How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
lowtechmagazine.com

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. As well as the network and content being resilient to local changes in climate events (flash floods, fires, etc). And possibly bringing access to more areas where network connectivity is slow, expensive and unreliable.

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 and can run on an STM32F103. (I'm not sure if the Contiki webserver fits on an STM32F103, though; Contiki is pretty customizable.) They say they have 865,000 yearly visitors, but unfortunately don't explain how many hits that is; if we assume it's 1000 hits per visitor, that's 865 million hits a year, which is 27 hits a second, in the ballpark of what you could do on a 486. So it ought to be within the capacity of a 72MHz 32-bit STM32F103, which uses 50 mA going full tilt — 165 mW if you're running on 3.3 volts. That's better than an order of magnitude less power.

This is probably an interesting experiment to do for resiliency purposes, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense for reducing resource usage in this case. If we assume "Kris De Decker" is the name of a human body that dedicates most of its time to writing this magazine, well, that body dissipates about 100 watts. You could run the magazine on 102 watts by using a 2-watt webserver, or 100.17 watts by using a 165 milliwatt webserver. But if they eat beef once a week, well, beef wastes about 96% of its energy input, converting it to cow poop instead of food; that's 4.8 watts of beef produced from 119 watts of soybeans and corn. By replacing one of those beef meals per year with a vegetarian meal — eating beef 51 times a year instead of 52 — they could reduce their energy consumption by more than the entire web server power budget.

Or, to look at it another way, eating beef once a year uses as much power as the web server: 72 MJ/year, 2.3 W.

(I'm ignoring the embodied-energy calculation because the article shows that it's small compared to the ongoing power use.)

Average marketed energy consumption in the rich world is about 10 kilowatts per person, although typically that figure doesn't include things like corn and beef. Interestingly, in another article https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-i... the author explains that their laptop uses 20 watts of power, and their external monitor uses 16.5 watts, together 18 times the power used by the web server. If they could manage to do their writing with a USB keyboard plugged into an Android cellphone with an OTG cable, they could probably reduce that to 3 watts, a reduction of 11 times the web server's entire power (although maybe they only write 8 hours a day, so maybe it's only 4 times.) If they could use an incrementally updated e-ink screen, an option I explored in some detail in Dercuano, they could use another order of magnitude less still.

I feel like sustainability is a bigger question than resource use, though. I can't sustain the laptop I'm writing this on because it contains parts I don't know how to fix, even if I could supply it all the energy it needs with like a bicycle generator or something. In fact, nobody in my country knows how to build a laptop like this; a lot of the knowhow only exists in China, and other parts only exist in Korea. Exploiting its CPU backdoors requires knowledge that is presumably only available in certain companies in the US. These seem like much bigger sustainability concerns to me than the really quite minimal power usage of the machine, which is a tiny fraction of the power usage of, for example, a candle (≈80 watts).

Anyone else seeing this? Looks like they allow me to access it via https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is..., but if they actually banned my IP specifically I don't really want to violate their wishes, I just wonder why I'm banned :/