Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
1–10 of 195 posts
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#2Interesting! Although there aren't any metrics on how much load is actually balanced this way. The only plot doesn't have y-axis labels.
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#3what a pity to know that they will be mining more of our personal data when we are chilling with the sunshine.
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#4Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was.
Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load.
Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#5COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#6FWIW, for the build2 project we host our own CI servers on premesis and the power supply is supplemented by a solar array. We have configured our daily package rebuild window to coincide with the maximum solar output so that on a sunny day it is all done using renewable energy.
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#7Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now.
Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams).
Still, i'd love to see this concept made a lot easier for the average consumer. Many people already have smart thermostats, why can't that talk to my power generation company and allow me to over heat/cool when the impact is lowest? Why can't my dish washer run automatically when it would impact the world the least? Why can't my EV automatically charge when power is most available?
I know most of those things are possible, but they sure as hell aren't easy, and IMO they won't truly have an impact until they're on by default and don't require the user to do much of anything.
These things seem like they are easily doable, but we just need the different industries to work together to come up with ways to have all of this stuff interoperate.
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#8Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me!
Seems like getting rid of the middleman at a basic, physical level. Power is available for very low cost at certain times. So let's time-shift computation that doesn't have to be done at a specific time! Really, it's just the same trick as time-shifting your EV charging and other power draws. It costs money to run battery banks and inverters. Let's just take them out of the process, where we can.
"The best part is no part." -- Elon Musk
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#9COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
Hey Martin, this is super cool! Congrats on the collab!
Would you mind commenting on what your tech stack is like? Looking at your github repo it seems like you're combining a lot of data sources. Can you comment on your approach? Also, considering this collaboration, are you running on GCP?
Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
#10COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
That looks like a good opportunity for an (at least tangentinally related) big shout-out to your great electricityMap (https://www.electricitymap.org/map) website!
I wish there would be more countries covered (in particular Switzerland), but I guess you depend on the live data being provided in these countries.