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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?

#61

Post by bacon_waffle »

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…

One benefit of small projects is that they give people a sense of scale, and a better mental framework for thinking about energy use. Electrical power is something we don't (usually) see or physically interact with, this project gives an idea of what a PV panel or battery that can run a tiny computer looks and feels like.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#62

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jedberg wrote: post #48
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I didn't realize it was that large. :'( Do you think the advent of DoH will improve that situation?

I don't think so. DoH deals more with streamlining the transmission of requests and responses, but I don't recall any part of the RFC dealing with TTLs. You'll still be talking to your local DNS server with its own caching rules.

I thought part of the big deal with DoH was precisely that you don't use your local DNS server (or more importantly, your ISP's DNS server). If DoH effectively means that more people pull DNS straight from Cloudflare, then I would expect the TTL situation to improve.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#63

Post by ozim »

falcolas wrote: post #58
EGreg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, you can use a refrigerator at night... the cold IS the battery.

That makes me wonder the viability of using a peltier as the pump/sink for a temperature differential battery.

Peltier eficiency sucks, so not really an option.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#64

Post by agumonkey »

ip26 wrote: post #28
agumonkey wrote: post #11

side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)

As is often the case, the most obvious target for optimization (the computer, 1-2W) has already hit diminishing returns. Their biggest energy hog is the router (10W), which they aren't running on solar.

but what's the manufacturing process of router chips ? surely a router inner logic is way less than a rpi SoC so it could be trimmed down over time through simple smaller features .. ?

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#65

Post by Polylactic_acid »

kragen wrote: post #7

It's an interesting exercise. In some ways it's similar to what we were doing at Satellogic: a Satellogic satellite is solar-powered, runs on batteries, and contains computers running Linux. (All of that is public; I'm not revealing anything unpublished here.) They seem to be running on a Raspberry Pi that uses two watts, so they can run Linux. But a website wouldn't have to run Linux. Contiki includes a webserver an…

The posts on low tech magazine are interesting but I feel that the solar power idea doesn't make much sense. Why are we running an entire OS and device for a single static site? This could easily sit on a data center and use virtually no power and actually no power while its not being requested unlike a rpi that has to sit online constantly waiting for requests.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#66

Post by lightedman »

kragen wrote: post #59
lightedman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The panel voltage is pretty stable until the illuminance gets really low" I'd like to see what panels those are, because the ones I've built while working as a PV manufacturing tech, both mono and poly (roughly 21% efficiency,) will have greatly varying voltages with even the tiniest hint of cloud cover over one cell, even with the junction box working to help separate out sections of the panel to maintain better vo…

Is that the MPPT voltage or the open-circuit voltage? I was thinking of a near-open-circuit voltage (which is what you have if you're powering a 2-watt webserver from a 50-watt solar panel), but MPPT will vary a lot more. Also, covering 6% of your cells will drop your voltage a lot more than covering all your cells 6%.

Open circuit. This is one specific behavior we looked out for when testing panels before shipping, after the EL test, lamination, and junction box installation.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#67

Post by Polylactic_acid »

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…

The extra batteries can be justified because they reduce the load over the entire setup so maybe you could get by with half the batteries but you would be using the batteries twice as much and they would wear out twice as fast.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#68

Post by Polylactic_acid »

jandrese wrote: post #20
agumonkey wrote: post #11

side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)

You can run a fair bit of web traffic off of something like a Raspberry Pi, and you don't need a ton of battery to keep that running overnight. Heavy database driven websites probably won't be an option, but the bottleneck for static sites would likely be the Ethernet interface. In fact that's pretty much exactly what they did. 168Wh battery pack is a small Deep Cycle SLA. A 50w Solar Panel and associated charge cont…

I tried running an rpi on a lead acid battery and a 40w panel. It seemed to be running fine for the first 2 weeks but then I think it had a few days where it drained the battery to 0 which ruined it and then it was turning off every night. I'm not sure what to do with the setup now since it seems like lead acid is not the way to go but all of the DIY solar charge controllers use lead acid.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#69

Post by Polylactic_acid »

agumonkey wrote: post #64
ip26 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often the case, the most obvious target for optimization (the computer, 1-2W) has already hit diminishing returns. Their biggest energy hog is the router (10W), which they aren't running on solar.

but what's the manufacturing process of router chips ? surely a router inner logic is way less than a rpi SoC so it could be trimmed down over time through simple smaller features .. ?

Home routers are just a general purpose CPU (ARM or MIPS) running a trimmed down OS. Thats why you can install openWRT on a lot of them and run arbitrary code.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#70

Post by jandrese »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #68
jandrese wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run a fair bit of web traffic off of something like a Raspberry Pi, and you don't need a ton of battery to keep that running overnight. Heavy database driven websites probably won't be an option, but the bottleneck for static sites would likely be the Ethernet interface. In fact that's pretty much exactly what they did. 168Wh battery pack is a small Deep Cycle SLA. A 50w Solar Panel and associated charge cont…

I tried running an rpi on a lead acid battery and a 40w panel. It seemed to be running fine for the first 2 weeks but then I think it had a few days where it drained the battery to 0 which ruined it and then it was turning off every night. I'm not sure what to do with the setup now since it seems like lead acid is not the way to go but all of the DIY solar charge controllers use lead acid.

Did you use a deep cycle battery? Letting a standard lead acid battery go to 0 is a surefire way to kill it.
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