Understanding impact of cap and trade (Waxman-Markey) on IT departments and networks

[For further in depth analysis on this subject please see the upcoming Educause Review special publication on this topic and presentations by Dr. Larry Smarr and yours truly at Educause summit in Denver in November.

There has been a lot of discussion about climate change and what IT departments should do to reduce energy consumption. Most of this is being driven by corporate social responsibility. But a few organizations are undertaking processes to understand the impact of cap and trade on the bottom line of their IT and network operations. When the real cost of cap and trade starts to be felt a lot of organizations will be looking at their IT departments as the low hanging fruit in terms of reducing energy consumption and concomitant GHG emissions.

Only marginal energy reductions are possible with traditional electrical hogging sources such as lightning, heating, air conditioning etc. IT holds out the promise of much more significant savings because of its inherent flexibility and intelligence to support "smart" solutions. Several studies indicate that ICT represents at least 30% of the energy consumption in most organizations and it is estimated as much as 50% within certain sectors such as telecoms, IT companies themselves and research universities. Hard, quantifiable data is difficult to find - but CANARIE is funding 3 research projects to do a more detailed analysis of actual electrical consumption by ICT and cyber-infrastructure for at least one sector in our society - research universities. (Preliminary results are already pretty scary!)

To date the various cap and trade systems have had little impact because either emission permits have been effectively given away, or the underlying price of carbon has had a negligible impact on the cost of electricity. This is all about to change. First with Waxman-Markey bill (HR 2454) now before the senate and the move to auction permits in the European Trading System (ETS). Even if the Waxman-Markey bill fails to pass in the Senate, there are several regional cap and trade initiatives that will be implemented by US states and Canadian provinces in the absence of federal leadership. So, no matter which way you cut it, electrical costs for IT equipment and networks are projected to jump dramatically in the next few years because of cap and trade. On top of that there may be energy shortages as utilities move to shut down old coal plants where it does not make economic sense to install carbon capture sequestration (CCS) systems to comply with the requirements of these cap and trade systems.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has done some extensive modeling and economic analysis of the impact of the Waxman-Markey bill. It is probably the best source for a general understanding of how various cap and trade systems around the world are going to affect IT operations. Even though some of the particulars of the bill may change in the US Senate, the broad outline of this bill as well as those of other cap and trade systems will remain essentially the same. Details of the EPA analysis can be found here:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/economics/economicanalyses.html

Surprisingly there has been little analysis by the IT industry sector itself on the impact of cap and trade on this industry. IT may be the most significantly affected because of its rapid growth and its overwhelming dependency in several key sectors of society such as university research, banking, hospitals, education, etc. Although IT overall only consumes 5-8% of all electricity depending on which study you use and contributes 2-3% of global CO2 emissions, IT electrical consumption is over 30% in most businesses and even greater amounts at research universities. What is of particular concern is that IT electrical consumption is doubling every 4-6 years and the next generation broadband Internet alone could consume 5% of the world’s electricity. Data centers as well are project to consume upwards of 12% of the electricity in the US.

There are number of important highlights in the Waxman-Markey bill that will be of significance to IT departments and networks:

1. The proposed cap reduces GHG emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.

2. Most of the GHG reduction will be from the electricity sector and purchase of international offsets in almost equal portions.

3. GHG emissions from the electricity sector represent the largest source of domestic reductions - although transportation accounts for 28% of emissions in the US, only about 5% of the proposed reductions will come from that sector and expected to raise gasoline prices by only a paltry $.13 in 2015, $.25 in 2030 and $.69 in 2050 (Much to the relief of the oil industry, Canada’s tar sands and owners of SUVs)

4. The share of low or zero carbon primary energy rises substantially to 18% of primary energy in 2020, 26% by 2030 and 38% by 2050, although this is premised on a significant increase of nuclear power and CCS. True renewables only make up to 8% in 2015, 12% in 2020, and 20% in 2030

5. Increased energy efficiency and reduced energy demand simultaneously reduces primary energy needs by 7% in 2020, 10% in 2030, and 12% in 2050.

As you can imagine there are many uncertainties and controversial assumptions that affect the economic impacts of H.R. 2454 and many other cap and trade bills. Briefly these are some of them:

(a) The degree to which new nuclear power and CCS is technically and politically feasible. HR 2454 assumes a dramatic increase in nuclear power and deployment of CCS. If either fails to materialize then the GHG reduction targets will not be met. Assumption of growth in nuclear power is particularly suspect as any new nuclear plants in the foreseeable future will be first needed to replace the many aging systems now at the end of their operating life.

(b) The availability of international offset projects. Given the controversy that already exists over international offsets many question the assumptions of being able to purchase this volume offsets particularly when every other country with a cap and trade system will be pursuing this same market.

(c) The amount of GHG emissions reductions achieved by the energy efficiency provisions. In the IT sector in particular growth of IT products and services may simply outweigh any gains made in efficiency.

Although the impact of HR 2424 on consumer electrical costs will be minimal, its a different story for business and industry users. The EPA estimates that the "average" price of electricity will increase by 66% for commercial users. But there will be huge regional variances in these prices depending upon the amount of electricity that is produced from coal without CCS. In those regions largely dependent on coal generated electricity the cost increase will be almost entirely dependent on the market price of carbon.

If your electricity is mostly generated by coal, which includes most of the mid-west in USA and western Canada, then a rough rule of thumb is 1000g of CO2 is produced for every kilo-watt hour of electricity which results nice easy one to one conversion of annual hourly consumption to metric tones of CO2. A typical research university has a 40 MW utilization which translates into about 350,000 MWhr of consumption. This would result in 350,000 mTCO2e. If carbon trades at $25/ton then the increased cost to the institution will be in excess of $8 million per year.

However if many of the assumptions in the Waxman-Markey fail to come to pass, particularly the availability of international offsets then cost of carbon could jump dramatically. (To protect against this the US senate is proposing a “collar” to limit variability in price of carbon). The EPA analysis has various projections for carbon, and depending on the scenario the cost could go up to as much as $350 per ton, if the objective of 17% in GHG reductions are going to be achieved by 2020 and 83% by 2050. The Nicholas Stern report in the UK suggests that carbon must trade at a $100 a ton to achieve meaningful GHG reductions.

One of the main concerns of the Waxman-Markey bill is that it is too little and too late. More and more evidence points to much more rapid warming of the planet than even the most pessimistic computer models have forecast. Although we had a wet and cool summer in eastern North America average global sea temperatures set a new high record this year. The latest study from UK Meteorological office, that incorporates CO2 feedback cycles for the first time, suggests that US could warm up by 13-18F and the Arctic by 27F by 2060. The bottom line is that Waxman-Markey is just a starting point to probably much more stringent GHG reduction policies. The IT sector needs to get prepared for this worst case eventuality. If nothing else it should be part of any disaster planning scenario. This will be the mother of all disaster planning scenarios as opposed to other natural disasters that might affect IT operations it will be long term, if not effectively permanent.

However there is some good news for the ICT sector. One of the requirements of the Waxman-Markey (Title I, Subtitle A, Sec. 101) requires retail electricity providers to meet a minimum share of sales with electricity savings and qualifying renewable generation funded through purchase of offsets or other credits. Nominal targets begin at 6% in 2012 and rise to 20% by 2020. The ICT sector is probably the best qualified to take advantage of these energy requirements by adopting follow the wind/follow the sun architectures and relocating, as much as possible, computers and databases to renewable energy sources. The key to take advantage of these opportunities is to start planning now. Several papers from MIT and Rutgers indicate that savings of up to 45% in electrical costs are possible with such a strategy. These savings will be more significant with the advent of cap and trade.



-- BSA]
--------------
Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
blog:http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/

UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic by 2060,

[Excerpts from Climate Progress Blog. Although this summer has been cool for many regions of North America the oceans overall have reached record high temperatures. More evidence that we are unsustainable path -- BSA]

http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/28/uk-met-office-catastrophic-climate-change-could-happen-with-50-years/

UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”
September 28, 2009

Finally, some of the top climate modelers in the world have done a “plausible worst case scenario,” as Dr Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, put it today in a terrific and terrifying talk (audio here).

No, I’m not taking about a simple analysis of what happens if the nation and the world just keep on our current emissions path. We’ve known that end-of-century catastrophe for a while (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“). I’m talking about running a high emissions scenario (i.e. business as usual) in one of the few global climate models capable of analyzing strong carbon cycle feedbacks. This is what you get [temperature in degrees Celsius, multiple by 1.8 for Fahrenheit]:

The key point is that while this warming occurs between 1961-1990 and 2090-2099 for the high-end scenarios without carbon cycle feedbacks, in about 10% of Hadley’s model runs with the feedbacks, it occurs around 2060. Betts calls that the “plausible worst case scenario.” It is something the IPCC and the rest of the scientific community should have laid out a long time ago.

