101–110 of 126 posts
Not quite how this article meant solar-powered, but still some useful food for thought.
> However, we’re comparing apples to oranges. We have calculated our emissions based on the embodied energy of our installation. When the carbon intensity of the Spanish power grid is measured, the embodied energy of the renewable power infrastructure is taken to be zero. If we calculated our carbon intensity in the same way, of course it would be zero, too. I don't get it. The carbon intensity of the national grid s…
The carbon intensity of the national grid is calculated as follows: carbon emissions of burning coal and gas in power plants (say 600 g/kWh) + carbon emissions of wind turbines, solar panels and the like (0 g/kWh). Embodied energy is not taken into account.
Does anyone know of any good sources of information about which web hosts are the most sustainable? I had a quick look and didn't find an obvious resource online to study. I messaged a couple of popular web hosts and each said they don't have any specific policies on sustainability or any energy usage stats to share.
This may sound snarky, but... I really wonder how helpful such projects are. Making the Internet greener is undoubtedly an important goal, but I feel this is perpetuating a myth that we're gonna fix the climate crisis with small-scale projects from below. Practically this is doing nothing to provide any relevant fix for the problem. What we should be doing is thinking about how we can fix the problem at scale, e.g. p…
I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…
Problem solved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3 http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final... Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much sm…
That study is also badly outdated. Under section 5, Life Cycle Inventory Data, it says "The authors have assembled this LCI data set to the best of their knowledge and in their opinion it gives a reliable representation of the crystalline silicon module production technology in Western-Europe in the year 2005/2006 and Balance-of-System components of the year 2006." I would love to see a life cycle assessment using wh…
Depending on incentives and purpose one can choose which facts that one want to use. A fair comparison would be quite complex and have many variables one need to define for both the solar version and the power grid version.
Does anyone know of any good sources of information about which web hosts are the most sustainable? I had a quick look and didn't find an obvious resource online to study. I messaged a couple of popular web hosts and each said they don't have any specific policies on sustainability or any energy usage stats to share.
This would be a useful thing to lobby hosting companies on. All it would take would be to convince a dozen or two of the largest, most visible hosting companies to put sustainability/power efficiency/consumption stats front and centre on the website and the rest of the horde would be more-or-less obliged to follow suit.
About $100 in gear ($30 144wh battery, $20 controller, $50 50w solar panel) to offset around $2 worth of electricity (9.53kwh * 0.17 euro/kwh) per year. The battery should be replaced about every 5 years, the solar panels 25 years, the controller every 10 years.
This may sound snarky, but... I really wonder how helpful such projects are. Making the Internet greener is undoubtedly an important goal, but I feel this is perpetuating a myth that we're gonna fix the climate crisis with small-scale projects from below. Practically this is doing nothing to provide any relevant fix for the problem. What we should be doing is thinking about how we can fix the problem at scale, e.g. p…
I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for it though. The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power, efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications.…
There was a project I stumbled upon over a year ago that implemented a P2P Web, but I can't seem to dig it up now. There was a client that mediated the connection between your machine and the network, and you'd just browse the web normally by pointing your browser at localhost:someport. It was kind of neat, since everyone who visited a resource could act as the server for somebody else, but it looked to me like it wa…