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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

#51

Post by toomuchtodo »

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.

> Although that being said we could just try to cover the earth with as many generators everywhere and then fully connect the grids.

This is the easier route: you do this by having as many businesses as possible purchase renewables PPAs, where they're specifically contracting for renewable energy.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/as-corporate-renewable-buyi...

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

#52

Post by uoaei »

skybrian wrote: post #44
ben509 wrote: 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…

It's good to an extent, but if optimization for cost gets too intense then it will seek out the flaws in market rules. This will be true whether machines or humans are doing the optimizing. I guess it's okay as long as the people making the rules have good monitoring and are watching out for weird exploits and fixing them. The flexibility to change the rules tends to be more common internally than externally where cu…

Tangent: this discussion is an interesting microcosm of the liberatarian/social-democratic dichotomy of economic theory. GP says a market will take care of itself, parent says not without significant regulation or else the perverse incentives will eventually be exposed and exploited.

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

#53

Post by supernova87a »

While the story is very positive and encouraging --

Unfortunately an unintended side consequence of these kinds of efforts (unless you're very conscientious about maintaining the correct incentives, generally through pricing) is sometimes that the gains in energy efficiency and savings are clawed back by an increase in overall energy consumption because it's gotten effectively cheaper to operate for the same number of compute cycles.

Just like with energy efficient LED light bulbs, although the overall energy use goes down, often it doesn't go down as much as it could have ideally, because people start lighting places that didn't have light before, because it's gotten so much more affordable to do so!

Or like when you add highway lane capacity, traffic gets worse...

Or in this case, the Google video engineers come up with new useless filters and resolutions to occupy the newly freed-up compute capacity.

Just something to be aware of. The people who do this have to monitor and put in place controls so that the outcome is what they intended. Otherwise people are more clever than you think.

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

#55

Post by mikepurvis »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #49
ben509 wrote: 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…

In the UK households used to be able to get economy 7 electricity, which meant cheap electricity at night (I'd guess for 7 hours?). I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be becoming available again. I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was going to do; but it seems not. More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in gen…

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 intelligent devices on the consumption side as an intelligent buffer.

It's goofy, but another one is situations where you have a lot of stored heat energy, thinking like pools, hot tubs, hot water heaters, etc— all those things could be activated in response to spot pricing with pretty simple policies (I want a shower of at least X degrees at 7am, I want the hot tub at at least Y degrees by 9pm, etc).

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

#56

Post by dkarp »

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.

bizarrely it's only the down button (not the up button)

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

#57

Post by gambiting »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #49
ben509 wrote: 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…

In the UK households used to be able to get economy 7 electricity, which meant cheap electricity at night (I'd guess for 7 hours?). I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be becoming available again. I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was going to do; but it seems not. More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in gen…

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 25-30p/kWh

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

#58

Post by icelancer »

dkarp wrote: post #56
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.

bizarrely it's only the down button (not the up button)

Yeah, was able to replicate this on Chrome 81.0.4044.113 on Windows. Weird.

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

#59

Post by awild »

Klathmon wrote: post #7
sambroner wrote: post #4

Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?

It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…

I imagine this could result in a feedback loop between the power plants scheduling and your devices scheduling if enough people use it.
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