Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: Digital Infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World

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, January 20, 2009

Digital Infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World

[Excellent presentation and paper by Larry Smarr given at a recent Australia-USA leadership event. Some excerpts from the paper below – BSA]

http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/presentations/lsmarr/2008/ppt/AALD_ICT_and_Climate_011509.ppt

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) presents a uniquely double-edge sword regarding climate change—simultaneously requiring substantial efforts to slow down the growth of its own climate impact, while increasing the use of ICT in other sectors to greatly lower their impact. This white paper provides an overview of these challenges and opportunities, provides some examples of on-going research, and lays out an agenda for American, Australian, and Canadian collaboration.

Proposed Australian, American, Canadian Green ICT Testbed
UCSD and UCI are among the Greenest U.S. campuses. UCSD has undertaken a large number of initiatives to move it rapidly toward a carbon neutral campus[i]. UCI recently won the Best Overall category award in the annual Flex Your Power program[ii], California’s statewide energy efficiency campaign. Among the several hundred applicants, UCI was among just five winners of this level of recognition. This means that Calit2 has a strong foundation on its two home campuses to undertake a wide range of Green initiatives.

Since a key thematic element of Calit2 projects is international engagements, we sought out both Canada and Australia to be partners in establishing an international Green IT testbed. As a first step, on October 27, 2008 a MoU was signed between UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Prompt Inc.[iii] during the third Summit of the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership in Montreal, Canada. In one of the first efforts of its kind, these universities in Canada and California are pledging to work together to reduce GHG emissions on their campuses while developing a 'green cyberinfrastructure' – information technology that improves energy efficiency and reduces the impact of emissions on climate change.

In the near term, the institutions agreed to develop methods to share GHG emission data in connection with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards for information computer and telecommunications equipment (ISO 14062), as well as baseline emission data for cyberinfrastructure and networks (ISO 14064). These protocols will become much more widely used as those reducing ICT GHG emissions wish to obtain energy credits in “cap and trade” systems. The Calit2 GreenLight data center will be connected to Canadian end users over the CENIC[iv]/Pacific Wave[v]/CANARIE[vi] dedicated optical fiber networks. CANARIE in Canada is studying establishing several research data centers near hydro, wind, and solar powered energy sources, so that a variety of Green Cloud alternatives can be experimented with. Meanwhile, efforts are underway at Calit2 to use DC fuel cell technologies to experiment with feeding modular data centers locally with zero carbon emission energy sources.

With Australia, Calit2 will build on its now extensive relations[vii] with Australian universities, CSIRO, and AARNet to extend in 2009 the UCSD/Canadian Green IT testbed to sites in Australia. Approximately half of the energy consumed by the Internet goes into the core network routers in the core nodes. Therefore, large improvements in network energy efficiency can be obtained if each packet travelling through the Internet passes through as few routers as possible. The primary method to minimize router hops is to employ optical bypass, by which traffic is groomed into wavelengths and/or wavebands which can be diverted around certain routers, avoiding the need for full electronic processing and every router. CUBIN proposes to study this using the dedicated optical infrastructure made available by the AARNet/CENIC testbed.