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Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Graeme » Mon 02 Apr 2012, 18:05:09

UN-backed study shows technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

The use of broadband in information and communication technology (ICT) can help the world transition to a low carbon-economy and address the causes and effects of climate change, according to a United Nations-backed report released today.
“Addressing climate change implies completely transforming our way of life, the way we work, the way we travel, shifting our model of development to a fairer, more sustainable model to ensure our survival,” said the Secretary-General of the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Hamadoun Touré, in relation to the report.

“We need to put at stake all the resources available to us, and mobilize the political will to turn discussions and negotiations into agreements and actions,” he added, in a press release announcing the release of the report, entitled ‘The Broadband Bridge: Linking ICT with Climate Action.’

The report aims to raise awareness of the pivotal role information and communication technology, particularly broadband networks, can play in helping creating a low-carbon economy. It also highlights the importance of public private partnerships in accelerating change.


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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Graeme » Mon 02 Apr 2012, 18:34:28

Can broadband save the world from global warming?

It is said that to limit global temperature rise to 2°C, emissions need to be capped at approximately 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020. However emission are likely to hit 53 gigatonnes by 2020. The ITU says that ICT and broadband-enabled applications could limit the total to just 45.2 gigatonnes by 2020.

The ITU's Broadband Commission Working Group on Climate Change has released a report The Broadband Bridge: Linking ICT with Climate Action for a Low Carbon Economy, which claims that ICT and broadband in particular could play a much greater role in reducing the world's output of greenhouse gases, if the right steps are taken.
The report makes 10 recommendations for - largely government - initiatives "to spur the kind of change that will result in a strong, integrated and bold approach to unleashing broadband's role in the networked, low carbon society of the future."

And it identifies "A lack of awareness about ICT and broadband's enabling role" as a key challenge going forward. "Policies and strategies will need to consider how to influence individual behaviour and raise awareness to enhance the uptake of broadband-enabled low-carbon solutions among consumers worldwide," the report says.


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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby ralfy » Wed 04 Apr 2012, 02:07:59

Unfortunately, the problem doesn't involve only the means of transmitting information but the threat of a resource crunch.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Graeme » Fri 06 Apr 2012, 01:22:40

Is cloud computing the next big energy saver for companies?

Cloud computing already has cut some businesses' IT costs. But a new report has found that it also could be the next big thing to help reduce their energy use.
The fourth annual Energy Efficient IT Report -- by technology products and services seller CDW -- calls cloud computing a possible “game changer” that's playing a growing role in energy efficiency.
For the report, CDW surveyed 760 people working in private businesses, nonprofits, schools and governments. Of these respondents, 62 percent agreed that cloud computing is an energy efficient way to consolidate data centers. That's up from slightly fewer than half of the respondents in 2010.


Cloud computing has been a hot topic in IT: Dell this week announced it will buy acquire cloud-client leader Wyse Technology, which claims that 200 million people use its products daily.

But how much energy savings are we talking about here? According to CDW survey respondents, virtualized servers or storage reduced energy use by 28 percent. That was the most popular type of cloud computing, with 65 percent of respondents already using virtualized servers, which essentially tap into unused capacity from various different servers to accomplish tasks.


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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby lper100km » Fri 06 Apr 2012, 13:47:54

Cloud computing:
Seems to me it might make CEOs and CFOs of companies who offload their transactions and data storage feel good but the overall effect on energy would be little changed. It just changes the location where energy is consumed. Is concentrating data from universal sources into monstrous server farm hotspots a smart thing to do?
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby radon » Fri 06 Apr 2012, 15:39:39

lper100km wrote:Cloud computing:
Seems to me it might make CEOs and CFOs of companies who offload their transactions and data storage feel good but the overall effect on energy would be little changed. It just changes the location where energy is consumed. Is concentrating data from universal sources into monstrous server farm hotspots a smart thing to do?


It should result in noticable energy savings due to the economies of scale. A simplified illustration - lighting. Say we have 27 disparate data centers each being a cube 10mx10mx10m, each consuming 1000kW for lightning (for the sake of the example) for their 10mx10m=100sq.m area.

Now assume that we consolidate them all in a single data-center. This would be 30mx30mx30m cube, with the area of 30mx30m=900sq.m, requiring, proportionally, 9000kW for lightning of the area. Meaning that the energy requirement grew ninefold: 9000kW/1000kW=9. But the memory capacity grew 27-fold.

You were previously spending 27*1000kW= 27000kW on lighting in your 27 data centers, and now you are spending 9000kW in a single center with the same memory capacity as the aggregate of those 27. Net saving of 18000kW.

