Before Eco-Responsibility was Cool
Wednesday Dec 07, 2005
Hey Scott, I was eco-responsible before before eco-responsibility was cool. Not like a friend who endeavored to live so that everything required for life, from food to energy to clothing, could be produced on a single plot of land a few meters square. No, I'm the type of "green" who doesn't want to give up anything, but hears his mother's voice: don't waste, leave some for the next person (or the next generation).
Power from Sun - the real sun
The electricity crisis and rolling blackouts of 2000-2001 hit us here in San Diego before the rest of the west. Day after day while working I kept a window open on the CalISO system status page to anticipate blackouts. It was obvious then, well before the Enron revelations, from the way generating capacity went offline when demand neared capacity that somebody was gaming the system.
We bought a rooftop photo-voltaic generating system sized to meet our household needs over the course of a year. Economically it was about a break-even proposition amortized over the life time of the solar panels verus the current price of electricity per kW-hour. We didn't give up anything, like cutting off appliances to stay within a power budget on a cloudy day. We stayed connected to the grid, spinning the meter backwards to sell electricity back to SDG&E during the day when they need it most, and buying it back at night when they have idle generating capacity. Win-win. Mostly it was insurance, that even if the Electric Robber Barons continued their looting, our price was fixed. We could leave our lights on and thumb our noses at Ken Lay. In the worst case, if the grid did become too unreliable we could always buy batteries and cut ourselves off the grid.
Driving Hybrid
We weren't interested in the Toyota Prius in 2003 - too small and too slow. But in 2004 it got really interesting, with as much interior room, as much acceleration, and better carrying capacity than my full size V6 sedan. Since a few hundred thousand people figured this out before I did, there was quite a waiting list, and I ended up with a 2005 model.
Power Efficient Computing
Sorry, I don't mean Sun UltraSPARC T1. What would I do with over 50,000 transactions per second in my home? Go over to Rich McDougal's cross reference if you want to read about CMT. This is about how I picked a PC from my buddies at HP. My goal really wasn't power efficiency; it was quiet. Power makes heat, heat needs fans, fans make noise, noise doesn't belong in my home. I already had an old Sony PC that did everything fine, except it sounds too much like a lawnmower when it runs. It has an Intel Pentium III chip; you know, back before they started really pushing the clock rate and the power.
So I started by looking at chip power consumption and SPECint2000 ratings. I picked an AMD Athlon processor which had good performance per watt, and nice power management features These features were supported by SuSE Linux, upon which my desktop JDS operating system was based. Several PC vendors used that chip, but colleagues recommended a Compaq Presario and they were right. That PC is so quiet that often if the screen is blacked out you can only tell it's running by spotting the green pilot light.
Little Green Data Center
Thorsten writes about running a Sun Fire T1000 powered by the solar panels on his house. His PV system looks about the same size as mine, but I generate a lot more electricity (3 kW DC, about 2.2 kW AC on a sunny day) - just an advantage of living in San Diego California instead of Hamburg Germany I suppose.
If he only cared about staying within a 1 kW power budget, Thorsten could build a home data center populated with Motorola 68040 processors: 6 watts at 40 MHz. Remember when an 040 was a fast machine? Remember when Macs didn't have fans? No wonder power consumption of data centers has grown so dramatically. But maybe he doesn't want to give up anything either, like thousands of transactions per second.
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Posted by Thorsten on December 12, 2005 at 02:18 AM PST #