As the Met Office notes here, “In some areas warming could be significantly higher (10 degrees [C = 15F] or more)”:

* The Arctic could warm by up to 15.2 °C [27.4 °F] for a high-emissions scenario, enhanced by melting of snow and ice causing more of the Sun’s radiation to be absorbed.
* For Africa, the western and southern regions are expected to experience both large warming (up to 10 °C [18 °F]) and drying.
* Some land areas could warm by seven degrees [12.6 F] or more.
* Rainfall could decrease by 20% or more in some areas, although there is a spread in the magnitude of drying. All computer models indicate reductions in rainfall over western and southern Africa, Central America, the Mediterranean and parts of coastal Australia.
* In other areas, such as India, rainfall could increase by 20% or more. Higher rainfall increases the risk of river flooding.

Large parts of the inland United States would warm by 15°F to 18°F, even worse than the NOAA-led 13-agency impacts report found “Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”

[...]

The fallacy of tele-commuting, video conferencing and virtual meetings to reduce CO2

[A lot of equipment vendors are promoting video conferencing as a solution to reduce Co2 emissions, especially from air travel. But as this article shows there is not a lot of compelling evidence that video conferencing is that effective. At first blush it would seem that the savings from air travel would be significant. But most analysis of video conferencing fail to take in account that the video conference system is often left on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The cumulative power consumption and resultant CO2 emissions may outweigh the gains made in eliminating air travel. Video conferencing should be part of an overall portfolio of reducing CO2 emissions, but on its own it is as affective as putting caulking around windows to seal out the drafts when you have still got the front door wide open --BSA]

http://earth2tech.com/2009/05/05/can-virtual-meetings-save-the-planet-in-a-word-no/


By now, you’ve probably heard the following claim: Video conferencing, when done right, can offer companies significant benefits when it comes to travel. By eliminating the need to send employees to on-site meetings, companies can cut both the cost and the nasty carbon emissions bill associated with such journeys.

That’s the message used to help market next-best-thing-to-real-life video conferencing services like Cisco’s TelePresence. collaboration service — that virtual meetings can save both money and the planet. But look beyond the headlines and the soundbites, and you’re likely to find a somewhat less verdant tale.


Digging into the data

Those may sound like some big numbers, but if you look at the actual research, not just the press releases and marketing tie-ins, they start to shrink. The study from Australia? It goes on to say that those 2.4 million metric tons of emissions are just 0.43 percent — less than half a percent — of the country’s total. (To be fair, GreenBiz also notes this fact.)

The impact of video conferencing in the BCG/Climate Group study was equally lukewarm, if not more so. Emissions reductions from “dematerialization,” the category under which teleworking and video conferencing fall, account for just 0.9 percent of the total potential emissions reduction in its scenario, while video conferencing on its own accounts for just 0.15 percent of the total potential.

What’s more, the actual travel-replacement effects of video conferencing aren’t exactly carved in stone. According to the WWF study, some research indicates that video conferencing may actually have a neutral or negative impact on employee travel, because travel time and budgets associated with internal meetings are shifted to strategic meetings with contacts outside the organization. That may be good for business, but it doesn’t do much for the polar ice caps.

80% of green ICT initiatives don’t have measurable targets!

The OECD has just published a great summary of the various Green ICT programs around the world. As this article points out many of these initiatives have no way of measuring whether the initiatives are actually reduce GHG emissions. This is quite a common problem with most energy efficiency initiatives. Unless a program undertakes a valid carbon verification and audit process such as ISO 14064 then there is no way to really determine if these programs are being successful. In fact many initiatives on energy efficiency may be making the problem worse because of the Jevons paradox. This is why the CANARIE Green IT pilot insists that applicants go through an ISO 14064 process to insure that their low carbon Internet architecture actually reduces GHG emissions.



http://www.greentelecomlive.com/?p=1180

A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that only one in five green ICT programs by governments and industry organisations actually have any type of measurable targets, or ways of measuring whether they are working as plan.

According to the report, authored by consultant Christian Reimsbach Kounatze and presented to the Working Party on the Information Economy, while most programs have some form of broad objective, only one-fifth of all government programs and industry association initiatives have measurable targets and indicators to measure whether these targets are being achieved.

Of the government initiatives, all have set objectives, but only 17 out of 50 have measurable targets, the report said. Of these, only 10 actually have formalised assessment and evaluation. More astonishing is the fact that the report found only two out of the 42 green ICT programs by industry associations had any measurable targets.


ICT IMPACT
At the same time, the report found that while there are many approaches to green ICT as illustrated by the 92 programs, and that each program would have its own objectives, the majority, or two thirds, are focused on improving the direct environmental impact from the use of ICT, thus neglecting the greater benefits of using green ICT to lower the impact of the society in general.

Only one third of the programs actually focused on “using ICTs across the economy and society in areas where there is a major potential to dramatically improve performance, for example in “smart” urban, transport and power distribution systems, despite the fact that this is where ICT have the greatest potential to improve environmental performance,” the report said.


....

OECD report
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/12/42825130.pdf

TOWARDS GREEN ICT STRATEGIES
Assessing Policies and Programmes on ICT and the Environment

Intergrating Cyber-infrastructure with Smart Grids and energy management

How to Use Open-Source Hadoop for the Smart Grid<

http://earth2tech.com/2009/06/02/how-to-use-open-source-hadoop-for-the-smart-grid/>

At first glance it’s hard to see how the open-source software framework Hadoop, which was developed for analyzing large data sets generated by web sites, would be useful for the power grid — open-source tools and utilities don’t often mix. But that was before the smart grid and its IT tools started to squeeze their way into the energy industry. Hadoop is in fact now being used by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) to aggregate and process data about the health of the power grid, according to this blog post from Cloudera, a startup that’s commercializing Hadoop.

The TVA is collecting data about the reliability of electricity on the power grid using phasor measurement unit (PMU) devices. NERC has designated the TVA system as the national repository of such electrical data; it subsequently aggregates info from more than 100 PMU devices, including voltage, current, frequency and location, using GPS, several thousand times a second. Talk about information overload.

But TVA says Hadoop is a low-cost way to manage this massive amount of data so that it can be accessed all the time. Why? Because Hadoop has been designed to run on a lot of cheap commodity computers and uses two distributed features that make the system more reliable and easier to use to run processes on large sets of data.


The Smart Grid and Big Data: Hadoop at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/06/02/smart-grid-big-data-hadoop-tennessee-valley-authority-tva/

For the last few months, we’ve been working with the TVA to help them manage hundreds of TB of data from America’s power grids. As the Obama administration investigates ways to improve our energy infrastructure, the TVA is doing everything they can to keep up with the volumes of data generated by the “smart grid.” But as you know, storing that data is only half the battle. In this guest blog post, the TVA’s Josh Patterson goes into detail about how Hadoop enables them to conduct deeper analysis over larger data sets at considerably lower costs than existing solutions. -Christophe
The Smart Grid and Big Data

At the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) we collect phasor measurement unit (PMU) data on behalf of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to help ensure the reliability of the bulk power system in North America. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide flood control, electricity generation, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley. NERC is a self-regulatory organization, subject to oversight by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and governmental authorities in Canada. TVA has been selected by NERC as the repository for PMU data nationwide. PMU data is considered part of the measurement data for the generation and transmission portion of the so called “smart grid”.

PMU Data Collection

There are currently 103 active PMU devices placed around the Eastern United States that actively send TVA data while new PMU devices come online regularly. PMU devices sample high voltage electric system busses and transmission lines at a substation several thousand times a second which is then reported for collection and aggregation. PMU data is a GPS time-stamped stream of those power grid measurements which is transmitted at 30 times a second each consisting of a timestamp and a floating point value. The types of information a PMU point can contain are:

* Voltage (A,B, C phase in positive, negative, or zero sequence) magnitude and angle
* Current (A,B, C phase in positive, negative, or zero sequence) magnitude and angle
* Frequency
* dF/dt (change in frequency over time)
* Digitals
* Status flags

Commonly just positive sequence voltages and currents are transmitted but there is the possibility for all three phases. There can be several measured voltage and current phasors per PMU (each phasor having a magnitude and an angle value), a variable number of digitals (typically 1 or 2), and one of each of the remaining 3 types of data; on average there will be around 16 total measurements sent per PMU. Should a company wish to send all three phases or a combination of positive, negative, or zero sequence data, then the number of measurements obviously increases.