The lighting energy requirement in this instance grows in square proportion, whereas the memory capacity grows in cube proportion.

For other energy consumption components the dependence may be more complex, but the principle is the same. The article actually quantifies the energy savings.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Graeme » Sat 28 Apr 2012, 19:41:26

The Intersection of Information and Energy Technologies

I believe that we will need great ingenuity to enable our planet to provide successfully for more than seven billion human beings, let alone the nine billion that will probably inhabit it by 2050, and I believe that information technology will make this ingenuity possible. Because of fluid marketplaces and an ever more globalized economy, nearly every important resource is becoming scarcer and more costly. Evidence of this is seen in the price not only of oil but also of aluminum, concrete, wood, water, rare-earth elements, and even common elements like copper. Everything is getting more expensive because billions of people are trying creatively to repackage and consume these materials. But there is one resource whose price has consistently has gone down: computation.

The power, cost, and energy use involved in one unit of computation is declining at a more consistent, dependable rate than we have seen with any other commodity in human history. That declining cost curve must be tapped to lower energy prices—and I believe it will be. This will happen as people ask: To achieve my purpose (in designing whatever device or system), can I use more "atoms" or more "bits" (computation power)? The choice will have to be bits, because atoms are going up in price while bits are going down.

Here are a few examples. When designing a car, one can put a bit more effort into stronger, lighter-weight materials, which will increase energy efficiency but possibly drive up cost; or one can put a lot more effort into using computational power to run simulations that optimize the use of materials. Today, computational fluid dynamics allow a designer to accurately design a new shape of car, put it in a computer wind tunnel instead of a physical one, and test 1,000,000 body designs to improve fuel mileage by significant amounts. This was never before possible for those constructing vehicles.


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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Sat 28 Apr 2012, 22:49:14

lper100km wrote:Cloud computing:
Seems to me it might make CEOs and CFOs of companies who offload their transactions and data storage feel good but the overall effect on energy would be little changed. It just changes the location where energy is consumed. Is concentrating data from universal sources into monstrous server farm hotspots a smart thing to do?

The security implications seem monstrous, given the dismal record of much of industry and the mere lip-service they pay to security, even as they "compromise"/lose critical personal data of millions of people.

I absolutely refuse, for example, to file my taxes electronically (corporate server required) or to back up my private data "on the web".

It might work well from an energy efficiency standpoint, but until I see a HELL of a lot of evidence that data is actually practically (vs. just theoretically) SAFE AND SECURE -- I would opine that it might well be an absolutely terrible idea.

(And I'm a former mainframe computer geek with almost 2 decades in corporate mainframe database system programming experience).
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby dolanbaker » Sun 29 Apr 2012, 05:40:07

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
lper100km wrote:Cloud computing:
Seems to me it might make CEOs and CFOs of companies who offload their transactions and data storage feel good but the overall effect on energy would be little changed. It just changes the location where energy is consumed. Is concentrating data from universal sources into monstrous server farm hotspots a smart thing to do?

The security implications seem monstrous, given the dismal record of much of industry and the mere lip-service they pay to security, even as they "compromise"/lose critical personal data of millions of people.

I absolutely refuse, for example, to file my taxes electronically (corporate server required) or to back up my private data "on the web".

It might work well from an energy efficiency standpoint, but until I see a HELL of a lot of evidence that data is actually practically (vs. just theoretically) SAFE AND SECURE -- I would opine that it might well be an absolutely terrible idea.

(And I'm a former mainframe computer geek with almost 2 decades in corporate mainframe database system programming experience).


Yes, having all the eggs in one basket appears to be the way of more and more things these days!

Just wait until (another) one gets dropped, the list of earthquakes and the like that have caused global supply chain incidents has rapidly increased in recent years!

The latest one is a factory in Germany that produces a third of global production of a resin used in car brake parts. http://uk.autoblog.com/2012/04/20/globa ... tory-fire/

Are we really going to continue down the path of having all our production of vital hi-tech products in only one place and now we're going to store all our data there as well!
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 05 Apr 2014, 08:05:53

I stumbled across an article this morning about Norway investing a lot of money into building a server farm in an abandoned mine close to the arctic circle as a way of saving energy on keeping the server farm cool in the summer. My first thought was going to the Arctic is a bit extreme because server farms need very broad band communication links with the rest of the internet and the infrastructure costs have to be pretty substantial. Not to mention if the climate flips over into the hothouse condition the Arctic isn't going to be all that cold in the summer.

