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.

Comments

Re:Well, it's about time

[arivanov]

Let's face it -- government regulations aren't working

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

• limited and rather short lifetime
• producing them generates polution. The silicon industry is hardly environmentally friendly, no matter what people say

Re:Reality check.

[AntiFUD]

a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.

This was quickly proven to be false. Now even the fossil fuel advocates have dropped the accusation. They now claim around 5 years as a break even point. Solar panels are getting better, so I think 5 years is far too high, but that is more of a debatable point, and not FUD.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Amphigory]

Something to think about.

At 6 foot 2 inches (177 cm) and 300 pounds, I cannot physically get behind the wheel of most small cars. Specifcally, this includes your Ford Fiesta. And I'm not the tallest person I know by any means (although I am one of the largest).

Also, in the US we have many people who live in rural areas the likes of which you have never seen in Europe. I used to live in a town where, to get to the nearest clothing store, you had to drive thirty miles. Groceries were ten miles, and at that overpriced. If you wanted to buy a computer, 50 miles (this was in rural Virginia -- we won't even talk about the western states.) A job good enough to afford a car was 50 miles as well.

At $6/gallon, a trip to work in the smallest car I can drive comfortably (which probably gets 23 miles/gallon highway) costs me $24.

Incidentally, in Europe your much higher population density also allows much better mass transit. In the US, mass transit is almost totally unavailable except in major metropolitan areas, and spotty even there. To get from Wakefield (where I used to live) to the nearest train station, you had to drive 30-40 miles. There was no other way.

Bear in mind that the UK is the size of one US state, and if memory serves has about 50% of the US population. Different circumstances require different approaches.

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Great, but...

[Scurra UK]

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"

Way to go :P

[Ayon Rantz]

"Right now millions of machines and web sites pollute every day," says Overman, alluding to their dependence on electric power plants that produce carbon dioxide.

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 ;)
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