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 varied too much to reliably run the loads they want.<p>Imagine when your fridge can do this: freeze extra cold when the sun is shining (or wind is blowing), don't run the compressor when it's not, only run the blower after you open the door to move that extra cold from the freezer, allow a slightly larger temperature range, and of course run as necessary to avoid spoilage. It's not a simple algorithm, it has to handle various timeframes, such as solar being a daily cycle except there's less in winter and can go for a week or more with very little (storm/overcast). Maybe it could also use a bit of "learning" like the Nest thermostats to also optimize predicted usage.<p>I know of one commercial product that sort of does this: the Zappi electric car charger. If you have grid-tied solar, it measures the current being fed back to the grid and adjusts the charging current to match. So if a cloud goes over your house, or you turn on a big appliance, the charger reduces the power to the car by the same amount. This maximizes the use of your own solar energy and minimizes the use of grid energy.<p><a href="https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/" rel="nofollow">https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/</a>
Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by engineers.<p>One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them bid on compute power. You could make the value virtual.<p>Or you could use real money. This is the premise behind EC2's spot instances. So when power is abundant, your prices drop and the relevant jobs kick off.<p>Using real market prices makes sense especially if you're renting out computing power, most customers will be happy to adjust workloads to save money.<p>Even if it's entirely internal, it's good to have a facility to "optimize for cost" and then report the savings. That's helpful to get the engineering resources devoted towards it, because "I saved $X" is a great bullet point to put in anyone's promotion packet or to base a bonus on.
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 grid is dirtier today.<p>Best thing. Then you incentivize a cleaner grid overall and you don’t even have to worry eventually about this kind of thing.
It seems that it must be a really difficult problem to work out the optimal solution for having spare capacity to allow time/location shifting of workloads to minimize carbon per unit of compute.<p>This Dell paper[0] suggests that 16% of the carbon over a typical server lifecycle is from the manufacture, so you probably don't want a server sitting there unused for 23 hours per day, since the overall carbon/compute ratio would be worse overall.<p>The post doesn't mention this metric, but it would be really nice to see something more detailed in time - especially with this overall efficiency of the server/datacentre lifecycle in mind, rather than just energy consumed from use.<p>[0]: <a href="https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon-footprint-poweredge-r640.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon...</a>
FWIW, 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.
(Off-topic, but regarding this site)<p>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.
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was.<p>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.<p>Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
While the green angle on this story is definitely good to highlight, I wonder if they're seeing any cost savings too?<p>Solar and wind on the grid increase supply, which should drive down price per KwH (of course, the equation isn't <i>quite</i> that simple, since demand in most of the world near human population centers is also highest during the day).
I've had an idea for the longest time that we should get rid of all the processes we've put in place to deliver everything "on-demand" and instead work with nature to get what we can.<p>What I mean by this is that instead of deciding "I want to drive 200 miles to the beach" and buying a tank of petrol, you would instead wait for favourable wind/solar conditions in order to "save up" the energy you need such that you can afford to drive to the beach. If you are unfortunate one year you might only end up with half of what you need, but you'll still be able to do something.<p>This goes for things like food too. Stop demanding the same food year round. Instead work with the seasons and eat what is available locally at that time of year.<p>This would be such a huge boost to happiness. You can't see light if it's light all the time. We just don't know how great our lives are because we simply expect it to all be available at all the time. Expectations are simply assimilated and become invisible very quickly. Not only that but it turns out that meeting these expectations comes at a huge price. Let's instead take what nature gives us, but no more.
I frequently criticize Google harshly for everything from search becoming more and more useless to pushing Chrome way to hard.<p>Seems some people at Google still hasn't got the memo yet that the "not evil" days are now a thing of the past. This looks amazing and more like something I would expect from old Google.
Not sure I’m very impressed by the plot they show here. The results during the day looks ok, but then they only translate two nightly peaks (low carbon) into one slightly larger... couldn’t even more of the work be done at night... also it is strange that there is a dip in both ends of the plot (maybe they just plot one 24h period, ignoring the previous day’s load and the next day’s load... I think it would be more appropriate to consider previous/day as well, as a 24h snapshot over a multiday view)<p>A more interesting measure would be the actual reduction in CO2 emissions.
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. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE</a>
Just a marketing device. Carbon neutral since 2007? Let me laugh in CO2, "green energies" are nowhere near carbon neutral. See planet of the humans by Moore.
Good idea, but I can't help but see this as marketing spin over the alternative title of the same story<p>"Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing"
I hope this doesn't add to much cost to their cloud customers' bills.<p>They've worked so hard to sell their AI solutions to the fossil fuel industry, lately, so they can help them extract and burn more oil and gas[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google-amazon-ai-oil-gas" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google-amazon-a...</a>
While the story is very positive and encouraging --<p>Unfortunately an unintended side consequence of these kinds of efforts (unless you're very conscientious about maintaining the correct incentives, generally through pricing) is sometimes that the gains in energy efficiency and savings are clawed back by an <i>increase</i> in overall energy consumption because it's gotten effectively cheaper to operate for the same number of compute cycles.<p>Just like with energy efficient LED light bulbs, although the overall energy use goes down, often it doesn't go down as much as it could have ideally, because people start lighting places that <i>didn't</i> have light before, because it's gotten so much more affordable to do so!<p>Or like when you add highway lane capacity, traffic gets worse...<p>Or in this case, the Google video engineers come up with new useless filters and resolutions to occupy the newly freed-up compute capacity.<p>Just something to be aware of. The people who do this have to monitor and put in place controls so that the outcome is what they intended. Otherwise people are more clever than you think.