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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?

#91

Post by generalpass »

alex_young wrote: post #5

Even with the additional upfront expense, lithium batteries would make this setup much more efficient due to the larger allowed cycles and would also reduce the environmental impact due to the low impact nature of lithium extraction.

Lithium-cobalt can be profitably recycled due to the value of the Cobalt, but nobody wants to pay the price for the batteries at that size.

Lithium batteries can explode when the lithium comes in contact for water. I'm not clear on what the waste stream is doing for all the non-cobalt chemistries (mostly manganese).

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#93

Post by seanwilson »

Does anyone know of any good sources of information about which web hosts are the most sustainable?

I had a quick look and didn't find an obvious resource online to study. I messaged a couple of popular web hosts and each said they don't have any specific policies on sustainability or any energy usage stats to share.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#94

Post by TheEnder8 »

This misses the elephant in the room. Every major tech company is already pushing hard towards renewable and/or zero carbon. The problem isn't tech, it's the other companies (chemical, oil, agriculture, etc).

https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/

https://sustainability.google/environment/

https://news.microsoft.com/climate/

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#95

Post by [deleted] »

lowtechmagazine wrote: post #78
philipkglass wrote: post #56

The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules. The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of solar panel." The source for that assertion is this article from 2017: "Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot System" https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3... Tha…

Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3 http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final... Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much sm…

[deleted]

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#96

Post by mrpopo »

TheEnder8 wrote: post #94

This misses the elephant in the room. Every major tech company is already pushing hard towards renewable and/or zero carbon. The problem isn't tech, it's the other companies (chemical, oil, agriculture, etc). https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ https://sustainability.google/environment/ https://news.microsoft.com/climate/

The problem is, of course, tech. As explained in the article, websites have become more energy-hungry over time. This is partly explained by the rebound effect (Jevons paradox). More efficient hardware leads to faster page load times. Unfortunately, the result was heavier pages loading roughly as fast, or even slower, than old-school websites.

Unless facebook, AWS, google and Microsoft start encouraging more efficient webiste designs (static websites, limited library usage, no more 1MB fonts, etc.), the work done by the author is absolutely relevant. Limited hardware capacity has always been the most reliable way to limit energy usage.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#97

Post by lightedman »

kragen wrote: post #88
lightedman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, I guess I must be totally wrong, then. Thank you for the generous correction!

You're welcome. Even without MPPT inverters/chargers in the mix, you can take a 1,000V (maximum US NEC allowed IIRC) string of panels (obviously in series) fully black out one cell out of hundreds, and your entire system will do nothing (assuming your panels do not have bypass junction boxes and are straight-series.) That blacked out cell essentially acts like a full clog in a pipe - nothing will pass because of that 'dead' cell, until you remove that whole panel and replace it or bypass it.

We test by shading different cells at a known light level, and seeing how far the panel as a whole deviates from our expected baseline. Usually what we'll find is that a cell hadn't had its ribbon bars properly soldered while in the tab/string machine, so the shading of the cell dramatically reduces performance. You can't catch this kind of defect easily in an EL tester, as usually you've got enough contact between ribbon and cell to get the entirety of the cell to emit light, thus hiding defects from soldering. So we implemented that shading test to root out bad cells/bad soldering jobs. Quite proud of having thought of that testing methodology, because I've not seen any other company test panels in that manner.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#98

Post by zrm »

gwbas1c wrote: post #15
agentultra wrote: post #3

I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for it though. The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power, efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications.…

> I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? This is pure speculation on my part, but probably much less efficient. In order to make the p2p network reliable, you'd need many more copies floating around. I also suspect that "finding" your data is more energy intense compared to basic DNS lookups.

It's possible to use erasure coding to avoid needing that many more copies. With 75% erasure blocks you can lose any 75% of the nodes hosting the data without compromising availability, and that only requires the equivalent of four copies. Moreover, distributing that number of copies has negligible overhead when data is requested much more often than it's modified, as is normally the case.

It's also possible to cache lookups in the same way as DNS by having larger nodes cache the lookup data and having smaller nodes query them, so that the most common queries are satisfied using a single request to a lookup cache.

Meanwhile the advantage of a P2P network is that most of the nodes are client devices which would have been powered on regardless, instead of needing additional devices dedicated only to hosting data.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#100

Post by toast0 »

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…

Getting one anycast IP really means getting a /24, which is pretty expensive. I would definitely go with a DNS solution instead, even though some users are going to be stuck behind brain dead caches that don't follow the TTL at all. Like others, I have seen traffic continue for weeks after a DNS change.
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