce far bigger economic opportunities than anything related to energy efficiency, smart meters and other silliness. – BSA]

Rutgers to deploy follow the sun solar center using GreenHadoop and GreenNebula

2012-05-05T04:31:00.000-07:00

[Here is a very cool project at Rutgers that demonstrates how we can build “adaptable” ICT green solutions that will be needed for a much warmer planet and yet at the same are also excellent solutions for mitigation.
It is this type of ingenuity that we will need in the coming decades, rather than silliness of energy efficiency, to address the challenges of severe weather caused by climate change and the shut down of coal trains and plants by protestors once the public starts to realize the real implications of climate change -- BSA

http://parasol.cs.rutgers.edu/
We are building a solar-powered micro-datacenter called Parasol. It comprises a small container, a set of solar panels, and batteries. The container lies on a steel structure placed on the roof of our building. The solar panels are mounted on top of the steel structure and shade the container from the sun. The container hosts two racks of energy-efficient servers (up to 160 of them) and networking equipment. The container uses free cooling whenever possible, and direct-exchange air conditioning otherwise.
Besides the solar panels, Parasol can draw energy from its batteries and/or the electrical grid. Three manual switches enable different configurations for the supply of energy. For example, we can configure Parasol to operate completely off the electrical grid. Parasol also includes extensive power monitoring infrastructure to quantify how much energy is drawn from each available source.
We are also building software for maximizing the use of green energy in Parasol. Our two first systems, GreenSlot and GreenHadoop, have been described in the literature. Both systems assume that there are no batteries and that brown energy should only be consumed when green energy is not available. We are currently working on GreenNebula, our extension of the OpenNebula cloud manager. GreenNebula will be aware of the green energy available at the datacenter. In addition, it will maximize the green energy use by migrating virtual machines across green datacenters. Finally, it will enable us to share Parasol with researchers from other institutions.

GreenHadoop
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~ricardob/papers/eurosys12.pdf

Interest has been growing in powering datacenters (at least partially) with renewable or “green” sources of energy, such as solar or wind. However, it is challenging to use these sources because, unlike the “brown” (carbon-intensive) energy drawn from the electrical grid, they are not always available. This means that energy demand and supply must be matched, if we are to take full advantage of the green energy to minimize brown energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate how to manage a datacenter’s computational workload to match the green energy supply. In particular, we consider data-processing frameworks, in which many background computations can be delayed by a bounded amount of time. We propose GreenHadoop, a MapReduce framework for a datacenter powered by a photovoltaic solar array and the electrical grid (as a backup). GreenHadoop predicts the amount of solar energy that will be available in the near future, and schedules the MapReduce jobs to maximize the green energy consumption within the jobs’ time bounds. If brown energy must be used to avoid time bound violations, GreenHadoop selects times when brown energy is cheap, while also managing the cost of peak brown power consumption. Our experimental results demonstrate that GreenHadoop can signiﬁcantly increase green energy consumption and decrease electricity cost, compared to Hadoop.

Activists block coal trains
http://grist.org/climate-change/you-shall-not-pass-activists-to-block-warren-buffets-coal-trains/
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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

Iceland to host supercomputer for universities and researchers in Scandanvian countries

2012-04-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

[Here is a great example of how research supercomputing and clouds can be hosted in remote environments that use only renewable energy.
The carbon footprint and energy savings are dramatic compared to any attempt at energy efficiency. It is the type of solution that will be needed for next generation of exascale computing. A CANARIE funded study undertaken by McGill University and San Diego Super Computer showed that such a strategy be undertaken by the Scandinavian universities and research centers could reduce overall costs by as much as 75% and CO2 emissions by 100%. This represents dollars savings worth tens if not hundreds of millions dollars per year. In an era of drastic funding cuts to universities these type of savings could be redirected into essential research and education programs at our universities. http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/2011/03/relocating-data-centers-to-colder.html

More recently SURFnet demonstarted how using how high speed R&E optical networks make it possible for researchers at universities in the Netherlands to access green clouds and supercomputers in Icealand for data intensive science http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/2011/08/surfnet-pilots-green-cloud-service-for.html