The amount of this time-series data created by even a regional area of PMU devices provides a unique architectural demand on the TVA infrastructure. The flow of data from measurement device to TVA is as follows:

1. A measurement device located at the substation (the PMU) samples various data values, timestamps them via a GPS clock, and sends them over fiber or other suitable lines to a central location.
2. For some participant companies this may be a local concentrator or it may be a direct connection to TVA itself. Communication between TVA and these participants is commonly a VPN tunnel over a LAN-to-LAN connection but several partners utilize a MPLS connection for more remote regions.
3. After a few network hops the data is sent to a TVA developed data concentrator termed the Super Phasor Concentrator (or SPDC) which accepts these PMUs’ input, ordering them into the correct time-aligned sequence - compensating for any missing data or delay introduced by network congestion or latency.
4. Once organized by the SPDC, its modular architecture allows this data to be operated on by third party algorithms via a simple plug-in layer.
5. The entirety of the stream, currently involving 19 companies, 10 different manufacturers of PMU devices, and 103 PMUs - each reporting an average of 16 measured values at a rate of 30 samples a second - with a possibility of 9 different encodings (and this only from the Eastern United States), is passed to one of three servers running an archiving application which writes the data to a size optimized fixed length binary file to disk.
6. A real-time data stream is simultaneously forwarded to a server program hosted by TVA which passes the conditioned data in a standard phasor data protocol (IEEE C37.118-2005) to client visualization tools for use at participant companies.
7. An agent moves PMU archive files into the Hadoop cluster via an FTP interface
8. Alternatively, regulators such as NERC or approved researchers can directly request this data over secure VPN tunnels for operation at their remote location.

TVA currently has around 1.5 trillion points of time-series data in 15TB of PMU archive files. The rate of incoming PMU data is growing very quickly with more and more PMU devices coming online regularly. We expect to have around 40TB of PMU data by the end of 2010 with 5 years worth of PMU data estimated to be at half a petabyte (500TB).

The Case For Hadoop At TVA

Our initial problem was how to reliably store PMU data and make it available and reliable at all times. There are many brand name solutions in the storage world that come with a high price tag and the assumption of reliable hardware. With large amounts of data that spans many disks; even at a high mean time to fail (MTTF) a system will experience hardware failures quite frequently. We liked the idea of being able to lose whole physical machines and still have an operational file system due to Hadoop’s aggressive replication scheme. The more we talked with other groups using HDFS the more we came away with the impression that HDFS worked as advertised and shined even with amounts of data the “reliable hardware” struggled with. Our discussions and findings also indicated that HDFS was quite good at moving data and included multiple ways to interface with it out of the box. In the end, Hadoop is a good fit for this project in that it allows us to employ commodity hardware and open source software at a fraction of the price of proprietary systems to achieve a much more manageable expenditure curve as our repository grows.

The other side of the equation is that eventually the NERC and its designated research institutions are to be able to access the data and run operations on the data. The concept of “moving computation to the data” with map-reduce made Hadoop an even more attractive choice, especially given its price point. Many of the proposed uses of our PMU data ranged from simple pattern scans to complex data mining operations. The type of analysis and algorithms that we want to run aren’t well suited to be run in SQL. It became obvious that we were more in the market for a batch processing system such as map-reduce as opposed to a large relational database system. We were also impressed with the very robust open source ecosystem that Hadoop enjoys; Many projects built on Hadoop are actively being developed such as:

* Hive
* HBase
* Pig

This thriving community was very interesting to us as it gives TVA a wealth of quality tools with which to analyze PMU data using analysis techniques that are native to “big data”. After reviewing the factors above, we concluded that employing Hadoop at TVA kills 2 birds with 1 stone — it solves our storage issues with HDFS and provides a robust computing platform with map reduce for researchers around North America.

PMU Data Analysis at TVA

Currently our analysis needs and wants are evolving with our nascent ideas on how best to use PMU data. Current techniques and algorithms on the board or in beta include

* Washington State’s Oscillation Monitoring System
* Basic averages and standard deviation over frequency data
* Fast Fourier transform filters including:
* Wiener Filter
* Kalman Filter
* Low Pass Filter
* High Pass Filter
* Band Pass Filter
* Indexing of power grid anomalies
* Various visualization rendering techniques such as creating power grid map tiles to watch the power grid over time and in history

We are currently writing map reduce applications to be able to crunch far greater amounts of power grid information than has be previously possible. Using traditional techniques to calculate something as simple as an average frequency over time can be an extremely tedious process because of the need to traverse terabytes of information; map-reduce allows us to not only parallelize the operation but also get much higher disk read speeds by moving the computation to the data. As we evolve our analysis techniques we plan to expand our range of indexing techniques from simple scans to more complex data mining techniques to better understand how the power grid reacts to fluctuations and how previously thought discrete anomalies may, in fact, be interconnected.

Additionally, we are also adding other devices such as Frequency Disturbance Recorders (FDRs, a.k.a. F-NET devices which are developed by Virginia Tech) to our network. Although these devices send samples at a third of the rate of PMU devices with a reduced measurement set, there exists the potential for many hundreds of these less expensive meters to come online which would effectively double our storage requirements. This FDR data would be interesting in that the extra data would allow us to create a more complete picture of the power grid and its behavior. Hadoop would allow us to continue scaling up to meet the extra demand not only for storage but for processing with map reduce as well. Hadoop gives us the flexibility and scalability to meet future demands that can be placed upon the project with respect to data scale, processing complexity, and processing speed.

Looking Forward With Hadoop

As we move forward using Hadoop, there are a few areas we’d like to see improved. Security is a big deal in our field, especially given the nature of the data and agencies involved. We would like to see security continue to be improved by the Hadoop community as a whole as time goes on. Security internally and externally is a big part of what we do, so we are always examining our production environment to make sure we fulfill our requirements. We also are looking at ways to allow multiple research projects to coexist on the same system, such that they share the same infrastructure but can queue up their own jobs and download the results from their own private account area while only having access to the data that their project allows. Research can be a competitive business and we are looking for unique ways to allow researchers to work with the same types of data while feeling comfortable about their specific work remaining private; additionally we are required to maintain the privacy of all the data providers - researchers will only be allowed to access a filtered set of measurements as allowed by the data providers or as deemed available for research by the NERC.

In our first discussions about whether or not we would explore cloud computing as an option for processing our PMU data, we wanted to know if there was a “Redhat-like” entity in the space that could answer questions and provide support for Hadoop. Cloudera has definitely stepped up to the plate to fulfill this role for Hadoop. Cloudera provides exceptional support in a very dynamic space, a space in which many companies have no experience and many consulting firms can provide no solid advice. Cloudera was quick to make sure that Hadoop was right for us and then provided extremely detailed answers to all of our questions and what-if scenarios. Their whole team was exceptionally adept in getting back to us on a myriad of details most sales or “front line support” teams would be stymied by. Cloudera’s distribution for Hadoop and guidance on hardware acquisition helped in saving us money and getting our evaluation of Hadoop off the ground in a very short amount of time.

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 am by Christophe Bisciglia, filed under community, guest, hadoop


------
Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
Bill@st-arnaud.org
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/

More on Climate as a Service - cyber-infrastructure grand challenge

The Earth System Grid (ESG) integrates supercomputers with large-scale data and analysis servers located at numerous national labs and research centers to create a powerful environment for next generation climate research. This portal is the primary point of entry into the ESG.

Ian Foster reports that the Earth System Grid provides access to PCMDI's archives. We are now working to expand ESG, in collaboration with others in Europe and elsewhere, to address the challenges of next-generation models.

(www.earthsystemgrid.org)

Of course one of the big challenges for ESG and other climate modeling HPC systems is that they do not become part of the problem as for example UK's new climate modeling supercomputer

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209430/Weather-supercomputer-used-predict-climate-change-Britains-worst-polluters.html

Weather supercomputer used to predict climate change is one of Britain's worst polluters


The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain's worst polluters.

The massive machine - the UK's most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory - was installed in the Met Office's headquarters in Exeter, Devon.

It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run - enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

...

Climate as a Service - a cyber-infrastructure grand challenge

At the recent World Climate Conference (http://www.wmo.int/wcc3/programme_en.html) a lot of the discussion was around providing “climate services” and coordinating these globally. Climate services involves the provision of climate information relevant for adaptation to climate change and climatic swings, long-term planning, and facilitating early warning systems against rapid extreme climate change. Climate Services most importantly to provide information on regional and local scale implications of climate changes. Most computer modeling today on climate change is done one a global basis which masks may significant regional differences. For example Canada’s far north is expected to warm by as much as 11C, even though global average temperature increase may 2-4C. Please see http://www.climateservices.gov/ for more details.