So I thought, where else could you put a server farm, near a large city, where the climate would be temperature friendly and allow passive cooling to deal with the temperature concerns of the Server Farm itself?

I looked up the highest altitude village in America, Alma Colorado, which sits at 10,000+ feet altitude and is just 65 miles from Denver, Colorado, the second largest Federal Data Hub in the USA. The town is very small right now, but easily close enough to be networked into the Internet via massive data trunks. The average July high temperature is only 71 degrees and a properly designed passive cooled building for these temperatures is easily compatible with a server farm. In the winter the deep cold is no problem for the electronics.

Yet I can find nothing in my data searches about this location even being thought of, nor any other mountain location in the USA, all I find are plans to put servers in Alaska and Norway in the far north.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby dolanbaker » Sat 05 Apr 2014, 09:29:10

If the mine is near the sea then it's relatively cheap to lay a few fibre cables to the US and the rest of Europe plus the fact that much of the electricity in that part of the world is hydro, it's a win - win situation.

As for hothouse mode, that's about as likely as a 2102 cataclysm!
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 05 Apr 2014, 11:14:39

That doesn't explain why nobody is looking in the mountains West of Denver or East of Los Angeles. Either or both cities are major Internet hubs and both have regional access to naturally cool mountain climates nearly perfect for passively cooling server farms. The energy savings alone should make them both attractive.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby dolanbaker » Sat 05 Apr 2014, 12:57:35

There are a large number of high tech companies setting up in Ireland, but they are doing it for tax purposes. A multi national company will move to where the tax take is the lowest assuming there are sufficient local staff with the right skills or they will import them. This is happening in Dublin right now.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 05 Apr 2014, 19:11:56

It so happens that I work for one manufacturer of the large servers that are often used in data centers. My workgroup's particular product line is the fully fault tolerant "database of record" machines that quietly count money in the background, in a location removed from the network backbone machines, in locations we keep secret. Both the database of record and the network backbones have remote backup sites, remote duplicate databases are common, as are non-volitile data backups sent to secure storage in odd places like salt mines.

Nowadays the network is pretty much immune to hardware failures, natural disasters, and even widespread sabotage. The modern failures you should worry about are Day 1 software bugs in widely used operating systems like Windows or Linux, deliberate cyber attacks by malicious people or groups, and thefts of personal data.

I don't keep things like my tax records or financial data on a computer that is network attached. I have one credit card used for online purchases, and I watch it closely - in fact I watch them all closely, because every card you use authorises purchases online over the web. Gone are the days when a card impression was accepted.

To tell the truth, even though it is fashionable to talk about "The Cloud" and we have been carefully coached at work on how to do so, I NEVER thought it was a good idea to have every file I care about in an anonymous location, encrypted in a way I don't understand, by somebody I don't know. So I don't partake of the cloud for anything more serious than the magazines, e-books, apps, and catalogs linked to my mobile devices. I archive on DVD several times a year, including the Android and iOS backup folders for all my mobile devices.

We have already been asked to provide data on those unfortunate residents of Oso, Washington, whose tweets and online purchases have quietly ceased since the mudslide. The authorities will use the information to assist in identifying bodies and body parts, via the DNA of relatives, and using the family data in the last census form you filled out. They will also go through your checking account and credit card records to see who your dentist is, and get your dental x-rays for the medical examiner.

I can't tell you how common such data requests are nowadays. There are even software packages that identify people by pattern analysis of their online habits, written words, sites visited, and so forth. It's easy to change your name, but hard to hide online - one of the things you are asked to do in one of the witness protection programs is to give up on using mobile devices and the Internet. I find that hard to imagine, my whole life has become divided into "BC" (before I had an online computer) and "AC" (after I had one).
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby ralfy » Sat 05 Apr 2014, 23:16:01

Increasing efficiency in computation becomes helpful given growing economic activity, which in turn requires increasing resource and energy consumption.
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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby Scrub Puller » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 00:14:40

Yair . . . I rely on the internet for much of my information/entertainment.

A growing problem is the fact the more information is out there the less everyone seems to know . . . the other problem is that the search engines are cluttered up with bullshit due to the fact that no one ever seems to take pages down.

For instance a search "latest engine in Nissan Patrol" is likely to yield information going back several years, doesn't all this useless information clutter up the system? . . . trawling through trash when you are doing serious research certainly takes up a lot of time.

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Re: Technology can help world move to low-carbon economy

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 08:15:08

Typing text in a search engine is SO 30 minutes ago. Verbally instruct your 'bot to crawl through the internet, then summarize the information for you.
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