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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

#81

Post by adrianmonk »

bizzleDawg wrote: post #18

It seems that it must be a really difficult problem to work out the optimal solution for having spare capacity to allow time/location shifting of workloads to minimize carbon per unit of compute. This Dell paper[0] suggests that 16% of the carbon over a typical server lifecycle is from the manufacture, so you probably don't want a server sitting there unused for 23 hours per day, since the overall carbon/compute rati…

> for having spare capacity to allow time/location shifting

Part of that calculation should be the amount of compute capacity headroom you'd choose to have anyway even if you didn't care about carbon.

Compute demands can vary from one day to the next. Maybe tomorrow people uploaded 3 times as many YouTube videos as they did today. Maybe load varies based on day of the week or day of the month. To some extent, you can smooth that out by delaying jobs, but there are practical limits.

You also want some spare capacity just for safety. Efficient utilization is important, but things like performance regressions or spikes in demand can happen.

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

#82

Post by maelito »

WalterBright wrote: post #78
205guy wrote: 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…

> A great deal How much in % ?

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

#83

Post by konschubert »

WalterBright wrote: post #78
205guy wrote: 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…

This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters.

Does this exist anywhere in the world?

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

#84

Post by mtrovo »

vladd wrote: post #79
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…

> 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),…

I think this is much more useful to a cloud provider than to a customer.

As a customer I think you could configure somethings like you said using spot instances on AWS but that’s it, you’re going to save some small amount of dollars in a year but if you account for the engineering hours needed to set this up maybe is not really worth it.

As a cloud provider you could juggle your client between datacenters depending on the load and price of energy over there. A flat rate for a cloud region means that there’s an opportunity for arbitration between datacenters that could be an increase of thousands in profits on their side.

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

#85

Post by skybrian »

uoaei wrote: post #52
skybrian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's more a continuum than a dichotomy, since there can be more or less regulation. A regulated market is usually considered to be capitalism. For example, the US stock market is regulated by the SEC. But it does get nebulous as you increase the scope and goals of regulation.

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

#86

Post by golemiprague »

205guy wrote: 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…

Isn't is something water heaters are doing for ages? They optimise for price, not for sun but that's what matter for most people.

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

#87

Post by mattygh »

konschubert wrote: post #83
WalterBright wrote: post #78

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…

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

Not true, it would work with hourly pricing. Still requires smart meters but those are something like 60-70% of homes in the US now. Even without real time or time of use based pricing, load shifting can still be valued and paid for as a service. Look up Demand Response: >$1Bn market in the US.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

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

#88

Post by beckingz »

konschubert wrote: post #83
WalterBright wrote: post #78

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…

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

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

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

#89

Post by jtr1 »

konschubert wrote: post #83
WalterBright wrote: post #78

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…

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

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by erentz »

This is a really good argument for carbon taxation to appropriately increase the cost of dirty energy. Send the correct price signal everywhere rather than making your own software do the equivalent of looking out the window at the weather and trying to decide if it’s a sunny or rainy or windy or clam day, and thus if solar or wind generation is making the grid cleaner. Or if instead those are likely offline and the grid is dirtier today.

Best thing. Then you incentivize a cleaner grid overall and you don’t even have to worry eventually about this kind of thing.

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