See also http://www.america.gov/st/energy-english/2009/February/20090209132739lcnirellep0.3980829.html

Climate services will have a major impact on the research and education community and their corresponding networks. Global, national and regional climate models will now need to be integrated. In addition tracking and satellite data must be distributed to numerous computational facilities around the world. The scale of this challenge is evidenced by the new network capabilities of the Department of Energy Network, who now see climate data volumes comparable to high energy physics data. These data volumes are expected to grow even more significantly as the reality of climate change starts to set in and policy makers demand more accurate long range predictions of the impact of climate change on their region.


http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/ESnet-Receives-62M-to-Develop-Worlds-Fastest-Computer-Network-52989552.html

“The study of global climate change is a critical research area where the amount of data being created and accessed is growing exponentially. For example, an archive of past, present and future climate modeling data maintained by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contains more than 35 terabytes of data and is accessed by more than 2,500 users worldwide. However, the next-generation archive is expected to contain at least 650 terabytes, and the larger distributed worldwide archive will be between 6 petabytes to 10 petabytes.”

Microsoft intends to cure server huggers

[
The bane of many universities and businesses is the plethora of servers and clusters scattered throughout the institution in just about every broom closet and under every desk. According to a Gartner report over 30% of an institution's electrical bill is attributable to PCs and peripherals, not counting all these servers. If institutions intend to be carbon neutral they have to address the challenge of server huggers --BSA]

http://slashdot.org/story/09/09/09/1730213/Microsoft-Aims-To-Cure-Server-Hugging-Engineers
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/09/09/microsoft-data-center-battles-server-hugging/

Microsoft wants the engineers in its labs to manage their servers remotely, and is moving development servers from a bevy of computer rooms in labs to a new green data center about 8 miles from its Redmond campus. "I see today as a real transition point in our culture," said Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist at Microsoft, who acknowledged that the change will be an adjustment for veteran developers but will save money and energy use. Microsoft expects its customers will run their apps remotely in data centers, and clearly expects the same of its employees."

Computing for the Future of the Planet- follow the sun/follow the wind research program

[There is another exciting research initiative at University of Cambridge called Computing for the Future of the Planet there is very much in line with similar initiatives at MIT, Rutgers/Princeton and CANARIE Green IT program. I have summarized these various initiatives below—BSA]

Computing for the Future of the Planet
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/~ah12/

Computing (computers, communications, applications) will make a major and crucial contribution to ensuring a sustainable future for society and the planet. Computing is an important tool that will enable developing societies to improve their standard of living without undue impact on the environment. At the same time, it will enhance the ability of developed societies to maintain their economic success while reducing their use of natural resources. The greater wealth generated using computing may reduce population growth and its problematic impact on the physical world.

Cost- and Energy-Aware Load Distribution Across Data Centers
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~ricardob/papers/hotpower09.pdf
Geographical distribution of the data centers often exposes many opportunities for optimizing energy consumption and costs by intelligently distributing the computational workload
Green data centers can decrease brown energy consumption by 35% by leveraging the green data centers at only a 3% cost increase

Cutting the Electric Bill for Internet-Scale Systems
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p123.pdf
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. substantial margin (45% maximum savings

Overview and background on CANARIE Green IT program
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/it-benefits-of-climate-change-to-canada


PROMPT Green Next Generation Internet Program
http://www.promptinc.org/index_en.html (look under new initiatives

Why IT professionals will become Chief Green Officers

[It still surprises many people to think that IT has anything to do with being green. Yet PCs and peripherals consume 30% of our energy in most businesses and probably significantly more at universities where cyber-infrastructure can be a major additional contributor. And some cyber-infrastructure facilities can also be the worst sources of pollution in a nation, as for example the weather and climate modeling super computer in the UK. IT folks are used to rapid change and novel solutions and I believe we have the tools at hand to significantly reduce the carbon footprint at our businesses and universities – not so much through energy efficiency, but by using the “network” to move computing jobs and tasks to sites that have low cost renewable energy and using “gCommerce” as a way of inducing consumers to reduce their own personal carbon footprint. Thanks to Jerry Sheehan and Alan Blatecky for these pointers – BSA]

Weather supercomputer used to predict climate change is one of Britain's worst polluters
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209430/Weather-supercomputer-used-predict-climate-change-Britains-worst-polluters.html

Gartner Says More Than 30 Percent of ICT Energy Use is Generated by PCs and Associated Peripherals
PCs and associated peripherals contribute approximately 31 percent of worldwide information and communication technology (ICT) energy use,
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=941912

Why IT Pros Will Become Chief Green Officers
http://www.greenercomputing.com
The next big corporate "C"-level job will be the Chief Green Officer (CGO). And if IT staff plays their cards right, they'll walk right into that high-paying, high-visibility, high-payoff job. Here's why.
Greening an enterprise requires far more than a background in energy, engineering, or the environment. It's all about data, and the people who know best how to manage that data will become CGOs.
These facts aren't lost on the big IT vendors. Cisco and others are rushing to release hardware and software for greening the enterprise, and at the center of it all are the IT staff who will be buying,

Will Vint Cerf revolutionize the smart grid in the same way he revolutionized the Information Highway?

[As many of you know I have long criticized today’s attempts at creating a smart electrical grid. The technologies, so far, are largely only of benefit to the utilities in avoiding building additional power plants for peak demand. The benefits to consumer and the planet are marginal at best. I am pleased to see Vint Cerf’s most recent blog where he advocates an “Internet” like approach to developing new standards for a smart grid. The evolution of the smart grid to my mind is very analogous to the development of the Internet. Before the Internet became main stream the “information highway” was largely seen as being solely the provenance of the telcos and the cablecos. To the same extent the smart grid today is seen as being part and parcel of the electrical utilities. But if we really want to create true innovation and reduce GHG emissions we need the same type of radical thinking that created the Internet which liberated us from the narrow, self serving perspective of the telcos and cablecos. Simple ideas like multiplexed power systems to eliminate vampire power loads, or dares’t I repeat myself “green broadband”, are the types of ideas we need instead of the typical megawatt-mindset solutions of the utilities . End of rant – BSA]

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/08/where-smart-grid-meets-internet.html

Where the smart grid meets the Internet
Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

The term "smart grid" means many things to many people. At the most basic level, the smart grid is defining smarter ways to deliver and use energy -- but did you know that the smart grid is also defining new ways to generate and exchange energy information?

Building information technology into the electricity grid will revolutionize the way our homes and businesses use energy. The first step will be to develop open protocols and standards to allow smart grid devices and systems to communicate with one another. That's why Google and other stakeholders are participating in a working group coordinated by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop interoperability standards for a nationwide smart grid.

When people talk about networks for exchanging information -- particularly among millions of end users -- the first thing that often comes to mind is the Internet. So it makes sense to take the successful processes used to create Internet standards and apply them to this new energy information network.

Google, for example, believes in the wisdom of crowds (we've used that wisdom to enhance our products and we continue to get feedback on future products via Google Labs and Google Code Labs). And we've found that a good way to harness the wisdom of crowds is to create open standards to solve network issues. Some of the key principles to developing truly open standards include open and free access to:
• Process. The customers of the smart grid information network are energy producers and consumers, hardware and software developers and energy regulators. Collaborate, and make sure all parties are represented during the standards discussion.
• Drafts. There are a lot of people with networking expertise who are not directly involved with smart grid; make it easy for them to participate, for example, by hosting meetings online and posting documents that are universally accessible for review.
• Comments. Allow comments resulting from current standards drafts to influence future drafts.
• Final standards. If people can't access the standard, they can't implement the standard!
• Standards unencumbered by patents. If implementers need to worry about licenses to practice the standard, it is not really a completely open standard.
The smart grid is essentially a nascent energy Internet. Thanks to the open protocols and standards on which it was built, the Internet has grown into a thriving ecosystem, delivering innovative products and services to billions of users worldwide. Applying the same principles of openness to the development of standards for our nation's electric grid would create a smarter platform for products and services, helping consumers conserve energy and save money.

Another excellent paper on low carbon Internet architectures

[Ricardo Bianchini has pointed me to an excellent paper low carbon Internet architectures from his group at Rutgers University and some folks at Princeton University. You can find the paper at http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~ricardob/papers/hotpower09.pdf

The paper describes a framework for Internet services to take advantage of data centers that pay different (and possibly hourly) electricity prices, data centers located in different time zones, and data centers located near sources of green energy.

He is now finishing up a new paper, in which they demonstrate how we can cap the (carbon-intensive) energy consumption of Internet services at low cost, to limit their carbon footprints.

