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Solar Powered Colocation
ferlatte writes: "There's a colocation facility available that uses nothing but solar power for their machines and local net. An article about them is available at ENN, and their own site is at Solarhost.com. Enviro-geeks might be interested." This would be fantastic for all the brick-and-mortar businesses breaking on to the Web that put 'environmentally friendly' stickers on their products in the eighties.
Correct, but you have got a wrong example for environmental awareness.
I would call this company envrironmentally friendly if it was somewhere in Death Valley or similar. It uses prime VA land instead. A waste of prime agricultural/habitable land imho is almost as bad as burning coal and oil if not worse.
It uses solar batteries instead of helioconcentrators. They have
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
-- Better to lose Karma than let the FUD go unchecked.
Let's face it -- government regulations aren't working. Every time big industry gets close to having to adopt a cleaner power source, they moan and groan about how it will ravage "the economy" (read: Lee Iacoca's bottom line) and the government backs down again. We need to make it economically unsound to pollute. Why don't we environmentally-minded consumers just stop buying polluting products like cars and aerosol sprays? If enough people refuse to put up with pollution, everyone will be forced to follow the way of these kind of pioneers.
This is great, but what happens when it rains and people want to go look at your website as they can't be outside?
"HTTP/1.1 Error 1000 - Sun is not shining"
Or better yet, build houses out of the trees. There are billions of tons of carbon locked up in homes aroudn the country.
I can't say anything about 1) or 3) but 2) is probably not an issue- ozone is produced by brush type motors, and virtually all motors in computer equipment are brushless motors. The computers would have a very hard time passing FCC emission specs with brush motors. The electrical noise put out by brush motors would probably be a really bad thing for the circuits in the computer too.
If they are really trying to be efficient, they would also avoid the lead bearing CRTs for the (electrically) efficient LCD display. There really isn't an economical way to get rid of the lead used in the solder, though there are non lead bearing solders available, they are still expensive, more difficult to use, and largely unproven.
> a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
OK. Solar cells; yes. Solar power; no.
Solar cells are not currently designed to be used in power plants or anything of that nature because usually the cost of production does not justify the profit that one can make selling the electricity. You're part correct in that "it takes more energy to make them blah blah blah" which is not entirely true; but disregarding that whole statement let me ask you this:
Have you ever seen a solar power plant?
Barring a couple exceptions they don't use solar cells. They use semi-parabolic reflector arrays (not even mirrors really) that work kind of like a huge fresnel mirror to reflect sunlight up onto a gigantic black obelisk-looking tower that has pipes running through it. The reflectors are all on gimbals so they can move through the day to continue to reflect light onto this tower correctly. The thing gets HOT. Water is pumped through the pipes to make steam which drives turbines. It's the same electricity generation process as nuclear, coal/oil, and geothermal plants all use.
Diss on solar cells all you want - they really are kind of a black thorn in the side of environmentalists; but please do not rip on solar power.
~GoRK
Most computers use switched-mode power supplies. These are a mainly INDUCTIVE load on the grid.
"When the grid was made", most of the stuff on it was (well, MOSTLY still IS) RESISTIVE loads like filament bulbs and heating elements.
I understand that the big increase in INDUCTIVE loads, though not providing an actual POWER CONSUMPTION problem, does provide some kind of a STABILITY problem. The grid people can add in all kinds of filters and stuff to balance the effect of too much inductive load, but then when any tiny section of the grid drops out, the resulting spike upsets the inductive loads and the filters in adjoining sections of the grid, which will also pop their big oil-filled grid fuses, which will in turn produce a spike that upsets THEIR neighbours, etc etc etc... In a nutshell, the entire grid is balancing on a knife edge, which is getting sharper and sharper every day as we add more inductive loads to it.
There's no problem actually generating ENOUGH POWER... The problem is keeping the whole grid stable.
This is probably less of an issue if, instead of using a big unstable grid, you're generating your own electricity from solar arrays, and filtering and balancing it however you want.
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
Solar cell technology still has a long way to go because it still has one nasty catch:
a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
Solarhost is a good step forward to establishing a market value for the use of green-er power, but considering that the energy demand spurred by the 'net needs to demonstrate a much larger energy payoff, I'd be more game for hosting businesses that promise the state of the art in energy efficienct servers. (And for chip manufacturers that pay more attention to their wattage requirements and not worry so much about hertzage.)
I remember seeing an ad in a catalog from igo.com (they carry accessories for laptops, PDAs and cellphones) that showed a solar panel that was the size of a large novel. You unzip it and it opens up to have two solar panels for charging your cell batteries or your laptop. Good Luck. On a whim I went just now and here is the link:
here for solar charger
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Wind has been used as an energy source for thousands of years. Up to 4000 years ago, the Babylonians and the Chinese used wind power to pump water for crops, and sailing boats were around long before that.
Wind power was used in Europe in the middle ages to mill (meaning grind) grain. This is where the term windmill comes from.
Micro hydro power is probably the least common of the three readily used renewable energy sources, but it has the potential to produce the most power, more reliably than solar or wind power if you have the right site. This means having access to a river or creek that has a high enough flow to produce useable power for a good part of the year. Many creeks and rivers are permanent, ie, they never dry up, and these are the most suitable for micro-hydro power production.
There was recently an article on CNN.com about European electricity providers being very concerned that an explosion of planned colocation facilities will strain the European grid to its limit. This is something we (or I, anyway) don't think about very much. There is a lot of talk about all the money and energy saved by the efficiencies of the "Internet economy," but all the powerful (and hot) equipment running the "Internet economy" must be using an enormous amount of power.
Does anyone know of any reliable estimates to how much power is being consumed by Internet-related hardware?
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
And here I always thought power plants produced electricity.. Well, I guess this is a good thing and all, but computers aren't exactly very power-hungry.. According to Alternative Power Systems, a home computer consumes 80-150 W/hr, which isn't much compared to air conditioning, electric heating, the light bulbs in your home, etc..
To make a difference with things like this, they need to suply power to a lot more than a small set of low-consumption computers. I seriously suspect these people of being more interested in doing CGI programming at 75$/hr than protecting the environment.. Besides, they're not even running Solaris :)
What we need are huge solar panels in space and wireless transmission of power down here to juice the stuff that eats a bit more than the websites.. But I guess that's not as profitable as selling "Powered by the sun" stickers to e-businesses ;)
--
Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!
This give a whole new meaning to "This website is powered by Sun."
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.