-- BSA]

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2012/04/thor-host-supercomputer-pilot-project?utm_source=DCD+Global+Newsletter&utm_campaign=416d8f0b9a-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4f9d75ed7b2d3240,0

Icelands’s Thor Data Center will host a new supercomputer being developed for the National High Performance Computing organizations of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Iceland.
The pilot initiative will test the use of remote hosting for supercomputing to overcome energy challenges. It will see compute being brought to the energy source instead of the other way around, which is more typical in a supercomputing environment.
Thor Data Center said it uses 100% green energy, with energy provided through hydroelectric generation or from geothermal power plants and wind power.
It also makes use of Iceland’s cool climate, using free-air cooling.
Few details were provided about the size of the supercomputing project, for the Danish Center for Scientific Computing, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, UNINETT Sigma and the University of Iceland, but a release by Thor hinted that this could be the first hosted supercomputer project of many in the Scandinavian region.
“In the long term, joint large scale procurements and energy efficient placement of supercomputers will be increasingly advantageous for the Scandinavian countries, as well as to Iceland. It increases value for money as well as the possibility to develop new advanced competencies within shared operations of remote computing,” Thor said.
The 28,000-sq-ft Thor Data Center is only 10 minutes from Reykjavik and has a Tier III mechanical infrastructure with 3.2MVA power feeds, but is capable of 6.4MVA.

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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Must watch video: The Iron Law of Climate Change Policy and why we must move to adaptation

2012-04-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

[Here is an excellent video of a lecture given by noted political economist Roger Pielke Jr that powerfully demonstrates the challenge we face in trying to prevent climate change:
http://goo.gl/1QKl0. To date most efforts addressing Climate Change have been focused on mitigation strategies such as increasing energy efficiency and/or using renewable energy sources . The fundamental philosophy of mitigation strategies is that we can still prevent the onset of climate change or at least keep the global average temperature below 2°C to prevent more severe outcomes.

Unfortunately despite the best intentions of many committed individuals and organizations, we are currently headed in the opposite direction. Even where there is political and public acceptance for Climate Change a number of economists argue that the public will never be prepared to make the huge sacrifices and substantial investments to avoid the worst possible outcomes. This is especially true in developing countries who are now starting to experience first world energy consuming life styles. In his this video Roger Pielke explains his famous Iron Law on Climate Change: “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time. “ The unavoidable reality is that policy makers and the public at large are committed to sustaining economic growth, raising society out of poverty, and expanding access to energy. GHG emission reductions will not be achieved by policies that seek to constrict or reduce economic activity.

As such many scientists and thought leaders are starting to argue, given the political climate, and that economic growth will always trump any meaningful economic costs to reduce GHG emissions we need to seriously think the unthinkable: we are unlikely to undertake any meaningful reduction in GHG emission and consequently we must prepare ourselves and society as a whole to adapt to a much warmer planet. President Obama’s National Science Advisor, Dr John Holdren said it most succinctly in his address to the National Climate Adaptation Summit: “Mitigation alone won’t work, because the climate is already changing, we’re already experiencing impacts. Nothing we can do in the mitigation domain can stop it overnight, so a mitigation only strategy would be insanity... we’re going to have to maximize both mitigation and adaptation.”
We don’t have to wait until the end of the century to be seriously affected by Climate Change. Already we are starting to see evidence of such extreme weather events directly linked to climate change such as the 2011 drought in South West United States and Mexico and the 2010 forest fires in Russia. This year’s warm spring in eastern North America, the floods in Pakistan and forest fires in Russia are only a mild precursor to what is expected in the coming decade.

All sectors of society are going to be impacted by these extreme weather events. This is especially true for the ICT sector. Unfortunately most work in the ICT sector is still focused on mitigation largely through energy efficiency. Given the imminent increase in severe weather and other dramatic climate impacts in the coming decade and the years beyond, and with little hope of global political will to deal with the problem, we need to seriously think of an adaptation strategy for ICT, even it is only for a worst case planning analysis. While we should not abandon mitigation strategies such as increased energy efficiency, it is time now to seriously look at how ICT sector itself can “adapt” to a warming planet as well as assist other sectors of society in their adaptation strategies. More importantly any adaptation strategy, should, by its own right, be a complementary mitigation process as well.