Also yours truly and my colleagues at CRC, Inocbyte and I2Cat will have a paper published in Journal of Lightwave Technology on low carbon Internet. As and in partnership with Larry Smaar, Jerry Sheehan and Tom Defanti at CAL-It 2 we are writing a paper for special edition of Educause Review on this topic coming this fall

--BSA]

How Amazon Kindle eBook addresses climate change through de-materialization

[Further to my earlier posting on the Amazon Kindle here is another analysis of the carbon saving capabilities of the devices. And as I mentioned previously a large part of the cost of an eBook could be paid for in Carbon offsets. Thanks to Jerry Sheehan for this pointer. Some excerpts—BSA]

http://earth2tech.com/2009/08/19/why-the-kindle-is-good-for-the-planet/
According to a fascinating report from the Cleantech Group, called The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, one e-Book device on average can displace the buying of about 22.5 physical books per year, and thus deliver an estimated savings of 168 kg of CO2 per year.
As Emma Ritch, author of the report put it:
Multiplied by millions of units and increased sales of e-books, e-readers will have a staggering impact on improving the sustainability and environmental impact on one of the world’s most polluting industries: the publishing of books, newspapers and magazines.
The report takes a look at the effect of the book and magazine publishing industries on both trees and carbon emissions: the U.S. book and magazine sectors accounted for the harvesting of 125 million trees in 2008, and an average book has a carbon footprint of 7.46 kilograms of CO2 over its lifetime. A book’s carbon footprint also can double if you drive to the store and buy it, versus having it shipped in the mail. So in a similar way to how downloading digital music and listening to it on your computer has a much better carbon footprint than driving to the store and purchasing a CD, the savings for e-Books are about both dematerialization and eliminating the need for transportation.
If a Kindle-user uses the device for the full storage capacity, Ritch says it can “prevent the emission of nearly 11,185 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent,” and for the Kindle DX, that can jump to a savings of 26,098 kg of carbon emissions. But a more average user, who probably won’t use the full storage capacity, will buy about three e-books per Kindle per month, and the report predicts that average consumer would displace closer to 168 kg of CO2 per year.
Considering all of the projected e-Book devices sold between 2009 and 2012 in the U.S., (and taking into account that e-Books don’t often replace books in a 1 to 1 ratio) the report says that e-Books could save 9.9 billion kg of CO2 from being emitted.

Ontario Government launches study to build low carbon data centers in Northern Ontario

News Release
Developing Green Technology In Thunder Bay
August 17, 2009

McGuinty Government Supports Local Economy And Innovation
NEWS

New low carbon data centres that provide alternative, less expensive and greener data storage facilities are being studied in Thunder Bay.
Rapidly growing global demands on the data management sector have resulted in increased energy consumption to operate and manage these large amounts of data, as well as to maintain proper climatic conditions at data storage facilities.
With support from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC), the Northwestern Ontario Innovation Centre will explore opportunities to develop a data centre industry in Northern communities that use green technology. A feasibility study is expected to be completed by October 2009.

QUOTE

“This exciting project will not only research the economic development potential of establishing low carbon data centres in Northern Ontario, it will also investigate opportunities for transferring the excess energy to other public facilities. That means everyone involved could experience reduced operating costs.”
- Michael Gravelle, Minister of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry, and Chair of the NOHFC

QUICK FACTS
• The NOHFC is providing $25,000 to the Northwestern Ontario Innovation Centre to conduct the study.
• The study will examine feasible energy options, effective ways to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint, and the potential economic benefits such as job creation and revenue generation.
LEARN MORE
• Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation Programs
• Growth Plan for Northern Ontario
Anne-Marie Flanagan, Minister’s Office, 416-327-0655
Michel Lavoie, Communications Branch, 705-564-7125

ontario.ca/north-news

• Privacy
• Important Notices
Copyright information: © Queen's Printer for Ontario, 2009
Last Modified: July 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.

How downloading music can help fight climate change

[Here are a couple good articles on why “gCommerce” can help the music and video industry. As noted in the EU study people wont pay for content. But how are music and film companies going to make money if there product is delivered free over the Internet? Carbon offsets are one mechanism where the music and film industry can earn money and yet provide free downloads and help address the biggest challenge facing the planet. For more gCommerce examples please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ -- BSA]

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/the-carbon-case-for-downloading-music/

A new study has found that downloading music is substantially better from an emissions perspective than buying compact discs.
The study, which was funded by both Microsoft and Intel and authored by two academics at Carnegie Mellon University and a third affiliated with Stanford University, found that buying an album digitally reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 80 percent relative to a “best-case” CD-purchasing scenario.
This “best-case” CD scenario involves a customer buying a CD online and having it delivered via a light-duty truck; the more carbon-intensive options examined by the study are express air shipment of the CD, and the customer visiting a store to buy the CD.
The advantage for digital comes largely because CDs must be manufactured, packaged and transported over long distances.

EU Gov't Study: People Won't Pay For Content; New Business Models Needed from the wow dept

Just as more and more European countries are trying to ban or block sites like The Pirate Bay, it seems like a few more politicians should take the time to read the new EU study on digital competitiveness (found via P2P Blog). In it, the authors study the question of paid content and "pirated" content, and find that an awful lot of people have absolutely no interest in paying for content, no matter what -- and that the entertainment industry is exaggerating the impact of things like file sharing, since so few people would actually pay for the content in the first place (even if it weren't available for free). Rather than blaming "piracy," the report properly notes that it's a shift in technology (from atoms to bits) that has created the business model problems today:

De-materialisation of creative content distribution is shaking up the business models of the creative industries, with both potential opportunities and potential losses and bringing new players into the media industries' landscape.

[snip]
RSS Feed:

Green IT solutuions: energy efficiency versus purchasing renewable power?

[Once again we are seeing several reports that energy efficiency is the way to reduce to the carbon footprint of IT, computing, cyber-infrastructure and other energy consuming activities. While energy efficiency is meritorious it will only have token impact on reducing the carbon footprint, especially that of IT. The continued growth in demand for new services and applications will quickly outpace many of the gains of energy efficiency, which because of all the legacy equipment amounts to only a few percent per year. If an individual or organization is truly and genuinely concerned about the environment and reducing their carbon footprint purchasing RECs (renewable energy credits) or renewable energy resale from a reputable ESCO is a much more direct and guaranteed way of becoming zero carbon. All the energy efficiency claims in the world will never be able to come close to reducing your carbon footprint as much or as quickly as purchasing renewable power. And better still as your demand for IT and cyber-infrastructure grows, as it inevitably will, you can still maintain a zero footprint if all your energy comes through RECs.

Of course, the big problem with RECs, or renewable energy resale is its cost. It can be substantially more expensive than dirty power. So purchasing RECs is really an indicator of an IT organization’s true commitment to becoming green. An alternative approach is to acquire your own renewable power is by building windmills on site or relocating IT equipment to a renewable energy sites. For example ecotricity (www.ecotricity.uk) in the UK has a novel business plan where they will build a windmill at a data center at their cost, in return for a long term contract for the power delivered from the windmill. Other organizations such as MIT and UoMassachusetts are looking to relocate their computing and cyber-infrastructure equipment to remote data centers powered by local hydro electric dams and/or windmills. The challenge with this scenario is the reliability of power. How can you build a reliable IT infrastructure when you have intermittent power sources such as wind mills, solar panels, etc? This is where clouds, grids and virtualization connected with high speed networks can play a critical role. Computing and data jobs can quickly be moved from site to site depending on the availability of local renewable power. This is the essence of CANARIE’s Green IT program. And as illustrated by the recent paper from researchers at MIT and CMU can save up to 40% on energy costs alone.

Even for consumers, using renewable power can be much simpler way of reducing their footprint than through buying energy efficient devices. According to the IEA, consumer IT devices use more power in aggregate than all traditional appliances combined in many homes. A lot of this power consumption is taken up by “vampire” loads when devices are in standby mode such as wall chargers, TVs, set top boxes, etc. A simple solution would be for the consumer to install a small solar panel and/or wind turbine and power all these vampire loads with a “multiplexed power” system using the existing household copper wiring. A vampire power network could use something like a 400 Hz power frequency which would be filtered out by traditional AC devices but could easily power appropriately modified AC/DC converters, chargers, switching power supplies, etc – BSA]


[ IMHO some misleading examples of comments on energy efficiency]

Google policy blog: The vast potential of energy efficiency
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/08/vast-potential-of-energy-efficiency.html

international Science Grid Week
How Green is my Grid
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001940

Energy-Aware Internet Routing scheme

[This is the kind of undertaking that CANARIE is funding under its Green IT program and hopes to deploy later this year. Cap and trade is going to dramatically raise the price of energy from coal fired power plants so schemes like this will be essential for the future Internet. Obviously an energy aware routing scheme is ideal for networks where all the nodes are powered by renewable resources. Rather than looking at cost of energy it would look at the availability of energy. Some excerpts – BSA]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/08/17/1413233/An-Electricity-Cost-Aware-Internet-Routing-Scheme
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23248/
An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.


