Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: Organizing research and teaching at universities to address the grand challenges of sustainability

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

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Organizing research and teaching at universities to address the grand challenges of sustainability

[An excellent article by the president of Arizona State University on the need for universities to fundamentally re-organize themselves to address the global challenges of sustainability and climate change. The institutions that are at the forefront of the science behind climate change, are surprisingly very slow in adapting their organizational structure and operations to deal with this imminent threat. It amazes me how few people at our universities appreciate the real and present danger of run away global warming. Even a 1C or 2C average temperature increase is going to have dramatic effects on society and economy as noted in the recent National Research Council report: “Committee on Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations.” As the Nobel prize winning columnist Paul Krugman noted that the although there still remains a lot of uncertainty about the magnitude of climate change, there is a small probability of catastrophic outcomes for this planet. “Current projections of global warming in the absence of action are just too close to the kinds of numbers associated with doomsday scenarios. It would be irresponsible — it’s tempting to say criminally irresponsible — not to step back from what could all too easily turn out to be the edge of a cliff. This risk of catastrophe, rather than the details of cost-benefit calculations, makes the most powerful case for strong climate policy. ”

As I have long argued the low hanging fruit for organizational change at universities is with cyber-infrastructure, networks and clouds. Computers, networks and HPC systems constitute a significant portion of the energy consumption at many universities. We have the solutions in hand to eliminate the huge carbon footprint of cyber-infrastructure and to enhance the quality of science that can be done with such facilities. Universities and R&E networks, to my mind, should be at the forefront of organizational change to deal with the challenges of climate change. For more thinking along this line please see the following paper in Educause Review written by myself, Larry Smarr, Tom Defanti and Jerry Sheehan “Cyber-infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World”

Organizing Teaching and Research to Address the Grand Challenges of Sustainable Development
http://president.asu.edu/sites/default/files/BioScience%20Article%20070110%20Organizing%20to%20Address%20Grand%20Challenges%20Sustainable%20Dev.pdf

National Research Council
Committee on Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12877

Climate Change and Higher Education
“Cyber-infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World”
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0960.pdf

More on revenue opportunities for R&E and open access networks - building next generation "5G" wireless network http://bit.ly/dck1kR
New revenue opportunities for R&E networks in helping universities reduce their energy costs http://bit.ly/dqvN70
Cloud helps universities reduce costs by 74% - more clouds reduce energy costs http://bit.ly/c5mT58
Cloud computing breakthru! CENIC & PNWGP have connected 10G lightpaths to Amazon compute & storage, OOI CI early user http://bit.ly/aG0a06
EEE Green House Gas standards for 5G networks and Green ICThttp://bit.ly/bqYNyN
CO2 emissions from US datacenters greater than all CO2 emissions from Netherlands or Argentina http://bit.ly/cW6jEY
Amazon joins Top500 supercomputer list with its Cluster Compute service ... http://bit.ly/99zipE
What A Price on Carbon Would Cost University Data Center Operatorshttp://bit.ly/9AOZzH
Moving beyond cyber-infrastructure - greening and moving HPC into the cloud http://bit.ly/bNGrXy
Industry and universities must prepare for next Y2K - "CO2K"http://bit.ly/9UMpMo
OECD recommends that basic research in ICT should be supported through carbon offset mechanismshttp://bit.ly/a8VhNk
Enabling Innovation with next generation wireless 5G Internet + clouds - technical details http://bit.ly/c3iZsZ3:18 PM Apr 25th via web
85% of research computing can be done using cloudshttp://bit.ly/cC1eQ7
The Rise of Research-driven Cloud Computing http://bit.ly/bA9YjL
More on building a 5G wireless mobile R&E green networkhttp://bit.ly/a5zQFL

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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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