11–20 of 195 posts
COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
That looks like a good opportunity for an (at least tangentinally related) big shout-out to your great electricityMap ( https://www.electricitymap.org/map ) website! I wish there would be more countries covered (in particular Switzerland), but I guess you depend on the live data being provided in these countries.
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
That's the great thing about standards -- there are so many to choose from!
"Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing"
COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
Hey Martin, this is super cool! Congrats on the collab! Would you mind commenting on what your tech stack is like? Looking at your github repo it seems like you're combining a lot of data sources. Can you comment on your approach? Also, considering this collaboration, are you running on GCP?
Also, feel free to join our Slack at https://slack.tmrow.com to ask your questions!
what a pity to know that they will be mining more of our personal data when we are chilling with the sunshine.
This Dell paper[0] suggests that 16% of the carbon over a typical server lifecycle is from the manufacture, so you probably don't want a server sitting there unused for 23 hours per day, since the overall carbon/compute ratio would be worse overall.
The post doesn't mention this metric, but it would be really nice to see something more detailed in time - especially with this overall efficiency of the server/datacentre lifecycle in mind, rather than just energy consumed from use.
[0]: https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon...
A more interesting measure would be the actual reduction in CO2 emissions.
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
If you're a large consumer of energy and can turn that consumption on or off at short notice (on the order of seconds) then the grid operator will pay you to allow them to scale your consumption up or down.
The classic example of this is cold storage. If you have a warehouse full of freezers which need to be kept within a certain temperature threshold then it doesn't really matter when you run the freezers and you could switch off at several points during the day.