Modern datacenters gobble up huge amounts of electricity and usage is increasing at a rapid pace. Energy consumption has accelerated as applications move from desktop computers to the Internet and as information gets transferred from ordinary computers to distributed "cloud" computing services. For the world's biggest information-technology firms, this means spending upwards of $30 million on electricity every year, by modest estimates.

Asfandyar Qureshi, a PhD student at MIT, first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm that would track electricity prices to reduce costs in a paper presented in October 2008. This year, Qureshi and colleagues approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea. Akamai's distributed servers cache information on behalf of many large Web sites across the US and abroad, and process some 275 billion requests per day; while the company does not require many large datacenters itself, its traffic data provides a way to model the demand placed on large Internet companies.

The team then devised a routing scheme designed to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country. The resulting algorithm weighs up the physical distance needed to route information--because it's more expensive to move data further--against the likely cost savings from reduced energy use. …The team found that, in the best scenario--one in which energy use is proportional to computing--a company could slash its energy consumption by 40 percent. "The results were pretty surprising," Maggs says.

Spiraling energy consumption has become a major concern for the world's largest Web companies; a report published by McKinsey & Company and the Uptime Institute in July 2008 estimates that datacenter energy usage will quadruple during the next decade in the absence of efforts to improve efficiency.

Koomey suggests that spiraling energy costs could encourage some companies to consider radical steps such as rerouting data: "Electricity use is a big enough component of data-center costs that this just might work."

Texas Data Centers to be powered by wind

[Following the examples of MIT, Ecotricity in the UK and CANARIE’s Green IT program many companies, schools and universities are starting to deploy zero carbon data centers using renewable power such as wind , sun and hydro. These deployments will become critical in the next 5 years as global temperatures start to ratchet up with the return of solar sun spots, El Niño and continued growth in anthropogenic emissions. Many people think that Climate Change is something that will happen in the later half of this century. But in fact, in a recent paper by NASA and US Naval Research Labortory, researchers predict that in the “next” 5 years global surface temperature will increase 0.15 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC. Major forest fires in the Western US are predicted as a result. Thanks to Nicole VanHove for this pointer –BSA]

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/20/wind-powered-data-center-planned/

A Texas startup plans to build a data center powered by energy from huge “wind farms” in the Texas panhandle and the Gulf of Mexico. Baryonyx Corp.has been awarded three wind energy leases for 8,000 acres onshore in Dallam County, Texas and another 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said. Baryonyx has also acquired 8 acres of land in Stratford, Texas for its data center project.
Baryonyx was formed in May to build data center projects powered by renewable energy resources. Its primary focus will be wind energy, but the company is also developing plans to eventually use hydrogen fuel cells and solar power to support its facilities when wind generation ebbs due to weather conditions.
The project is the most ambitious effort yet to harness wind power to provide electricity for data centers. Green House Data has built a 10,000 square foot facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming that runs primarily on wind energy, while Microsoft has demonstrated wind-powered containers packed with servers.
100 Turbines for Data Center
Baryonyx plans to build a 28,000 square foot data center in Stratford, which will be powered by 100 wind turbines built on the adjacent land that will generate up to 150 megawatts of power. Each of the turbines will be able to generate up to 3.3 megawatts of power. Capacity not needed by the data center will be sold to local utilities. Baryonyx said it will take about 3 years to reach the operational phase for the wind-powered data center.
Leases Support Texas Schools
Once the wind farms are built and producing energy, they will pay royalties to the state’s Permanent School Fund that in the form of power
----

From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ±0.03 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC.

So conclude Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in a new Geophysical Research Letters study, “How Will Earth’s Surface Temperature Change in Future Decades?”

http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2009GL038932-pip.pdf

Also a major new study, “Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” finds a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:

We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.

http://ulmo.ucmerced.edu/pdffiles/08JGR_Spracklenetal_submitted.pdf

Green carbon trade market could mean billions for telecom, IT

Green carbon trade market could mean billions for telecom, IT
TelephonyOnline - USA

Telecom and IT companies are well-positioned to tap the potentially $700-billion market for lowering carbon dioxide emissions, ...

http://telephonyonline.com/global/news/carbon-trade-arnaud-0626/

MIT to build zero carbon data center at rural hydrodam which will create jobs etc

[Here is an excellent example of a unique partnership between MIT, Cisco, EMX to build a large data center in Holyoke, MA. With the advent of cap and trade, peak oil , shortage of energy supplies, and inadequate capacity transmission lines many organizations are realizing that locating your own independent sources of renewable power for your data center will be critical and provide a significant competitive advantage in the coming years. According to Grupp and Ellis there are only 6 sites left in the entire USA that can support a modern 40 Mw data center! As governments start to understand the significance of climate change and order a moratorium on building new coal plants or shutting down existing ones, not only will the cost of power skyrocket, but it simply may not be available at any price. Those sites that have arranged for their own source of energy, independent of the electrical grid, such as on-site windmills, run of the river turbines etc will be the real winners. And most of this capital deployment of data centers in rural/remote areas can be paid for though carbon offsets. Of course, high speed optical networks are essential for this strategy –BSA]


Data centers are running out of space and power
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/28/study-data-center-supply-near-all-time-low/


"Data Center Overload"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html


Cisco, EMC Team with MIT to Launch $100M Green Data Center
http://www.greenercomputing.com/news/2009/06/11/cisco-emc-team-with-mit-launch-100m-green-data-center
The city of Holyoke, with a ready source of cheap, relatively clean hydroelectic power, will host a new, energy efficient data center that will bring innovation and jobs to the city.

The data center will be managed and funded by the four main partners in the facility: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cisco Systems, the University of Massachusetts and EMC.

While the project is just at the launch of a 120-day planning phase, there are big hopes for the facility. "The potential for breakthrough technologies and research is enormous, and both the center and collaboration will undoubtedly serve to lift up the City of Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts," governor Deval Patrick said.

In addition to being the hub of a community-redevelopment project, the facility, if and when it is finished, will be a high-performance computing environment that will help expand the research and development capabitilities of the companies and schools that work there.

And hydroelectric power has long been a draw for big tech projects like the Holyoke facility, although rarely in as urban a setting as Holyoke -- the city is 10 miles outside Springfield, Mass., and is just 90 miles from Boston. Google's "Project 02," a code name for its massive data center in The Dalles, Ore., was sited in that location because of the cheap and abundant energy from a nearby hydroelectric plant. And last year, Microsoft was reportedly looking to site a data center near Quincy, Wash., and its nearby hydroelectric facility.

Convergence of new energy and communications causes econmic revolutions

[Some interesting commentary by the famous seer Jeremy Rifkin, although I am suspect of his claims of a hydrogen economy. From every study I have seen production of hydrogen consumes more energy than it produces. Thanks to Eric Tsang for this pointer – BSA]

THE GREAT ECONOMIC REVOLUTIONS IN HISTORY: THE CONVERGENCE OF NEW ENERGY AND COMMUNICATIONS REGIMES
http://www.foet.org/lectures/lecture-hydrogen-economy.html

