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The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

bbc.com

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Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#21

Post by walrus01 »

magnio wrote: post #14
quaintdev wrote: post #3

Offtopic > The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Isn't 1.2g per page view huge amount? I wonder if we can have api for this.

According to Website Carbon Calculator, each page view produces 2.22g of CO₂. I think it would be lower if you use an ad blocker. https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/bbc-com-future-article...

I really have no idea how they're calculating that other than a lot of hand-wavy math. It will vary greatly depending where you are. If I'm in Vancouver and I access CDN or hosting resources from a massive datacenter located in WA or OR, it's highly likely that 98% of the energy for my home, and all of the telecom/ISP sites in between, and the datacenter itself are all hydroelectric powered.

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#22

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

Baeocystin wrote: post #19
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loaded in well under 2 secs for me (no JS, all ads blocked, not that there will be on the bbc)

Makes me wonder just how much power/carbon waste goes in to ads vs content on the modern web.

Tell you what, why don't you give it a try? It should take 30 secs to disable JS on firefox, then see how it feels, re-enable it afterwards. See what a snappy web can feel like (when it doesn't break, which is ~30% of the time).

I keep saying it, strange that nobody has ever said that they tried it. There seems to be some weird mental block around trying something new, even if easy to do and with possible benefits. Why is this?

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#23

Post by adrianN »

walrus01 wrote: post #21
magnio wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Website Carbon Calculator, each page view produces 2.22g of CO₂. I think it would be lower if you use an ad blocker. https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/bbc-com-future-article...

I really have no idea how they're calculating that other than a lot of hand-wavy math. It will vary greatly depending where you are. If I'm in Vancouver and I access CDN or hosting resources from a massive datacenter located in WA or OR, it's highly likely that 98% of the energy for my home, and all of the telecom/ISP sites in between, and the datacenter itself are all hydroelectric powered.

That power could be used elsewhere in your power grid. It probably makes sense to look at CO2/kWh averaged over the whole grid.

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#24

Post by Johnyma22 »

yaacov wrote: post #9

There was a proposal to do this to the California aqueduct, but it turns out they don’t lose much water from evaporation and it would be cheaper to put them on land. https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/could-the-califor...

"don't lose much water" in CA... I doubt the CA case study lends itself too much to the Indian environment.

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#25

Post by xaedes »

newyankee wrote: post #6

This helps control evaporation losses as well, the water flow in canals is more predictable which helps. Also there is a great potential for floating solar especially behind existing hydro as the grid infrastructure almost exists.

A good point from a dead comment : "I wonder how this would affect the climate, the rains especially."

Reducing water evaporation should have some kind of effect. Does anybody know of weather and/or rain effects due to these evaporation preventing floating black balls on reservoirs?

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#28

Post by usrusr »

Baeocystin wrote: post #19
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loaded in well under 2 secs for me (no JS, all ads blocked, not that there will be on the bbc)

Makes me wonder just how much power/carbon waste goes in to ads vs content on the modern web.

Close enough to all/none if you ignore the cost of content production.

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#29

Post by usrusr »

xaedes wrote: post #25
newyankee wrote: post #6

This helps control evaporation losses as well, the water flow in canals is more predictable which helps. Also there is a great potential for floating solar especially behind existing hydro as the grid infrastructure almost exists.

A good point from a dead comment : "I wonder how this would affect the climate, the rains especially." Reducing water evaporation should have some kind of effect. Does anybody know of weather and/or rain effects due to these evaporation preventing floating black balls on reservoirs?

Less evaporation losses means more water will reach irrigation networks where it will evaporate anyways (either before or after temporarily becoming part of a plant)

Re: The ‘solar canals’ making smart use of India’s space

#30

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #22
Baeocystin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder just how much power/carbon waste goes in to ads vs content on the modern web.

Tell you what, why don't you give it a try? It should take 30 secs to disable JS on firefox, then see how it feels, re-enable it afterwards. See what a snappy web can feel like (when it doesn't break, which is ~30% of the time). I keep saying it, strange that nobody has ever said that they tried it. There seems to be some weird mental block around trying something new, even if easy to do and with possible benefits. W…

I'm going to ask again if someone would PLEASE give this a try and tell me what you think. Just 15 minutes, no more, just so we can get an unbiased opinion (ie not mine).

If it turns out to be tolerable then you've got a trivially easy way of cutting carbon use, a little.

thanks

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