[CAnet - news] Replacing electrical transmission lines with optical networks!

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
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One of the challenges of delivering renewable energy such as wind power or
solar systems is the high cost of the electrical transmission lines to carry
the power to where it is needed.  Unfortunately ideal solar and wind power
sites are rarely located near major urban centers.  Most renewable energy
systems produce relatively small amounts of power compared to a coal and
nuclear power plants, and as consequence the cost of the electrical
transmission line given the distances to reach renewable energy sites can
completely undermine the business case for deploying a renewable energy
system in the first place.

But maybe there is another solution of rather than building expensive
electrical transmission lines to link these remote renewable energy sites to
the electrical grid we instead move our cyber-infrastructure servers,
storage and other facilities to the renewable energy sites themselves and
link them with optical networks to the global information grid - the
Internet.

One of the fastest growing energy consuming sectors is information
communication technologies (ICT). It is estimated that ICT consumer upwards
of 9% of all the energy output in North America through direct electrical
consumption and cooling.  Cyber-infrastructure facilities, corporate server
farms, etc are major sinks for electrical power and cooling and are putting
enormous strains on the electrical systems of our cities, universities and
businesses.

With today's modern telecommunication facilities, there is no reason why
these cyber-infrastructure facilities and server farms need to be located in
close proximity with their users. High speed optical networks allow these
facilities to be located anywhere.  In fact many large corporations like
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others are already starting to collocate their
server farms to low cost energy sites around the world.

The obvious next step in this evolution is to collocate cyber-infrastructure
equipment and servers directly to the renewable energy sites themselves. And
rather than building expensive electrical transmission systems to connect
these renewable energy sites to the electrical grid, we instead build much
cheaper optical networks to the servers to interconnect them to the global
information grid - the Internet.

One downside of this approach, is that these cyber-infrastructure facilities
and servers will not be connected to any electrical grid, and as result they
will experience a lot more outages and down time dues to the waxing and
waning of the wind or the diurnal cycle of the sun.  But the beauty of ICT
is that we already have the technology to do rapid load balancing of servers
due to outages, and of course, the Internet from day one has been designed
to route around outages.

We have the technology at hand to build "follow the wind"  or "follow the
sun" computing grids using optical networks to ensure extreme high
reliability information systems and computing grids regardless of whether or
not components of the underlying physical computational network and/or
storage facilities are available and on line. The mesh of global optical
networks around the world will further help provide load balancing due to
varying wind and solar conditions.

Ben Bacque of Alcatel-Lucent has even suggested that we locate these
renewable energy/server farms in Canada's remote artic regions because this
would also help address the cooling challenges of todays modern servers. Up
to now it has been impractical to locate renewable systems in Canada's high
north because of the high cost of building transmission lines over immense
distances across inhospitable terrain. 

Building optical networks to remote renewable energy systems will also allow
governments to achieve an important social objective of delivering high
speed Internet to remote and rural communities and would provide much needed
jobs for the maintenance and care of these server farms and renewable energy
systems.

Optical networks can be also used to interconnect micro-power systems that
provide power to peer to peer storage and computing grids. As with renewable
energy systems, the existing electrical grid is ill suited for connecting
hundreds, if not thousands of small micro electrical power systems located
at our homes and businesses.  The interconnection to the grid requires
costly and expensive switches and meters that must be installed by
professional electricians, and the distribution system must be re-configured
to handle power origination from those who were traditionally consumers of
electricity.

So rather than connecting the micro-power systems to the electrical grid we
can perhaps use them to power locally hosted servers and storage facilities.
And as before these servers and storage facilities can be interconnected via
a well proven  peer to peer grid over the Internet.

Robin Chase sent me an interesting pointer to a talk given by John Holdren
(Director of Woods Hole Research Center) to the UN in September 2007, John
Holdren's slides had a stunning number:
If worldwide CO2 emissions peak in 2015 - that's seven years from now - we
have a 50 percent chance of avoiding catastrophic effects of climate change.

http://networkmusings.blogspot.com/2007/10/closing-climate-change-window-of.
html

Most scientists already think we are at a tipping point in terms of CO2
emissions.

To my mind the ICT industry and research community as a whole has a moral
responsibility to help address this problem. If the ICT industry  and
research community consumes 9% of the global energy budget, we can safely
assume that ICT contributes to 9% of the worlds global emissions of carbon
dioxide.  But as opposed to any other sector in society ICT community has
the means and tools to virtually eliminate this entire carbon footprint (and
possibly more) through the many techniques I have outlined in this blog and
previous postings.  A 9% drop in carbon emissions over the next decade would
dramatically mitigate the threat of global warming.

We need a call to action by the ICT industry and research community. We need
to start immediately testing and experimenting with these ideas and many
more that I am sure will be thought of in the process of identifying
possible solutions.  We need to immediately freeze the carbon budgets of our
universities, research centers and server farms.   Universities and research
centers are the institutions that should be demonstrating global leadership
and developing new solutions to address global warming.


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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

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