The great pivotal economic changes in world history have occurred when new energy regimes converge with new communication regimes. When that convergence happens, society is restructured in wholly new ways. In the early modern era, the coming together of coal powered steam technology and the print press gave birth to the first industrial revolution. It would have been impossible to organize the dramatic increase in the pace, speed, flow, density, and connectivity of economic activity made possible by the coal fired steam engine using the older codex and oral forms of communication. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, first generation electrical forms of communication—the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, electric typewriters, calculators, etc.—converged with the introduction of oil and the internal combustion engine, becoming the communications command and control mechanism for organizing and marketing the second industrial revolution.
A great communications revolution occurred in the 1990’s. Second generation electrical forms of communication—personal computers, the internet, the World Wide Web, and wireless communication technologies—connected the central nervous system of more than a billion people on Earth at the speed of light. And, although the new software and communication revolutions have begun to increase productivity in every industry, their true potential is yet to be fully realized. That potential lies in their convergence with renewable energy, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, to create the first “distributed” energy regimes.
The same design principles and smart technologies that made possible the internet, and vast distributed global communication networks, will be used to reconfigure the world’s power grids so that people can produce renewable energy and share it peer-to-peer, just like they now produce and share information, creating a new, decentralized form of energy use. We need to envision a future in which millions of individual players can collect, produce and store locally generated renewable energy in their homes, offices, factories, and vehicles, and share their power generation with each other across a Europe-wide intelligent intergrid. (Hydrogen is a universal storage medium for intermittent renewable energies; just as digital is a universal storage mechanism for text, audio, video, data and other forms of media)
The question is often asked as to whether renewable energy, in the long run, can provide enough power to run a national or global economy? Just as second generation information systems grid technologies allow businesses to connect thousands of desktop computers, creating far more distributed computing power than even the most powerful centralized computers that exist, millions of local producers of renewable energy, using hydrogen storage and intelligent utility networks, can potentially produce far more distributed power than the older centralized forms of energy – oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear – that we currently rely on.
The creation of a renewable energy regime, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, and distributed via smart intergrids, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution and should have as powerful an economic multiplier effect in the 21st century as the convergence of mass print technology with coal and steam power technology in the 19th century, and the coming together of electrical forms of communication with oil and the internal combustion engine in the 20th century.
European industry has the scientific, technological, and financial know-how to spearhead the shift to renewable energies, a hydrogen economy, and an intelligent power grid and, by so doing, lead the world into a new economic era. Europe’s world class automotive industry, chemical industry, engineering industry, construction industry, software, computer and communication industries, and banking and insurance industries, give it a leg up in the race to the Third Industrial Revolution.
By fostering renewable energies, a hydrogen infrastructure, and a continent-wide intelligent intergrid, the European Union can help create a sustainable economic development plan for its 500 million citizens in the first half of the 21st century.
The Third Industrial Revolution will require a wholesale reconfiguration of the transport, construction, and electricity sectors, creating new goods and services, spawning new businesses, and providing millions of new job.
Being first to market will position the European Union as a leader in the Third Industrial Revolution, giving it the commercial edge in the export of green technological know-how and equipment around the world. Producing a new generation of renewable energy technologies, manufacturing portable and stationary fuel cells, reinventing the automobile, transforming Europe’s millions of buildings into power plants to produce renewable energy for internal consumption or distribution back to the grid, reconfiguring the electrical power grid as a intelligent utility network, as well as producing all of the accompanying technologies, goods and services that make up a high-tech Third Industrial Revolution economy, will have an economic multiplier effect that stretches well toward the mid decades of the 21st century.
The coming together of distributed communication technologies and distributed renewable energies via an open access, intelligent power grid, represents “power to the people”. For a younger generation that’s growing up in a less hierarchical and more networked world, the ability to produce and share their own energy, like they produce and share their own information, in an open access intergrid, will seem both natural and commonplace.
The key challenge that every nation needs to address is where they want their country to be in ten years from now: In the sunset energies and industries of the second industrial revolution or the sunrise energies and industries of the Third Industrial Revolution. The Third Industrial Revolution is the end-game that takes the world out of the old carbon and uranium-based energies and into a non-polluting, sustainable future for the human race.

Jeremy Rifkin is president of The Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC. and teaches at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Rifkin is currently advising the Prime Minister of Slovenia, Janez Janša, during his presidency of the European Union (January to July 2008). Mr. Rifkin also served as an adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal during their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security. He currently advises the European Commission, the European Parliament, and several EU heads of state, including Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain and Prime Minister Romano Prodi of Italy. Mr. Rifkin is the author of seventeen books on environmental, energy and economic related issues including The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth (Tarcher/Penguin).

CANARIE announces launch of $3 million Green IT Call for Proposals

CANARIE Announces $3 Million Call for Proposals to Fuel the Development of Advanced Computing and Networking
Technologies that Reduce Carbon Emissions and Help to Slow the Rate Global Warming

June 1, 2009 (OTTAWA, Ontario)–CANARIE today announced a $3 million Call for Proposals to fuel the development of advanced computing and networking technologies that reduce carbon and greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) infrastructure (including computer hardware, software and networks), and enable collaboration on promising green IT solutions that will help slow the rate of global warming.

The CANARIE Green IT Pilot Program will help Canadian innovators to capitalize on emerging opportunities in Green ICT—a global market that, according to Insight Research Corporation, is expected to reach over US $600 billion by 2013. Specifically, it aims to facilitate national and international collaborative research projects that demonstrate the

• technical feasibility and usability of relocating computers and other cyber infrastructure to zero-carbon data centers that are connected by optical networks, and powered solely by renewable energy sources such as the sun or the wind, and
• business case for providing carbon offsets (and/or equivalent services) to university researchers and IT personnel who reduce their carbon footprint by relocating computers and instrumentation to zero-carbon data centers
CANARIE expects to award up to $2 million for major zero-carbon data center pilot projects; and about $1 million for the development of business cases and smaller projects. The outcomes of this pilot project could influence the development of ‘Canadian-designed’ green ICT approaches, products and services that could be marketed around the world. As countries such as the United States, Britain, Singapore and Australia consider injecting billions of dollars into green and broadband strategies, these initiatives could help put Canada ‘in the global game’, stimulating business development opportunities and opening new markets for Canadian companies.
“This Call for Proposals aims to capitalize on Canada’s expertise in ICT and the development and use of advanced networks to accelerate the adoption of low-carbon ICT infrastructure and management strategies,” said Guy Bujold, President and CEO of CANARIE. “It will enable innovators to collaborate on the development and validation of novel green technologies, assess the feasibility of zero-carbon data centres, and propose cost-effective and environmentally sound IT strategies that could benefit companies in many sectors. This reinforces CANARIE’s commitment to partner with industry, academia and government to address global sustainability challenges such as climate change.”
“This Call for Proposals underscores CANARIE’s critical role as a change agent in the ICT landscape”, said Brian Fry, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing for RackForce, a leader green datacenters based in Kelowna, BC. “It will provide enormous lift for companies such as RackForce that aim to develop, implement and promote the use of green data centers to reduce our carbon footprint. For example, winning project teams could influence the development of new standards, discover new ways to optimize zero-carbon data centers, and help to stimulate increased uptake of green ICT approaches. This represents a win for industry–and for society.”
The deadline for initial proposals is June 29, 2009 at 5PM EDT, with full applications to be submitted by September 10, 2009 at 5PM EDT. Selected proposals will be announced in October 2009. For additional information on this program, please visit: http://www.canarie.ca/funding/greenit/call_for_proposals.html

Obama Adviser Looks At Deploying National U.S. Broadband Network

[As I have mentioned several times in my postings there is soon going to be a huge pot of money available to pay for several national broadband networks, as well as cyber-infrastructure facilities in the US and possibly elsewhere.

The Waxman-Markey bill wending its way through Congress will require that utilities purchase $1.25 in carbon offsets for every $1.00 they spend on emission permits (although its not clear whether this will apply to the free permits that are proposed to be allocated under the bill)

Broadband networks and cyber-infrastructure can go a long way in helping reduce the US carbon footprint. Estimates of 15-20% overall reduction of CO2 are possible through virtualization and dematerialization using broadband networks.

Qualifying these reductions as high quality offsets as per the Waxman-Markey bill will more than pay for a national broadband rollout.

On June 1st CANARIE will launch its long awaited Green IT Pilot program which will help Canadian universities, industries and R&E networks learn how to develop the necessary protocols under ISO 14064 to make cyber-infrastructure and broadband networks eligible to earn such carbon offsets.

The Waxman-Markey bill could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in carbon offsets.

Thanks to Eric Lee for this pointer on posting from Gordon Cook’s Arch-econ list—BSA]

Bill



TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Obama Adviser Looks At U.S.-Built Broadband Network

Tuesday, May 26, 2009
by David Hatch

A senior adviser to President Obama is touting the idea of spending
tens of billions of dollars in public funds to build a nationwide,
state-of-the-art broadband network featuring speeds 100 times faster
than today's technology.

While there has been no formal Obama administration commitment to such
infrastructure investment, Susan Crawford, special assistant to the
president for science, technology and innovation policy, has said she
is "personally intrigued" by an ambitious plan by Australian Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd.

His plan proposes a public-private partnership that would invest up to
$33 billion over eight years to build and operate a fiber-optic
broadband network reaching 90 percent of homes and workplaces.
Wireless and satellite technology would be used to reach the remaining
10 percent in the outback.

Obama and congressional Democrats have backed a $7.2 billion cash
infusion to stimulate domestic broadband investment as part of this
year's economic stimulus package, but experts have acknowledged that
gaps in availability and bandwidth will remain, with pockets of the
United States left with no service or antiquated technology.

Proponents of Australia's program argue that the government-subsidized
network promises myriad opportunities for online businesses and
enhancements to energy efficiency, media distribution and public
safety.

