Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: More on how data centers can save millions with follow the wind/follow the sun software

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

Monday, August 24, 2009

More on how data centers can save millions with follow the wind/follow the sun software

[Similar to technology under development under CANARIE’s Green IT program. Some excerpts. R&E networks are well positioned to support this capability as they don’t usually have constraints on bandwidth and speed – BSA]
http://earth2tech.com/2009/08/19/how-data-centers-can-follow-energy-prices-to-save-millions/
How Data Centers Can Follow Energy Prices to Save Millions
Companies that own numerous data center operators across the globe could be able to save millions of dollars a year in electricity costs if they dynamically shifted computing power across their data centers to when and where energy prices are the cheapest. At least that’s according to a study out this week from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon (hat tip Ars Technica).
In other words, companies that have lots of data centers can take advantage of cheap bandwidth, smart software and fluctuating hourly energy prices to shift computing power to a data center in a location where it’s an off-peak time of the day and energy prices are low. Commonly that’s in the middle of the night, which is why industry-watchers like Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, call the process “following-the-moon.”
For data centers that are more “energy proportional” — using energy efficiently across a range of activity levels, from idle to peak load, as I explained on GigaOM Pro (subscription required) — and don’t have any constraint on bandwidth use and speed, the savings could be as high as 13-30 percent.
The study is interesting because while some companies with massive distributed data centers are starting to employ these tactics (data center software maker Cassatt, for example, sells a product that dynamically shifts loads to find the cheapest energy prices), this is still a relatively new concept. It’s particularly interesting for companies that offer cloud computing services, selling scalable on-demand computing as a service, since they could use their massive networks to create significant savings and pass that onto their customers.
Given many cloud computing providers are already shifting computing loads to different locations to provide fast delivery and on-demand bandwidth, the researchers suggest that adding in an energy price cost policy wouldn’t be that difficult. And as longtime IT energy researcher Jonathan Koomey found in one of three reports released this week, cloud computing companies are already leading the charge in being smarter about energy use.
An alternative, which Stacey on GigaOM has written about, is helping data centers shift computing loads to tap into renewable power. But unfortunately for the time being, until clean power drops in price, that’s not going to save you a whole lot of money.