Energy used for Cloud Computing

Large-scale data centers place tremendous demand on the electrical grid, a demand that is increasing rapidly as cloud computing becomes more common as a business strategy for many corporations. As more than one pundit has pointed out, the source for powering these data centers is often generated by coal--modern technology energized by an eighteenth century fuel that is a global warming nightmare.

Heather Clancy in a ZDNet post thinks that corpoations ought to make a strong effort to boost the visibility and acceptance of renewable energy sources, as in an example she cites about Kaiser Permanente and Recurrent Energy installing solar power systems.

When they are completed, the systems will carry approximately 10 percent of the power load at sites in Vallejo and Santa Clara in Northern California and Fontana and San Diego in Southern California.

Kaiser is developing the systems with Recurrent, which will actually own them. Kaiser will buy the power through solar power purchase agreements. And, low and behold, this will make recurrent eligible for a 30 percent tax credit because Kaiser is a not-to-profit organization.

Kaiser will look to additional renewable energy sources in the future to continue building out its distributed system.

So far, Kaiser has managed to save up to $10 million per year in its energy conservation efforts.

The inspiration for this piece, a Greenpeace report on the ramafications of cloud computing, suggests that industry IT leaders, such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, Facebook, and Apple, ought to begin wielding their influence to speed the adoption of renewable energy systems.

Bugatti: The Last Grand Accomplishment of the Age of Oil

Those of us born in the 50's or 60's (maybe even later) are so thoroughly enraptured by the mystique of the automobile that—even though the reality of peak oil is as inescapable as a future visit from the grim reaper—we still can't totally escape the visceral admiration of machines that can propel bodies at fantastic speeds with unflappable precision.

WIRED reviewer Joe Brown did a nice job of straddling the line between fantasy and irony in his piece, Peak Oil: Bugatti Makes a Car for the Ages. This machine is at once a monument to excess and gluttony while at the same time being an example of the engineering expertise of a species that celebrates the sheer joy of making things, with nary a concern how those things will affect the planet as a whole. Nuclear bombs, genetically modified crops, nanotechnology, and a host of other engineering marvels fit under this umbrella. It creates a certain schizophrenic point of view—a perspective that makes it possible to see the Apollo moon landings with a sense of awe and simultaneously condemn the incredible amounts of money consumed while people around the world starve.

At the article's close, Brown adds a nice summation:

Maybe we'll idolize maglevs next. Maybe Tesla will have its day on a Trapper Keeper with a juice box that tops 250. But whatever we're drooling over next year, whatever makes its way onto the dorm-room walls and man-children's screen-savers, it won't run on petrol. Unless it's still a Veyron: the last king of the gas-guzzlers, forever the greatest. All hail.

It gets 10 miles per gallon, but it sure is something.

Algae Powers Venice

Work is underway in the City of Venice to build a 40-megawatt power plant that runs on fuel made from algae. Expected to be finished by mid-2011, the power plant will supply roughly 50 percent of the city's electricity requirements.

As reported in ecoworldly:

The algae will be cultivated in laboratories and put in plastic cylinders where water, carbon dioxide, and sunshine can trigger photosynthesis. The resulting biomass will be treated further to produce a fuel to turn turbines. The carbon dioxide produced in the process will be fed back to the algae, resulting in zero emissions from the plant. “Venice could represent the beginning of a global revolution of energy and renewable resources. Our goals are to achieve the energetic self-sufficiency for the seaport and to reduce CO2 emissions, including those one produced by the docked ships”, says the president of the seaport of Venice Authority, Paolo Costa.

Finding ways to extract energy from nuisance plants and biomass waste may be an effective means to move a few steps closer to zero emission energy production.

The Energy Impacts of Meat

If you put the ethical issues aside (not an easy thing to do, because the ethical issues are monumental), the subsidized production of a commodity that Americans consume two or three times a day has far-reaching impacts. Meat, a commodity that contributes to a large number of environmental and health problems, is becoming increasingly popular outside the U.S. as well, a fact that is multiplying livestock production problems.

In an article written for the New York Times, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, Mark Bittman (who strenuously reminds readers that he is not a vegetarian) outlines the problem from a number of perspectives.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

So how much energy does meat production require? The answer is eye opening.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

Averting global warming is going to take more than switching light bulbs and driving a hybrid. It's going to require re-examining some of our most cherished habits--including the kind of food we put in our mouths.

