The last day of my EcoRider trip as part of the Sun EcoTour saw me climbing hills in the Elm, a vast enchanted forest east of Braunschweig. The climbs drew half of the battery, or 600Wh of energy. How much brain energy I needed to constantly recalculate how many hills the battery may be able to serve in the middle of the forest was not recorded.
Update: Visualize the path of this day in Google Earth (KMZ, 19KByte)
Durch die Sun EcoTour auf uns aufmerksam geworden, hat Elita Wiegand mich eingeladen, eine Reihe von Gastblogs zum Thema "Green IT" auf ihrer Innovativ-In Plattform zu posten. Hier die Links zu meinen fünf Postings:
Since a dedicated server easily draws 5000 KWh electrical energy for power and cooling, which is (at least for the german energy mix) equivalent to four tons of carbon dioxide emissions, everybody should have a second thought on how much CO2 his or her web presence produces.
Just like Car Pooling, shared webhosting can save a lot of energy. But if we share a server with somebody else, how can we find out how many nighbours we have to calculate our carbon footprint? The answer: http://www.myipneighbors.com/
Let's see:
www.systemhelden.comseems to live on a decicated server, since it is sharing its IP address with www.systemhelden.de only.
But: systemhelden.com is running on a Solaris Container, so we are not using a physical server here.
One Shared Domain at Strato (that according to Strato only consumes just 1KWh per year) shares the IP address with 700-800 other domains. Combine that with many IP adresses configured in one server, and you get many thousand domains served from one server alone.
Our Sun EcoTour Blog shares the server with 17 other domains. Not bad. We just have to make sure to buy enough CO2 neutral energy to feed the Sun EcoRider and the web page.
End of 2006, wind turbines with 20,6 Gigawatts of rated power were installed in Germany, producing 30.600 GWh of electricity in 2006. That's a yield factor of 17%. Not bad.
So when adding a really big battery to the picture above, a wind turbine with 200 KW / 17% / (battery effciency 80%) = 1500 Kilowatts of rated power would be sufficient to feed a Blackbox. That's the smallest turbine Repower offers these days.
This is exactly why the Blackbox is not only clever engineering to cram as many servers as possible in a small footprint, but also an ecologically responsible concept. Do not bring (CO2 emission tainted) electricity to your datacenter, build your datacenter where CO2-free power is available!
The last five days, Martin covered the first 300 kilometers of his EcoTour through Germany. The vehicle carried the pedaleur himself, luggage for a week and provided protection from heavy rain showers. Looking at other vehicles meeting these specs, how does the EcoRider compare?
The CO2 emission of the EcoRider was calculated as if all the electric power would have been created by using a Diesel powered generator with an efficiency of 30%.
So even with homegrown inefficient power generation, using the EcoRider for dry trips with luggage up to 70km is better for the CO2 balance than everything else. And better for your health.
Before releasing our valiant driver into the first hop of the Sun Eco Tour from Hamm to Detmold next week, I head to undergo a test trip with the hybrid bike myself. So this morning, weather cold and windy, light rain added the mix, I went out for a ride of 30 Kilometers:
First lesson learned: To move a bike weighting 65kg you better have support of an electric engine to climb hills and generally sustain to go faster than 12km/h.
Eco Rider and an electric engine? Electricity is typically made from fossil fuels like coal, so we have to count CO2 emissions here. Let's see: The batteries were fully loaded this morning. According to the specs, that's 1296Wh full of finest electrical energy. After the 90-minute ride going 30km with mostly legwork but added electrical support to sustain a speed of 20km/h, the batteries were half-empty. So the non-human energy consumption of the Sun Eo Rider can be estimated at 2,2KWh per 100km. If that amount of electricity would have been created on a coal-fired power plant, 3,7kg of CO2 would have been created. A Toyota Prius creates 12kg of CO2 per 100km, but is able to carry five people plus luggage compared to one lonely biker and his bag in the Eco Rider. Not much of a difference on the CO2 balance sheet!
So we need to buy the electricity from a source who produces CO2 emission-free. 50KWh shold be sufficient for 2000 Kilometers. 50KWh - that's a light bulb switched on for 20 days. Or a small server (300 Watts), running for one week.
