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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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Octopus energy in the UK with the beta agile tariff is based on 30 minute pricing and prices have been so low at times such as yesterday that the price per unit has been negative, for example on Sunday and Monday I was paid 4.2 pence per unit to take electricity off the network.

Their web site advertises support for IFTTT. Has anyone here hacked on Octopus APIs? Looks very cool.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works well if you can aggregate the distributed resources so they're large enough to bid at the wholesale level.

one could imagine a company that gives fridges out for FREE and sells the aggregated “balancing energy” to recoup the cost of the fridge.

I like the business model. But it'd surely be advertising at you too. The pressure for the owner to pick up those free dollars would be just too strong.

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

#134
post #97

COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!

What's your opinion about Michael Moore's new documentary about the green economy? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

The main point of the documentary is that the EROEI of the "green economy" turns out to cost more than using fossil fuels directly. In short, the green economy didn't give common people an alternative, it simply gave business people a new tool to mask their intentions while idealistic politicians genuflect to the lie. The lies trickle down through the career pipe line and people go along with unquestioned assumptions out of fear of losing their jobs.

I personally think the documentary doesn't go far enough about the cultural aspect. I'm speaking specifically of the social norms of conformity, sociopathy and narcissism in the decision making classes. We have fucked future generations for short term gains and the only hope the tech community can come up with is to pretend that we will build rockets to go to Mars. When the kids of the billionaires pushing this horseshit get preventable cancers or tangled up in a class war - maybe then things will change (albeit I doubt it). Until then, it's all bean bags, idiocy, shiny tech toys and fluff. Enjoy it while it last. The magic bullet of nuclear fusion doesn't seem to be likely and the social organization to leverage what we have in a responsible manner doesn't either. We will keep doing what we are doing until nature bitch slaps us and we have to change. Hopefully I'm wrong. I want to be.

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

#135
post #79
post #29

Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by engineers. One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them bid on compute power. You could…

> 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),…

Something sort of similar exists for iOS. BGTaskScheduler (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks/bg...) is the public interface, but the internal interface allows for more subtle calculations about how long you can wait until this job is complete and what the optimal physical condition of the phone is (e.g. battery charging, user not using phone, wireless network connection). One of the important features is that when you run a job you have to check in fairly often (every second or so) to see if your job can still run, and if it can't, stop the job. This stops your two hour ML training session from burning battery for a while if the user wakes up at 2am and decides to go on a walk.

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

#136
post #75

This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy. Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings, but maybe it varie…

> 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…

People are hacking together some interesting things in this space: https://fridge0.branchable.com

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

#137
post #75

This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy. Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings, but maybe it varie…

> 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…

How much of energy consumption even is by households though?

I think people have a strong bias for thinking the things they see and touch during the day are environmentally important. But most "pollution"/energy use happen out of sight from our everyday lives.

Or so I think. Happy to be disproven!

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

#138
I frequently criticize Google harshly for everything from search becoming more and more useless to pushing Chrome way to hard.

Seems some people at Google still hasn't got the memo yet that the "not evil" days are now a thing of the past. This looks amazing and more like something I would expect from old Google.

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

#139

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…

How much of energy consumption even is by households though? I think people have a strong bias for thinking the things they see and touch during the day are environmentally important. But most "pollution"/energy use happen out of sight from our everyday lives. Or so I think. Happy to be disproven!

~20% is residential—still significant. Plus ~30% transportation, which as we transition to EVs become more and more relevant to residential energy use.

But even commercial and industrial could be optimized in the same manner. I've been thinking: If electricity is much cheaper during certain periods, would factories be built to only run during those times?

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/

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

#140
post #75

This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy. Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings, but maybe it varie…

The future is nuclear power, and when companies buy hardware they use it at max performance around the clock because energy is cheap and does not depend on weather.

There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables: nobody explained how to convert the world to 100% renewable energy without coal backup.

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