Thankfully a number of research groups have been looking at this problem for some time and have been experimenting with adaptation solutions that enable ICT products and networks to survive severe climate change. The foremost example of such an approach is the CANARIE funded GreenStar project led by researchers at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada. The Greenstar project was the first in the world to conceive of deploying what is called a “follow the wind/follow the sun” architecture of a global computing cloud and network where all the compute nodes are powered solely by renewable energy such as solar panels, wind mills and hydro electric power. The system is designed such that when the wind dies, or the sun sets at a given node the computing jobs and tasks are immediately forwarded to another node which has power, located elsewhere in the world over a high speed optical network. The system operates completely independent of the local electrical grid and can provide services regardless of the state of the local power system. Not only is it designed to survive a much warmer planet it is a nearly a low carbon mitigation architecture in its own right. – BSA]
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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
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A new Bit-Torrent proxy to enable green file transfers

2012-04-12T08:34:00.002-07:00

[Integrating this BitTorrent proxy with a Greenstar network node powered by wind or sun would be a novel way to enable green file transfers.
The same architecture could be used for large data file transfers used at university DMZs as being deployed by ESnet – BSA]

A BitTorrent proxy for Green Internet ﬁle sharing: Design and experimental evaluation

Recent studies have shown that the Internet-related energy consumption represents a signiﬁcant, and increasing, part of the overall energy consumption of our society. Therefore, it is extremely important to look for energy-efficient Internet applications and protocols. The largest contribution to this energy consumption is due to Internet edge devices (PCs and data centers). As a particularly signiﬁcant example, in this paper we address the fact that users leave their PCs continuously powered on for satisfying connectivity requirements of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) ﬁle sharing applications, like BitTorrent (currently the most popular P2P Internet platform). To reduce these energy consumptions, without penalizing the Quality of Service of BitTorrent users, in this paper we propose a novel architecture based on the introduction of a BitTorrent proxy. BitTorrent users delegate the download operations to the proxy and, then, power off their PC, while the proxy downloads the requested ﬁles. We implemented our solution and validated it in a realistic testbed. Experimental results show that, with respect to the legacy BitTorrent approach, our solution is very effective in reducing the energy consumption without introducing any QoS degradation. Speciﬁcally, our results show that the proxy-based solution can provide up to 95% reduction in the energy consumption and, at the same time, a signiﬁcant reduction in the average ﬁle download time.

A BitTorrent proxy for Green Internet ﬁle sharing: Design and experimental evaluation

http://cnd.iit.cnr.it/andrea/docs/comcom10_bt.pdf

ESnet DMZ

http://fasterdata.es.net/fasterdata/science-dmz/

Greenstar Network

http://www.greenstarnetwork.com/

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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com

twitter: BillStArnaud

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Why we need to bypass electrical utilities if we want to build a low carbon society

2012-03-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

[I have long argued that we need to bypass electrical utilities if we want to build a low carbon society.
Utilities, even if they are publicly owned, have an inherent economic incentive to use cheap and dirty coal or gas, as they then earn the generating revenue. With distributed solar panels at homes and business the customer earns the revenue and the utility becomes a dumb pipe. Heard that argument before? Just as we had to bypass the telephone company to build the global Internet we will need to bypass the utilities to build the future Energy Internet.

Currently the entire electrical grid is built around an architecture of large centralized generating stations. A low carbon electrical grid will need an entire different architecture – and it already exists. It is called our roadway system. With electric vehicles we can use them as a store and forward packet technology to deliver renewable energy from roadside solar panels or windmills. Not only does this enable delivery of renewable energy to homes and businesses bypassing the utilities and existing electrical grid, it also provides a clean and efficient transportation system that complements our western lifestyle. For more details on the Energy Internet please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/2012/02/stanford-university-research-on-dynamic.html –BSA]

Why generators are terrified of solar
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified-of-solar-44279

Here is a pair of graphs that demonstrate most vividly the merit order effect and the impact that solar is having on electricity prices in Germany; and why utilities there and elsewhere are desperate to try to reign in the growth of solar PV in Europe. It may also explain why Australian generators are fighting so hard against the extension of feed-in tariffs in this country.