Simple Measures to Reduce Energy Use

Conventional wisdom (that is, the specious analysis that is generally circulated in the mainstream media) typically looks at our national energy needs as a matter of building more power plants, producing different kinds of fuels, or progressing slowly toward more use of renewables. The notion of doing more with less doesn't usually get a lot of coverage, although there are a number of efficiency studies demonstrating how we can successfully meet many of our future energy needs simply by eliminating waste.

As reported in the New York Times (and posted on truthout), The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department conducted a research study recently where 112 households in the Olympic Peninsula were equipped with digital thermostats and computer controllers linked to other appliances, such as water heaters and clothes dryers. Controls for all of these energy-consuming items were also connected to the Internet.

The study results indicated surprsingly impressive energy savings over the span of a year, with the potential for tremendous long-term savings:

Over a 20-year period, this could save $70 billion on spending for power plants and infrastructure, and avoid the need to build the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants, say scientists at the federal laboratory.

The demonstration project was as much a test of consumer behavior as it was of new technology. Scientists wanted to find out if the ability to monitor consumption constantly would cause people to save energy - just as studies have shown that people walk more if they wear pedometers to count their steps.

More efficient cars, smarter heating and cooling of buildings, appliances used more wisely and deliberately--all of these measures clearly can substantially reduce our need for a drastic increase in the number of power plants and the frantic, often misguided quest for new fuel sources.

Untapped Energy Solutions: Co-Generation

With a little ingenuity and some rethinking of the centralized infrastructures that dominate power distribution in the U.S., we could go a long way toward both easing climate change threats and stretching our energy resources. Waste and inefficiency are unforgivable at this stage of our accelerating descent into energy hell. This is the persepctive underlying Bill McKibben's latest article in Orion Magazine, The Unsung Solution, which explores the benefits of tapping waste heat from manufacturing processes to generate power.

McKibben profiles a firm, Recycled Energy Development, quoting one of the principals, Sean Casten, who said:

“Let’s look at Florida. Here’s a Maxwell House coffee roaster in Duval County. They’re roasting beans, so all that heat has to go somewhere. About twelve megawatts’ worth of potential electricity is going up the stack. Basically, there’s a network of tubes with water in them. The heat would hit one side of it, produce steam, and we’d use that to turn a turbine and generate electricity. It’s like any other boiler, just without a flame, because the heat is already there.”

This is not a poorly understood emerging technology that requires vast development resources and risky investment strategies. Co-generation techniques have been in use for decades and are a proven, successful means of making maximum benefit of available power resources. The article continues:

Does that sound suspiciously pie-in-the-sky? Casten can drive a few miles from his Chicago office to an East Chicago plant run by Mittal Steel. A few years ago, a predecessor energy-recycling company installed this kind of equipment on the smokestacks of the plant’s coke ovens. In 2004, this single steel plant generated roughly the same amount of clean energy as was produced by all of the grid-connected solar collectors throughout the world. Casten’s company estimates that recycling waste heat from factories alone could produce 14 percent of the electric power the U.S. now uses. If you took much the same approach to electric generating stations you could, says Casten, conceivably produce the same amount of energy we use now with half the fossil fuel.

Let’s cut the numbers in half to account for corporate enthusiasm. Hell, let’s cut them in half again. You’re still talking about one of the most effective ways to cut carbon emissions that we’ve got, a mature technology ready to go. You’re talking about a recycling project infinitely more important than all that paper we’ve been bundling and glass we’ve been rinsing for the last two decades. Why isn’t it happening everywhere? The first answer, says Casten, is that very few companies spend much time thinking about their waste heat. “How much time do you think about the useful things you could be doing with your urine?” asks Casten. “The guy at the coffee roaster is spending all day focused on roasting coffee beans so they taste good.”

Laws governing the operation of electrical utilities, which in most communities are essentially monopolies, tend to protect the profits of the utilities above all else, McKibben asserts. In such an environment, change is difficult or impossible. Therein lies the rub. Our energy salvation may require restructuring the counter-productive regulations that have gotten us into the predicament we're in today. The solutions are available if we're smart enough to utilize them.

The Greatest Gas Guzzler of All

When it comes to burning oil in volumes that stagger the imagination, the United States Pentagon garners top honors, giving new meanings to terms like waste and inefficiency. As reported in Tomdispatch.com, putting a wrapper around the words of Michael Klare, future wars may be fought just to fuel the machines that fight them. A quick excerpt:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million -- and yet it's a gross underestimate of the Pentagon's wartime consumption.

It's hard not to grind your molars to dust at the absurdity of this equation.