Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: How Cyber-infrastructure and research networks can help reduce CO2 footprint

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

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

How Cyber-infrastructure and research networks can help reduce CO2 footprint

[There are a couple of upcoming meetings-workshops on how cyber-infrastructure and research networks can help universities and research networks reduce their carbon footprint and possibly even earn carbon offset dollars.

The first meeting will be the California-Canada summit to be held in Montreal October 26-27. This is an invitation only event which will involve leading carbon accounting firms, industry players and academia from Canada and California where we will be exploring possibility of some collaborative initiatives between Canada and California on how research networks and cyber-infrastructure can help reduce the carbon footprint at our respective institutions. Dr Larry Smarr, Harry E. Gruber Prof, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego and myself will be co-chairs of this event. If you have expertise in carbon accounting and GHG life cycle measurements with respect to ICT (ISO 14062 and ISO 14064), in particular research networks and cyber-infrastructure, you may be interested in attending this event. Please contact Lisa Stockley (Lisa.Stockley@international.gc.ca) about a possible invitation.

The second meeting is being sponsored by PROMPT Inc on October 28th and will be a continuation of the California-Canada summit but with a focus on Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming (G-NGI) http://www.promptinc.org/documents/atelier_ngi_ang.pdf. This workshop will focus on the development of new computing and Internet architectures to reduce global warming as well as the establishment of ISO 14064 testbeds in order to baseline emission measurements in order for network researchers and campus CIOs to potentially qualify for carbon offsets. This workshop is also invitation only, so please contact Jacques McNeill if you are interested in attending ( JMcNeill@promptinc.org).

Finally there will be session on Green Cyber-Infrastructure and research networking at the CANARIE-ORION summit on November 4 in Toronto which will also involve leading carbon accounting firms such as ZeroFootPrint and Climate-Check where they will explain the various standards and processes for measuring CO2 baseline emissions and how to possibly qualify for carbon offsets. http://www.orioncanariesummit.ca/greenit.html

Abstract:

Increasingly it is being recognized that Climate Change is an issue that we all have a responsibility to address. Its solely not a problem restricted to coal burning power plants or drivers of SUVs. It will also have a major impact on how we carry out research and teaching at our universities. Most significantly cyber-infrastructure and IT may now be one of the major contributors to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions at our universities and research centers. Fortunately, although cyber-infrastructure and IT may be part of the problem, it is also part of the solution.

Many universities throughout North America are adopting carbon neutral strategies either on a voluntary basis, or as part of a government mandate. This workshop/seminar will help inform university IT departments, CIOs and researchers the necessary steps on how to reduce the institution’s carbon footprint

This workshop will show how to collect GHG life cycle data (ISO 14062) for their respective cyber-infrastructure and IT hardware vendors and how to establish ISO 14064 baseline data as soon as possible for their respective campus and wide area networks and IT equipment, from which future GHG reductions will be measured (and this potentially eligible for carbon offset dollars). Finally new network and distributed computing architectures will be discussed that may allow institutions to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of their current cyber-infrastructure and networks.]