The first graph illustrates what a typical day on the electricity market in Germany looked like in March four years ago; the second illustrates what is happening now, with 25GW of solar PV installed across the country. Essentially, it means that solar PV is not just licking the cream off the profits of the fossil fuel generators – as happens in Australia with a more modest rollout of PV – it is in fact eating their entire cake.
Both graphs were published last week on the website Renewables International, and were sourced from EPEX, the European power price exchange. The first graph, from 2008, shows peaking power prices rising to around €60/MWh and staying there for most of the day, with some visible peaks around noon and the early evening – the size of which would depend on the temperature and the usage.

The second graph shows a brief leap to €65/MWh around 9am, before the impact of solar PV takes hold – erasing the midday peak entirely and leaving only a smaller one in the evening. The huge bite out of day-prices is also a bite out of fossil fuel generators’ earnings and profits. Note that the average peak price in the second graph is barely higher than the baseload price.

Deutsche Bank solar analyst Vishal Shah noted in a report last month that EPEX data was showing solar PV was cutting peak electricity prices by up to 40 per cent, a situation that utilities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe were finding intolerable. “With Germany adopting a drastic cut, we expect major utilities in other European countries to push for similar cuts as well,” Shah noted.

Analysts elsewhere said one quarter of Germany’s gas-fired capacity may be closed, because of the impact of surging solar and wind capacity. Enel, the biggest utility in Italy, which had the most solar PV installed in 2011, highlighted its exposure to reduced peaking prices when it said that a €5/MWh fall in average wholesale prices would translate into a one-third slump in earnings from the generation division.
[…]
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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Another innovative low carbon brokered cloud strategy - Mastodon C

2012-02-27T07:20:00.002-08:00

[Mastodon C is a new service from Magic Dashboards, a London-based startup.It helps developers and data scientists to minimize their environmental impact, by sending their Hadoop jobs to the greenest available locations, without reducing their productivity or significantly increasing cost.
The project use Jbroker for brokering Hadoop cloud jobs to AWS sites.

The project was born at the 2012 London Green Hackathon. If you'd like to see the project in its most nascent form, you can read the coverage on the AMEE Blog.—BSA]

It is great to see so many research and commercial organizations pursuing zero carbon or low carbon cloud/network initiatives including:

Greenstar Network
www.greenstarnetwork.com

Mantychore
http://www.mantychore.eu/

Hewlett-Packard, AMD, Clarkson University GreenCloud
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2011/10/hewlett-packard-amd-and-others-aim-to.html

2012 London Green Hackathon
http://www.amee.com/what-we-do/initiatives/hack-events/london-green-hackathon-jan-2829-2012/
Mastodon C web site
http://www.mastodonc.com/index.html

Calculating of your cloud computing carbon footprint
An excellent paper calculating cloud/network carbon footprint can be found at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6008718

Graph of past 24 hour carbon footprint of whole network is provided in every minutes. History videos are available here:
http://207.162.8.220/history4.html

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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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Carbon Accounting and Green IT strategies for networks - TERENA workshop

2012-02-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

[TERENA in partnership with SURFnet and GEANT is hosting a 2 day workshop on carbon accounting and Green IT strategies for R&E networks.
Lots of interesting topics and presentations.
At one time I thought carbon accounting would allow R&E networks tap into various cap and trade programs. But given the abject failure of most cap and trade initiatives I think carbon accounting will be best applied to Green or Energy Revolving Funds deployed by many universities and governments. The carbon and energy savings can be very significant especially when coupled with institutional strategies to outsource research and education computing to the cloud (assuming the cloud infrastructure uses renewable energy).—BSA]

http://www.terena.org/activities/green-workshop/ws2/programme.html

Green IT is revolutionizing UK cyber-Infrastructure via networks, cloud, outsouring and financial incentives

