Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Monday, February 27, 2012

Another innovative low carbon brokered cloud strategy - Mastodon C


[Mastodon C is a new service from Magic Dashboards, a London-based startup.It helps developers and data scientists to minimize their environmental impact, by sending their Hadoop jobs to the greenest available locations, without reducing their productivity or significantly increasing cost.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Carbon Accounting and Green IT strategies for networks - TERENA workshop


[TERENA in partnership with SURFnet and GEANT is hosting a 2 day workshop on carbon accounting and Green IT strategies for R&E networks.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Green IT is revolutionizing UK cyber-Infrastructure via networks, cloud, outsouring and financial incentives


[As readers of this blog may know I have long argued that advances in research and education through cyber-infrastructure (or eInfrastructure) can be largely justified, if not entirely paid for through the energy savings of using clouds, networks or outsourcing.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Stanford university research on dynamic charging of electric vehicles for future Energy Internet


[It is exciting to see prestigious institutions like Stanford University, which has been the incubator for many companies that created the original Internet, to now undertake work leading to the development of the Energy Internet.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Green Revolving Funds can help fund costs of cloud computing and R&E networking


[There have been some interesting new developments in university Green Revolving Funds (GRF) that I believe could be a significant revenue opportunity for cloud suppliers and R&E networks

Monday, January 9, 2012

How to make the Internet DNS green


[The Dutch Internet registry SIDN has launched a unique program in partnership with CleanBits to identify what proportion of .nl domain names were hosted on a green or CO2-neutral basis.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

A classic example of why energy efficiency never works

If you live in the United States and value fuel efficiency, you might catch yourself looking longingly overseas at super efficient vehicle fleets and wondering, why not us?

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Network and Telecommunication protocols for the Energy Internet


[Bruce Nordham of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed some very exciting concepts on the networked and telecommunications protocols for the future “Energy Internet” or what he calls “Building Networks”.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Details on building an "Energy Internet"


[I have put together a compendium of material on building the future “Energy Internet” which can be found at http://goo.gl/8HyNb.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Must watch video: on the move electric vehicle charging at University of Auckland


[I am very excited to see the recent announcement from University of Auckland of their very innovative inductive charging system for electric vehicles.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

$1 Billion University Green program launched - CIO and NRENs could be big beneficiary


[The $1 billion green challenge is inspired by the exceptional performance of existing green revolving funds operated by many universities worldwide.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle


[Here is a great example of how countries like Canada, Sweden, Norway, etc could be the hubs of the future global green Internet.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The "Energy Internet" - how the Internet + renewable energy can transform the economy


[Here is a couple of interesting articles on topics on how the Internet + low carbon or zero carbon renewable energy architectures can transform the global society and economy.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Using the social Internet as a tool to reward consumers to use solar powered ICT devices



[Here is a great example of how the Internet and ICT could be used as an incentive to get customers to reduce their carbon footprint from ICT devices.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Hewlett Packard, AMD and Others Aim to Use Wind, Solar Power for Data Centers


[A concept that originated with CANARIE funded Greenstar project, spearheaded in Quebec by ETS, PROMPTinc and CRC in Ottawa, is now gaining momentum around the world.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

The rebound effect and ICT - why free energy may reduce CO2 emission

[I have long argued that energy efficiency, as a primary objective, is not sufficient to slow down, never mind reduce CO2 emissions.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Scant CO2 Benefit from China’s Coal-Powered Electric Cars

Much has been made of China’s big push to build and deploy 1 million electric vehicles a year by 2015. The move will help cut smog and oil imports. Less has been made of the scant impact this is likely to have on the country’s emissions of carbon dioxide, given its enduring reliance on coal for most of its electricity. 

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Packet Based Energy Delivery Systems


[Internet engineers have long recognized the value of packet based networks, particularly those that support the end to end principle.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

If you have no power, energy efficiency is irrelevant


[There are dozens, if not hundreds of research initiatives around the world looking at improving energy efficiency in computers and networks.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Modeling the economy in a changing climate

As society adjusts to the knowledge that our climate is changing, policy makers are faced with a difficult question: how can they use policy to help prevent and cope with climate change, while minimizing the damage to their nation or organization’s economic health?

Monday, August 22, 2011

SURFnet pilots green cloud service for Dutch universities using lightpaths

[I recently received a fascinating e-mail from Rogier Spoor at SURFnet on an exciting initiative they have undertaken to pilot a green cloud service for Dutch universities using a lightpath connection to Iceland.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Clouds would reduce carbon emissions equivalent to 16.8 million cars

[An excellent article on the carbon reduction potential of clouds. And one of the few analysis that distinguishes between energy consumption and efficiency versus carbon footprint.

Open Flow in the real world: Carriers, clouds and follow the sun/wind networks


[It is exciting to see the concept of software controlled networks pioneered by CANARIE and CRC (UCLP) and other researchers such as Nick Mckeown at Stanford starting to gain momentum.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

World's first zero carbon video conference using follow the wind/follow the sun

[At this week’s CANARIE annual general meeting the Greenstar team demonstrated the world’s first zero carbon video conference using follow the wind/follow the sun technology.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time

It's Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.

Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet.

Far-flung data centers could use otherwise unharvestable renewable energy for computation.


Really Remote Data

Far-flung data centers could use otherwise unharvestable renewable energy for computation.

Monday, May 30, 2011

The future of Green IT is Survivable IT

[Before the first battle has hardly begun we have already lost the war on climate change.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Green Cloud Apps will be future killer apps for the Internet

[I recently stumbled across a very cool app called EchoSign that allows for electronic transmission and signature of all sorts of documents such as NDAs, expense claims, contract revisions, patient signatures, etc.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Obama orders all US departments and suppliers to develop climate adaptation plan

[This is big news. Developing a climate adaptation plan is a lot harder than making vague commitments to sustainability.

Friday, May 13, 2011

UK Government report on how climate change could ruin the Interent

[The UK government recently issued a report outlining the impacts of climate change on the Internet.