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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

#91

Post by mattygh »

beckingz wrote: post #88
konschubert wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of various sizes as well.

Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone, because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense for their device companies or someone else to figure it out with utility and pay thousands of homeowners to agree to participate. Ohmconnect has a cool service in California.

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

#92

Post by mikepurvis »

walshemj wrote: post #80
mikepurvis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intelli…

I think when widespread overnight charging of EV's is a thing cheap evening electricity will be phased out

Even in that world, you'd still want a way to manage the load through the night so that you don't have all the chargers clicking on at 11pm and then when the cars are full have a few hours later, demand craters until morning.

With renewables the incentives for load management become even higher (per this article). The real next step after second-by-second billing would be setting up chargers with backfeeding capabilities/policies, so that you have an arrangement with your employer to charge your car at work on cheap daytime solar power, sell it back into the grid during the evening rush, then charge up again on overnight base load. Most EV batteries are way overspecced for what people need in daily use, so as long as you have a special "charge me to full and stay there" mode you can switch into, there'd be no reason (other than a bit of wear and tear) not to cycle your battery like this.

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

#93

Post by vlasev »

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.

Funny enough, on Mac, fn + down works, although the jumps are larger.

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

#94

Post by mattygh »

jtr1 wrote: post #89
konschubert wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Sense is great, but way overkill for demand response. Also, measurement needs to be billing grade accuracy, and I don't think Sense is going for that

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

#95

Post by harikb »

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…

Fridge is typically placed inside a house, unless we are talking about some alternate kitchen style. If so, ambient temp inside an apartment/house that is already heated or cooled is somewhat constant I assume. If so, where is the savings?

Also freezing it more in day doesn’t allow me to freeze less at night. If I don’t open the door at all, then the insulation is already taking care of this. What am I missing?

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

#96

Post by mempko »

Everyone wanting to really understand what is going on with the new green economy and these platitudes should watch Michael Moore's nee documentary he just released free on YouTube called Planet of the Humans. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

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

#97

Post by mempko »

martincollignon wrote: post #5

COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!

What's your opinion about Michael Moore's new documentary about the green economy? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

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

#98

Post by beckingz »

mattygh wrote: post #91
beckingz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of various sizes as well. Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone, because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense for their device com…

Demand response programs are great because of their scale and ability to provide incentives and command and control without directly interacting with the markets.

The real big thing is aggregating the aggregations. Distributed Energy Management Systems (DERMS) / Virtual Power Plant Management Systems are an active research topic.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

erentz wrote: post #90

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…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by shadowgovt »

gbear605 wrote: post #71
shadowgovt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon consumed in building a server is sunk cost and would be paid independent of whether the server does any kind of carbon-footprint-aware load shifting. Assuming the server is "sitting unused for 23 hours a day" is the wrong model for what this work changed. You're assuming the server could be running at 50% duty cycle vs. 100% duty cyle. It isn't; since we're talking the batch load, there's a roughly fixed amoun…

Suppose I'm building a new datacenter that I want to do some constant amount of work each day. It doesn't matter the time of day. I can either power it with solar power, in which case it will run for 1/Y of the day, or with coal power, in which case it will run 100% of the day. If it only runs for 1/Y of the day, then I will need to buy Y times as many computers in the solar scenario than in the coal scenario. If Y =…

But again, that's the thing. There is only 1/Y work to do in the day; it's batch work. The work in this case is constrained on the input side, not the CPU resources side; building 1 or 2 or 1,000 nodes to do the work won't decrease how expensive it is to do the work (in fact, building more computers than you need will make it cost more!).

... so why does Google build more computers than they need? Keep in mind that at Google scale, they're always and forever building "As many computers as we can possibly afford to" under the assumption that there will always be work for those machines to do. You and I may need to consider cost of manufacturing; Google doesn't. They always have the "Build datacenter infrastructure" cranked to an 11 (more accurately, they are following an N-year plan of construction that is extremely expensive to modify).

That's the breakdown between Google's way of thinking and the way of thinking that you've presented: Google's cost of manufacture is fixed. Those computers will be built, whether or not they're going to also then run green-streamlined batch jobs. The limiting factor on the batch work is only so much work is generated in a day, and the rate the work is completed is already good enough that completing it in half the time yields no marginal value. So may as well complete it using sun instead of coal.

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