2012-02-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

[As readers of this blog may know I have long argued that advances in research and education through cyber-infrastructure (or eInfrastructure) can be largely justified, if not entirely paid for through the energy savings of using clouds, networks or outsourcing.
But a big impediment in adopting cyber-infrastructure in most jurisdictions is the lack of financial incentives. The energy savings of cyber-infrastructure are usually earned by the facilities or estates department or rarely based on to researchers and educators. But initiatives like national Green Revolving Funds, funded by the national government such as the 10 million Salix pound program in the UK, and JISC/JANET programs to promote clouds, outsourcing and Green IT are starting to make a difference. More importantly universities such as Cambridge are developing programs to pass on energy savings to individual departments. Another great example is the public-private partnership of London University and UNIT4 to offer shared outsourcing services to UK universities, as well as the recent JANET cloud brokering offering. If these collocated facilities use green or renewable power, the carbon/energy savings for a university can be significantly greater than more traditional energy saving schemes such as changing light bulbs or adding insulation. Of course, advanced high speed R&E networks supporting Software Defined Networks and Hybrid optical backbones are critical for this vision. Ultimately I think such initiatives can entirely underwrite the cost of such advanced networks by making Green Revolving Funds aware of the huge energy savings available by integrating advanced networks with clouds and outsourcing. Kudos to JISC/JANET for these forward thinking services -- BSA]

Cambridge Shared Savings
http://www.goodcampus.org/susteit/susteit-cases/index.php
(Back to Top)
A new case study from the JISC-funded RECSO Project, managed by Forum for the Future with inputs from SusteIT, describes the background, aims and working of the Electricity Incentive Scheme (EIS) that Cambridge University implemented in 2008/09 and has since developed. The Scheme encourages consumers of electricity across the University to maximise their energy efficiency through a system of financial incentives (both rewards and penalties) at a departmental level. It thus achieves the benefits of fully devolved energy budgets without the administrative and managerial implications that this could have involved. The Scheme saved an estimated £820,000 in energy costs in its first year. Although not targeted at ICT, it obviously provides general incentives to tackle its energy use - as evidenced by an Appendix which details how the scheme helped stimulate an innovative green data centre (PUE approaching 1.1) in the Department of Engineering (also featured in the presentations from our September 2011 workshop at Cambridge).
READ MORE

University of London Computer Centre and UNIT4 join forces to deliver shared services to educational institutions
Further and Higher Education Institutions to benefit from Agresso Campus Platform as a Shared Service.
UNIT4 and the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), the University of London’s provider of shared IT services, today announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deliver shared services based on the Agresso Campus Platform to educational institutions across the UK. This is the first such agreement between an educational establishment and a vendor to jointly provide enterprise software as a shared service.
ULCC will provide hosting and support services to institutions, that will benefit from reduced IT infrastructure costs while capitalising on the economies of scale that come from sharing. With ULCC being a point-of-presence for JANET(UK), the UK’s Higher Education’s network, customers can also rest assured that the service will be fast and reliable.
“Integrated back-office solutions will become indispensable as institutions look to address sector challenges,” said Richard Maccabee, Director of ICT at the University of London. “We chose the Agresso Campus Platform because it provides sector specific solutions across the board for both Further and Higher Education. What’s more, Agresso’s architecture is unique and allows us to easily adapt the solution to meet the individual requirements of customers. This improves our competitive advantage and will keep our development costs low. In fact we have already implemented or agreed service contracts with four institutions in just 12 months.”
The Agresso Campus Platform offers educational institutions a portfolio of tightly integrated solutions covering all functional areas including financial management, student management, research award management, CRM, curriculum management and reporting and analytics. These best-of-class technologies provide agile, interoperable solutions to help Institutions adapt to increasing complexity, business change and funding challenges including the impacts of growing student numbers, new revenue streams and organisational and regulatory changes.
“Shared services delivers huge shared efficiencies allowing institutions to focus their resources on what they do best, education and research,” said Anwen Robinson, Managing Director of UNIT4 Business Software Ltd. “ULCC is an example of best practice in a sector that is desperate to cut costs and modernise. They are also a trusted advisor to the sector and the faith they have demonstrated in UNIT4 sends a clear message to the market.”

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