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Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

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Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#111

Post by johnb »

konschubert wrote: post #83
WalterBright wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally…

This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?

It does in Australia: https://www.amberelectric.com.au/ (disclaimer: I work there)

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#112

Post by hutzlibu »

walshemj wrote: post #80
mikepurvis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOU pricing is pretty widespread at this point; I have it in a medium-sized city in Canada, and intentionally run laundry (electric dryer) in the evening when power is half the cost of daytime use. With EVs coming online and being set up to charge at night, it would definitely be nice to have a minute by minute spot pricing scheme, though, then you'd basically have a mechanism for using the chargers and other intelli…

I think when widespread overnight charging of EV's is a thing cheap evening electricity will be phased out

I think your household electricity prices just need to reflect real market prices. For example there were times in germany this year, with negative power prices, because the wind was blowing strong and all the wind plants generating more than anyone needed.

But for me as a customer, the price was as high as allways.

But if customers could react to that (automatically), you could have all sorts of jobs waiting for it. Bitcoin mining, dryer, charging batteries, freezer full power ... would be good for the grid, too, to balance it.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#113

Post by gambiting »

ajpgrealish wrote: post #76
gambiting wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Octopus you can go to an Agile tariff, where you're paying exactly what the market rate is, which means that frequently at night you are being paid for using electricity(the rate per kWh goes into negative). I know a few people who have it with an electric car, and it means that at certain times you are being paid to charge your car. It's crazy. But also it means that at peak times the cost can be as high as 25-…

There are apps that can automate this whole process for you, monitoring the charge your cars needs each night and the dynamic energy prices either on an Economy 7 or Agile tariff and then controls the charging to optimise the price. If you're car needs less charge than your off peak rate time period then it will charge at the lowest carbon times. https://ev.energy

OHME charging cables and wallboxes do this as well

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#114

Post by samatman »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #46
Seirdy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a smaller scale, you could do what Low Tech Magazine [0] does and actually have downtime when sunlight is low. Since this doesn't happen too often and users can just save articles (with RSS, email newsletters, etc.), websites like this can just be powered by a single computer, solar cell, and small battery in the owner's Barcelona apartment. Thanks to small static pages and tiny dithered images, the site is almost…

This is actually great: imagine a CDN in various geographical locations all of which work off sunlight in their own time zone (and turn off with no sunlight). This way you can have 24/7 fully green content delivery to consumers. Although that being said we could just try to cover the earth with as many generators everywhere and then fully connect the grids.

I respect lowtechmagazine's experiment: it's designed to make you think, and it succeeds.

But CPUs have an incredibly high embodied energy, we should aim for full utilization of servers, regardless of the source of that energy.

If it's three CPUs with carbon-neutral electricity, or one CPU with electricity from coal, the latter is the responsible choice.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#115

Post by samatman »

vlasev wrote: post #93
mabbo wrote: post #54

(Off-topic, but regarding this site) Am I crazy or is this website capturing down-button clicks and ignoring them? I typically use down and up to slowly scroll as I read an article. This page is driving me nuts.

Funny enough, on Mac, fn + down works, although the jumps are larger.

This makes sense, fn + down sends Page Down, which is a different keystroke.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#116

Post by alcover »

mempko wrote: post #96

Everyone wanting to really understand what is going on with the new green economy and these platitudes should watch Michael Moore's nee documentary he just released free on YouTube called Planet of the Humans. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

Thank you.

This is beyond depressing. All cope and hope peddling.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#117

Post by vladd »

mtrovo wrote: post #84
vladd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value. Or you could use real money. It's not the value of the outcome for that job that you're interested, but rather its sensitivity to a delayed latency in executing it. For example, preemptively converting Youtube videos to a lower resolution with optimum compression to avoid having to do it in real-time (when video is played) at a crappy compression (to be fast),…

I think this is much more useful to a cloud provider than to a customer. As a customer I think you could configure somethings like you said using spot instances on AWS but that’s it, you’re going to save some small amount of dollars in a year but if you account for the engineering hours needed to set this up maybe is not really worth it. As a cloud provider you could juggle your client between datacenters depending o…

If spot instance price is the only communication channel between you and the cloud provider to achieve this, it's hard to do a good job at it. For example, if the spot price was $0.60 one hour ago, and $0.55 right now, and you still have 13 hours of latency left for your job's execution, should you start triggering it or not? (how do you figure out your bid level?) You could have statistical data to have an intuition what's the lowest price that's been hit historically on similar days of the week in the past etc, but it's inexact and overly complicated.

If the cloud provider becomes aware of the remaining latency you have at your disposal for the job's execution, they can do a much better job. They would be able to look across the entire job execution queue in that datacenter, each job having a specific remaining duration for its execution, they would know the predicted pattern of carbon/solar/wind split for the next hours, and the implementation of the system would sit just on the cloud provider side (making the life of the customers easier and simple).

Of course, in the end, the benefit is towards our planet, but this is much more likely to succeed if the proper cloud API exists and the implementation initiatives are properly aligned to avoid redundant implementations on the customer side.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#118

Post by qmarchi »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #46
Seirdy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a smaller scale, you could do what Low Tech Magazine [0] does and actually have downtime when sunlight is low. Since this doesn't happen too often and users can just save articles (with RSS, email newsletters, etc.), websites like this can just be powered by a single computer, solar cell, and small battery in the owner's Barcelona apartment. Thanks to small static pages and tiny dithered images, the site is almost…

This is actually great: imagine a CDN in various geographical locations all of which work off sunlight in their own time zone (and turn off with no sunlight). This way you can have 24/7 fully green content delivery to consumers. Although that being said we could just try to cover the earth with as many generators everywhere and then fully connect the grids.

I mean, technically, that's what Google's solution ends up doing.

Their DCs are globally distributed, so their timings on when they'd actually be doing the heavy lifting is shuffled around.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#119

Post by fuzzybear3965 »

samatman wrote: post #114
heavenlyblue wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually great: imagine a CDN in various geographical locations all of which work off sunlight in their own time zone (and turn off with no sunlight). This way you can have 24/7 fully green content delivery to consumers. Although that being said we could just try to cover the earth with as many generators everywhere and then fully connect the grids.

I respect lowtechmagazine's experiment: it's designed to make you think, and it succeeds. But CPUs have an incredibly high embodied energy, we should aim for full utilization of servers, regardless of the source of that energy. If it's three CPUs with carbon-neutral electricity, or one CPU with electricity from coal, the latter is the responsible choice.

Did you mean the reverse? I.e. "If it's one CPU with carbon-neutral electricity, or three CPUs with electricity from coal, the latter is the responsible choice."

If no, then why. I can explain my confusion if needed.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#120

Post by samatman »

fuzzybear3965 wrote: post #119
samatman wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect lowtechmagazine's experiment: it's designed to make you think, and it succeeds. But CPUs have an incredibly high embodied energy, we should aim for full utilization of servers, regardless of the source of that energy. If it's three CPUs with carbon-neutral electricity, or one CPU with electricity from coal, the latter is the responsible choice.

Did you mean the reverse? I.e. "If it's one CPU with carbon-neutral electricity, or three CPUs with electricity from coal, the latter is the responsible choice." If no, then why. I can explain my confusion if needed.

I don't mean the reverse, I mean that running one CPU 24 hours a day instead of 3 CPUs 8 hours a day is better, even if the 3 CPUs have carbon-neutral energy and the 1 CPU does not.

To be fair, these are artificial choices, and that's not even what lowtech was doing (they have a battery). I was responding to the post about the CDNs that stop working at night.

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