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How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#31

Post by ctdonath »

To compare, I’m a solar powered user. All summer I work outside on a notebook writing apps, powered by several combinations of solar panels and matching batteries.

On the whole it works. Excess PV panel capacity charges battery, ensuring enough backup to run during unfavorable angle, cloud cover, weather, shadows, and night.

Most common issue is re-positioning panels every few hours to favorable angles & avoiding shadows.

Greatest concern is prolonged cloud cover, depleting batteries after a couple days of insufficient light. The cost of preparing backup against “multiple standard deviations” is substantial, buying rarely used batteries (and extra panels to charge them in reasonable time) - hundreds of $ of gear (2-4x base cost) used maybe one day a month. Winter makes this outlier the norm, magnified by its own outliers.

Also, one becomes very aware of app power consumption. Found one web page (AgileCraft logout page) pulls 30 ways for no good reason.

I’m sure solar powered web server would face comparable issues. Depleted batteries are a brick wall, waiting for not just light & time to recharge, but to run the system ASAP.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#33

Post by mpfundstein »

hannob wrote: post #26

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…

before you'll be able to run you need to learn to walk u know....

at least this shit is inspiring

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#34

Post by MuffinFlavored »

ctdonath wrote: post #31

To compare, I’m a solar powered user. All summer I work outside on a notebook writing apps, powered by several combinations of solar panels and matching batteries. On the whole it works. Excess PV panel capacity charges battery, ensuring enough backup to run during unfavorable angle, cloud cover, weather, shadows, and night. Most common issue is re-positioning panels every few hours to favorable angles & avoiding sha…

Can you link to what panel/battery/supporting hardware/etc. you purchased + used?

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#35

Post by m_coder »

alacombe wrote: post #10
m_coder wrote: post #2

>>More likely is that we eventually switch to a more poetic small-scale compressed air energy storage system (CAES). Please do this!! I want to see that article on CAES actually worked out in real life not just theory with no howto steps .

City-wide application are discussed regularly here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760 Also online.. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-o... Down the line, problems are efficiency and all the downside of working with gases.

Yes, I did read those articles and it has me very interested. What I would be more interested in is some sort of applied DIY situation. Something I could cobble together myself and it would have the potential to get the efficiency that is discussed in lowtech mag. It seems to me that with the sorts of articles they write, I would be able to follow along on a small scale if I wanted. In particular, how do you make a compressor going one way and a generator going the other?

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#36

Post by jedberg »

kragen wrote: post #29
jedberg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I meant anycast (fixed above). And it's true, the other options would work too, but there would be added latency.

With DNS failover there is only added latency during the time interval between when a server goes down, causing the DNS to get updated, and when the dead IP times out everywhere, which can easily be a few minutes. If the server can anticipate that it is going to go down it can remove itself, and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency.

> and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency.

In my experience running large websites, that's about 10% of the internet, if not more.

When I made a DNS change, only about 70% of the traffic dropped off in the TTL. The rest took anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks (and some never dropped off, we had to just let them fail after a while).

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#37

Post by dragontamer »

jedberg wrote: post #13

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…

For more local purposes, solar + wind is a nice complement. Wind is strongest at night, while solar is best in the day.

Nuclear usually needs to keep running, and fewer people use electricity at night (unless you live in Philippines where it is common to only run AC at night to save on electricity).

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#38

Post by ctdonath »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #34
ctdonath wrote: post #31

To compare, I’m a solar powered user. All summer I work outside on a notebook writing apps, powered by several combinations of solar panels and matching batteries. On the whole it works. Excess PV panel capacity charges battery, ensuring enough backup to run during unfavorable angle, cloud cover, weather, shadows, and night. Most common issue is re-positioning panels every few hours to favorable angles & avoiding sha…

Can you link to what panel/battery/supporting hardware/etc. you purchased + used?

GoalZero.com : Boulder 100 Briefcase, Nomad 20, Nomad 13, & Nomad 7 panels; Yeti 400, Yeti 100, Yeti 100AC, Yeti 50, & Guide 10+ batteries. Running a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhones, & iPad Pro.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#39

Post by ctdonath »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #30

I see they're still using dithered PNGs instead of JPEGs for images. The first time I saw it (I don't have the numbers handy now) I ran some experiments and it seemed clear to me that a JPEG would work much better, and if dithered PNGs were really a good option, more people would be doing them. This was on photographs, where JPEGs are kind of a home-run and PNGs aren't good no matter what you do to them. This time th…

“At scale” has to include several standard deviations of insufficient light/wind availability. When batteries deplete, you have no power. This gets very expensive when you’re backing up for cases that won’t happen more than one day per year (or decade).

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#40

Post by nothal »

hannob wrote: post #26

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 think that seeing things like this should serve more as a point of inspiration, not a full faceted solution.
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