Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: UK study on how grids and virtualization reduce CO2 by universities

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

UK study on how grids and virtualization reduce CO2 by universities

[Excerpts from Guardian article. Universities and their funding bodies around the world should take note --BSA]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/link/story/0,,2278356,00.html
Why the future's green for IT

A survey into ways in which colleges and universities can make computing greener and more sustainable is about to publish its preliminary findings.

Higher Education Environment Performance Improvement (Heepi) and SustainIT, an NGO set up to focus on the environmental and social impact of IT, are researching how sustainable further and higher education IT is, and how education best practice compares with the private sector.

The report being written for the Joint Information System Committee (Jisc) says green IT is best achieved through the collaboration of IT and estates management. It finds that increased energy and computing costs can be offset by technologies such as grid computing and virtualisation. The need to reduce carbon the footprint is behind a cull of wasteful IT practices.

The author of the report, Peter James, who is also part-time professor of environmental management at Bradford University and associate director of SustainIT, says: "Eighty to 90% of a computer's capacity is wasted.

"By linking PCs together we can run complex computing tasks broken down into manageable chunks when the computers are not in normal classroom use."

[..]
Virtualisation offers much more dramatic savings. "This is one component of grid computing that's really going mainstream," says Berry. "Many servers set up to run a single application are running at less than 10% capacity. By using virtualisation you can bring several applications onto one server and use less energy for IT, power and cooling."

[...]
Meanwhile, Cardiff University has come up with an innovative solution to the cost of running super computers for research projects by centralising departments' IT budgets and transferring byte-hungry number-crunching to clusters of smaller high-performance computers. The project is called Arcca (advanced research computing at Cardiff).

"Before Arcca, departments ran their own computers for their own researchers," says Dr Hugh Beedie, Cardiff's chief technology officer, who was personally charged with reducing IT costs throughout the institution. "When they weren't online the computers were idle. Now we manage things centrally and any researcher can access our super computer cluster." [...]