A chief concern here is that a public broadband network would be
costly -- upward of $430 billion. While U.S. consumers would benefit
from the increased competition and lower monthly rates, they would
foot the bill through tax dollars.

"I think it's a pipe dream at this point," said a telecommunications
industry source, who added, "Good luck finding the money in this
fiscal environment."

Other industry sources also cautioned that a government-subsidized
network might dissuade private sector investment, leaving Americans
with fewer options down the road. "You can't just build it and you're
done," one critic cautioned, emphasizing the government would have to
spend billions on upgrades and would be saddled with customer service
responsibilities. "The government's continually going to have this
'white whale' it's going to have to keep pouring money into."

As the FCC prepares a national broadband strategy to be presented to
Congress by Feb. 17, there's already speculation that the agency -- at
the prodding of the White House -- will give serious thought to
adapting Australia's model for the United States.

Crawford, a member of Obama's National Economic Council, raised
eyebrows when she discussed Australia's plan at a policy forum in
April.

"Simply put, a digital economy requires fiber, and Australia is making
the determination that for that to work it will require a utility
approach," Crawford said, noting that Singapore is making a similar
investment and Britain and the Netherlands are exploring the concept.

"These governments understand that a wholesale network can deliver
massive social and economic benefits," she said, referring to capacity
that would be made available to carriers at reduced rates. (For a
fuller version of this article, go to CongressDaily's TechCentral at
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congressdaily/techcentral/.)

The Challenge of Smart Grids - a rallying cry to R&E networks and Internet community

[There has been a lot of news in the press recently about SMART electrical grids. Cisco recently announced that Smart Grids will eclipse the size of the Internet and Google announced its plans to launch Home Energy Management software. Even some telephone companies are looking to get into the business of home energy management. Can you imagine the same companies that brought you the two tiered Internet, are now going scaling up to bring you the two tiered electrical grid. Not only do they want to manage your Internet application but they want apply the same mindset to managing your appliances.

The big challenge with today’s Smart Grids strategy is that it is all based on managing peak load and are designed around a “gosplan” utility megawatt mindset architecture of huge centralized databases for the acquisition, management and control of consumers meters and appliances. (Another aspect of Smart grids is for utilities to better manage their own infrastructure which makes sense, but that is separate issue than managing consumer devices) .The main beneficiary is not the consumer but the utility operator in avoiding having to build new power plants for peak load. The environmental benefits are minimal and the savings to the consumer are marginal (around 10%) based on data from the Smart Grid trial at PNNL in Washington State. There are also huge challenges with respect to security as outlined by Rahul Tongia at CMU in his e-mail on Dave Farber’s IPer list. Imagine if someone hacked such a network and were able to turn off and on your appliances and electricity at will.

Innovation rarely comes from large monopolies like electrical utilities and telcos. But the Internet research and education community has a long of history of innovation particularly in adopting principles of the Internet in terms of intelligence at the edge and broadband network infrastructure as exemplified in the excellent paper “Unleashing Waves of Innovation” http://www.ntia.doc.gov/broadbandgrants/comments/488.pdf. R&E networks around the world have been instrumental in network innovation and working with communities in broadband infrastructure such as initiatives led by Educause, Internet 2, NLR, KAREN, i2Cat, etc. I believe the same organizations have the capability, infrastructure and knowledge to pioneer new techniques for smart grids built around the principle of intelligence at the edge and customer control. Universities, schools and research institutions in partnership with R&E networks are well suited to work with communities on exploring new architectures and solution for Smart grids that will have genuine benefits for the consumer (as opposed to the utility) as well as the environment.

Germany happens to be a world leader in this area and has many great examples of new smart grid architectures where consumers can also supply power to the grid. The 5th estate video compares and contrasts the German approach to what is largely happening in North America. In Germany consumers can arrange for their own meter independent of the utility and subscribe to different energy providers. Thanks to John Spence and Frank Coluccio for these pointers – BSA]


Great 5th estate video on green in Germany versus Canada in Smart grids and renewable energy http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green/video.html


Opportunity is promising, but utility cooperation will be the challenge

By Sean Buckley | Telecommunications Magazine | March 31, 2009

"As I head out to CTIA to help host our one-day Machine to Machine: Show me the Money panel series, it’s hard not to notice reports that Verizon is considering the idea of adding energy management services as one of the services it could offer over a home network connected to its FiOS FTTH service. Other than saying they will offer videoconferencing, Verizon has not formally confirmed a plan for an energy management service. I don’t think the idea of a telco like Verizon, or any service provider for that matter, offering energy management is far-fetched. Service providers, especially those like Verizon and their RBOC counterparts (AT&T and Qwest) are looking to find new ways to differentiate themselves and avoid having others leverage their connections into the home for applications they don’t control."

[Indeed!]

Cont.: http://www.telecommagazine.com/newsglobe/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_5074


Rahul Tongia tongia@cmu.edu from a posting on Dave Farber’s IPer list

As a researcher in the "smart grid" space, I will mention several facts/observations about smart grids:

1) People are throwing solutions out before figuring out what the problems are. Adding billions of $ to the mix (with strange rules to boot - e.g., sizes and $ limits per project) doesn't help. 2) The fundamental thing utilities need to understand when designing systems is what their functional goals are: audit (important in a place like India, with 10-20% theft), monitoring, or control. You need different
designs. These then lead you to the issue of communications design.
It's NOT bandwidth that is the concern, but predictability and reliability. Should the utility own it themselves, or rely on outsiders? I could user outsiders with the former, but is it appropriate for things like control? I don't think so (IMHO). 3) Some of the largest vendors of meters and affiliated technology are behind the curve in technology. Some of the best firms in this space are relatively small.
4) Security cannot be an add-on. Everyone pays lip service to security, just like being "green." But have we developed the right, lightweight solutions?
5) Open standards are going to be critical, else we will end up with $ $, proprietary, and sometimes inferior solutions. 6) Getting communications right in both directions is the key challenge. We need to innovate more! Both directions means from the user/meter to and from the utility. Then, from a user's central point (maybe meter, maybe inside), signaling to appliances and devices.
One has to realize how little the costs could be for smart systems.
Take a smart fridge. No, I don't want it to order milk when my an RFID chip on the milk carton says expired. I just want energy efficiency and load control. If a fridge knows when peak electricity is, then there is no reason it should run the compressor, or five times worse, the defrost cycle, during peak periods. Extra cost at the fridge level for the intelligence AND short-range communications? A few dollars (if built to standards in high volume). The issue is chicken- and-egg. Who signals, where, and how is an unanswered Q. The utility?
Governement? A neutral grid operator? Consumer aggregators (energy service providers)? Or the consumer himself/herself?
I think automated systems that don't rely on humans are going to work better than people staring at a household display (thermostat/meter) to take actions. As a consumer, I should be in charge of that, unless
I am willing to give the utility or a 3rd party such control.
Certainly price signals are important. Here Time of Use is not as good as Real-time (near real time) since (1) ToU can become a self- negating prophecy and (2) only the latter can deal with unforeseen events.
A relatively sophisticated (but low bandwidth) solution is important.
We need bidirectional communications once we go beyond automated metering as a goal. For starters, you need that if you consider communications security. You need to have touchless upgrades and security enhancements - a meter will last 15-20 years. Can anyone
swap out a network key with a one-way radio broadcast and verify it?
Bidirectional is also important when we consider compliance (if not "theft"). I'm not talking the India or Nigeria kind. I remember a story about direct load control in the Detroit area in the early 1920s or 30s. The utility would pay people to let it control their water heaters or other such load, using analog radio signals. People then figured out they could get paid but yet have no discomfort if they just put aluminum foil over the receiver!

The good news is the amount of load control we need to make a difference isn't much. Avoiding blackouts is cutting loads of maybe 5-10% or so. Saving 5% of PEAK electricity is (rule of thumb) some 25% of generation costs.
Rahul

>



CISCO: SMART GRID WILL ECLIPSE SIZE OF INTERNET Cisco sees a $100 billion market opportunity in the smart grid. The company make communications equipment for the electricity grid -- everything from routers in grid substations to home energy controllers. Cisco's move is a sign that the creaky electricity distribution system is poised for a digital upgrade. Other high-tech companies, including IBM, Intel, and several start-ups, are ramping up smart-grid efforts to capitalize on expected investments from utilities and federal governments. Cisco estimates that the communications portion of that build-out is worth $20 billion a year over the next five years. The idea of the "smart grid" is to modernize the electricity industry by overlaying digital communications onto the grid. Smart meters in a person's home, for example, can communicate energy usage to utilities in near real time. That allows the utility to more efficiently manage the electricity supply and potentially allow a consumer to take advantage of cheaper rates.

>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation RSS Feed: