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This Solar-Powered, 'Low Tech' Website Goes Offline When It's Cloudy (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Every website and product connected to the internet would not be able to exist without a vast network of wireless routers, fiber optic cables running underground and underwater, and data centers that house the servers which bring the internet to life. Data centers in the U.S. alone eat up 70 billion kilowatts of energy per year, according to a 2016 estimate from the Department of Energy -- that's 1.8 percent of all energy use across the country.
The internet is not ethereal, and a new project from the blog Low-Tech Magazine aims to make that issue more tangible. Low-Tech Magazine -- a blog operated by Kris De Decker that has run on Wordpress since 2007 -- launched a "Low-Tech," solar version of the site that's designed from the ground-up to use as little energy as possible. (Check out the solar version of the site here.) In a Skype call with Motherboard, De Decker said that he doesn't think people don't care about how much energy it takes they use the internet, they just don't understand the extent of the problem. "There's this idea that the internet is immaterial, it's somewhere floating in clouds," he said. "Of course, it's a very material thing that uses resources, materials, energy -- and quite a lot actually."
The internet is not ethereal, and a new project from the blog Low-Tech Magazine aims to make that issue more tangible. Low-Tech Magazine -- a blog operated by Kris De Decker that has run on Wordpress since 2007 -- launched a "Low-Tech," solar version of the site that's designed from the ground-up to use as little energy as possible. (Check out the solar version of the site here.) In a Skype call with Motherboard, De Decker said that he doesn't think people don't care about how much energy it takes they use the internet, they just don't understand the extent of the problem. "There's this idea that the internet is immaterial, it's somewhere floating in clouds," he said. "Of course, it's a very material thing that uses resources, materials, energy -- and quite a lot actually."
Wouldn't leaving it off truly use as little energy as possible?
Storing a web site on a hard disk uses less electricity than storing it in ram. This is why Slashdot does not have any ram installed on any of their servers. In fact, Slashdot actually uses cloud based ram, where it uses the ram of visitors to run their website. This saves Slashdot a ton of money in terms of ram costs.
It's power.
Did you mean 70 billion kilowatt hours?
As backup. Or have wind mill's to also contribute to the power used. Dumb as dirt, both as an article. And the idiots that tried designing something like this.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
So I work with a non-profit that is off the grid. As with any organization in the modern era, we have become extremely dependent on IT systems to conduct our day to day business. For our system, which is a campus network spread out over about 20 buildings, the electrical load is approximately 3.5 kilowatts or so. The trouble is that we're off grid, with our own private hydro-electric power plant. In the winter months, the output of our plant can drop as low as 30 to 40kw, meaning that the IT infrastructure is consuming upwards of 10% of the total output of our electrical system.
Now, we look at that power as an investment of sorts, as it allows us to use some pretty sophisticated load management systems to better make use of our limited resources. We've also put the gear into spaces that need to be kept from freezing in the winter, so the waste heat contributes to that, rather than running heaters.
But yes, the internet isn't free (electrically).
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Goddammit! I see this conflation of energy in power in the mainstream press all the feakin' time. Kilowatts is not a unit of energy! It's a unit of power (energy consumption over time). If a reporter doesn't know the difference, and doesn't realize that the different is really important, then I can't trust that any of the rest of their reporting is worth my time.
However, since they couldn't be bothered to do even a modicum of technical checking, I will help fill in the blanks. There are two ways to interpret this statement:
In the first case, they would be talking about 70 terawatts of power, and that being 1.8% of the US consumption. This is absurd: the average energy consumption of the U.S. is only a few terawatts.
In the second case, they would be talking about 70 terawatt-hours of energy, implying a total consumption in the U.S.of about 3888 TWh. This is in line with recent statistics for U.S. electricity consumption. However, electricity consumption is not the same as total energy consumption, where one also has to consider energy for heating, transportation, industrial processes, etc.
So, the reporter is talking about energy, not power. He or she doesn't know the correct units, and conflates electrical consumption with total energy consumption. In short, the reporter is sloppy as all get out with their information. No wonder we can't have a proper debate about energy in this country - no one knows what the hell they're talking about.
I was just reading an article about how Netflix eats up to 15% of all internet bandwidth world-wide. How can we talk about environment issues when this abuse goes on. Time to throttle this shit to the max!! Let the bytes trickle!