Next week the Sun Eco Tour starts in Detmold, home of Weidmüller, who won the Energy Efficiency Award in 2007 for saving 775.000kWh electrical power in their production plant every year. Detmold - that's more than 500km north of Munich, where I'm located. So what is the most eco-efficient way to travel to Detmold?
Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) offers a neat service that calculates the energy consumption and CO2 emission for every possible route. They compare going by rail (using their energy mix - Diesel and electricity created in coal, nuclear or hydro power plants), by car and by plane.
So this is my result for the Detmold trip:
24kg CO2 for the train trip, compared to 106kg for the car and 96kg for the plane. OK, that's Factor 4 - decision done - 5hrs, 20min on the train - finally time to read a good book again!
After unveiling his latest engineering masterpiece, the Sun Constellation System for HPC, Andreas von Bechtolsheim had a look at our little Eco Rider Hybrid Bike:
Constellation at TACC would be the most energy efficient HPC supercomputer. 529 Teraflops using 3 Megawatts would make it to #1 of the Green500-List by a wide margin. By the way - that's the same amount of energy one would need to drive 5000 Eco Rider Hybrid Bikes (30mph using 600 Watts of electric power, or - in power-saving mode - up to 20mph using human power alone)
Eco Responsibility is one of Sun's top priorities. To spread the word about our story, we are touring all over Germany this summer. The tour vehicle: A hybrid bike, the Sun Eco Rider. Typically moved forward on muscle power alone with support from an electric motor when hills get steep.
Tim, you can buy one of those from Aerorider in th...e Netherlands. With or without electric assistance. Aerorider did put on the Sun Green color for us, we did the logos.
The bike is heavy, but you stay dry inside.
What draws more energy: Filtering 1000 SPAM Mails or doing one Google Search Request? - Surprise: It's the Google Search Request with twice as much energy.
How much CO2 does a Google Search produce? Servers need electrical power. According to recent
studies, all servers in the US accounted for more than 1.2% of
the nationwide annual electrical power consumption, more than all TV
sets combined. And, according to Netcraft,
the number of internet hosts has doubled since then.
The majority of electrical power is created by burning fossil
fuels like coal, gas or oil, producing carbon dioxide CO2 ad global
warming. So how much CO2 does one Google search produce? One EBAY
auction or a SecondLife avatar? Or one blog on blogs.sun.com?
For a keynote at the german EBAY developer's conference I
calculated the following numbers and compared them to the CO2
emission of a Toyota Prius hybrid car and a human being:
Web service
CO2 emission
Same emission as
One Google search
6.8 grams
56 meters with the Prius or running 170 meters
One EBAY auction
55 grams
420 meters with the Prius or running 1275 meters
A SecondLife avatar, 24hrs „alive“ for one year
332 kilograms
2734 kilometers with the Prius or (as a human) just living for
one year
One blog post on blogs.sun.com
850 grams
7.6 kilometers with the Prius or running half a marathon
My calculations and the sources for the number of servers etc. can
be found in my presentation (in german language, but the numbers
should speak for themselves). Download ODF
here or PDF
here. Or view online the Flash presentation (created with StarOffice Flas Export) below:
As an example, this is how I calculated the surpisingly high blog
post on blogs.sun.com number:
We are hosting 66183 blogs in 3 years, running on two
T2000 (the best servers you can get when it comes to power
efficiency).
A pair of Sun Fire T2000 servers draws 2*320Watts. Double that
number for cooling and infrastructure, so you need 33628KWh in three
years. That's 0.5KWh for every blog! One KWh electral power created
in a coal power plant creates 1700 grams of CO2 - so the global
warming effect of this blog is comparable to a runner running 21
kilometers (or sitting in front of his computer for one whole day).
Endlich ist es soweit. Die erste Folge von CSI:Computer Systems Integration (formerly known as Solution Center Live) ist online! In dieser Folge zeigen wir, wie man mit einem Laptop, Solaris 10, ZFS und ein paar USB-Sticks einen Storage Server X4500 für den Hausgebrauch bauen kann:
Wer es selber nachbauen möchte: Der Chefermittler persönlich schreibt über die technischen Hintergründe in seinem Blog.
|
|
|
|
ny - claim they can. 
gute Idee mit dem Video :-)