Look, if you just used Clean Energy Institute (CEI) specs, you'd have a fully powered green energy website, entirely powered by solar, and excess solar energy stored either in modern batteries (70-80 pct) or compressed air storage (80-90 pct).
No reason for it to go offline during a cloudy day. Heck, the CEI is literally located in a fairly cloudy and rainy city, Seattle, and we get 70-80 percent energy from our solar arrays on cloudy/rainy days, so you must be doing something wrong.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you're a troll, is clicking one of your affiliate links literally feeding a troll?
You just can't run a modern economy on intermittent power.
We need reliable base-load power.
Solar and wind need batteries or some kind of storage, and then they are more expensive than conventional reliable energy sources.
Statistics show it, the more renewable energy a country (or state) has, the more the electricity costs.
The 10W router used isn't solar-powered. And the ~1.5W server is hooked up to inefficient as hell lead-acid batteries. Why would you half-ass it that much? If you're doing this, you obviously at least get lithium batteries. Even rigging up off-the-shelf pass-through charging capable power banks would be better than dealing with lead-acid batteries.
You can't escape modern tech, unless you live like a mountain man in the woods with no electronic devices or internal combustion engines.
There's no pretending modern off-grid photovoltaic power with a charge controller, running a website on an A20 processor, is "low tech." It's extremely high tech, all of this stuff has tons of extremely expensive, extremely high tech capital invested in its production.
No, it feeds. 350 pound man baby. Think line backer. American football.
What's funny is, they could save even more power by simply using tinypng.com! :) I was able to reduce the file size of the png by 2k
geeky stuff I'm proud to have been a part of: linux.com / themes.org / sourceforge.net / sicnus.com
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Table-ized A.I.
If more websites went offline once in a while.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The image on the front page may look "low tech" with its dithering, but the file is a 800x553 pixels, 4-bit greyscale PNG image that weights 43415 bytes:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine....
The same image would probably have looked much better and would probably be much smaller file if he had used JPEG, which is the proper format for photographs.
So it's lowtech enough to have an ethernet controller, but having a backup battery is too high tech?
Also we can't just have power over ethernet as the backup to the solar?
If their server was so great, they'd put in enough panels to produce a net positive amount of power and reverse meter it.
It makes it really easy to pick out the people who have no clue what they're talking about, and have based their conclusions on idealized beliefs rather than solid engineering data. I concentrate on educating listeners about the difference between power and energy, so they can pick these people out and ignore them like I do. Don't correct the shills and snake oil salesmen - let them continue to make the error.
1.8% energy use seems pretty cheap to me for such a foundational piece of infrastructure. I bet the internet more than pays for itself energy-wise (because it enables optimization/automation/monitoring/etc.). Sure, we should try to cut that footprint, but data centers are quite aware of their energy bill and a lot of smart people at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Intel, etc., have been chasing those efficiencies. Figure out how to put a dent in HVAC and you'll have a much greater impact on the environment.
Aside from the apparently subjective benefit of "feel good emotions" simply do a return on investment calculation for your internet activities including both operational as well as capital costs. Are alternative power sources cost effective? Powering down internet equipment at certain times is a rather crude form of time-of-use pricing. I once had a client (a metal foundry with electric furnaces) whose electrical rate was zero at certain times since the electric utility needed a certain base load to operate effectively. In short don't guess just follow the money
But if they really want low-tech, why aren't they using VAWT? If you have the tech to build a bycycle and generator, you have VAWT, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say fr solar....
Read. It has plenty of storage for when it's cloudy.
These guys are so so stupid.
~800Mhz dual core Android, 512Mb RAM, Busybox. Apache, PHP, MySQL, FTP).
~£150 waterproof outdoor solar charger + £70 residual backup battery, will last you days if the panels get broke or it rains.
A few USB charging cables. Need never go down unless the infrastucture does (and if it's powered when the infrastructure dies, mute point - mains wouldn't help at that point.
Throw a Samsung Galaxy Tab S in there as a development workstation and bookshelf, and you'll be 200 years ahead of everyone else after the collapse.
Optional bonus points for figuring out how to make replacement batteries after civilisation ends. They could be bigger, uglier and bulkier than they are now, that wouldn't matter, but they have to work.
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