Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: How R&E optical networks can help reduce CO2 emissions

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Monday, January 7, 2008

How R&E optical networks can help reduce CO2 emissions

[I am prompted to write this blog by the recent decision of the BCnet board to adopt a Green Broadband strategy. As far as I know the British Columbia research and education optical network is the first in the world to adopt such a program as part and parcel of their disaster recovery and virtualization planning. Not only will this initiative have enormous benefits for the BC university research community it will also provide significant advantages to BC businesses and government.

BCnet and other optical R&E networks are starting to realize that they can play a critical role in helping mitigate the impact of CO2 emissions from cyber-infrastructure and other carbon intensive facilities on university campuses.

Many universities are spending millions of dollars on building new facilities to host the demand for new cyber-infrastructure equipment that is essential to the future of scientific discovery. A big part of the cost of such facilities is the new electrical and air conditioning systems required to power and cool these systems respectively, which of course has a large carbon footprint.

But rather than building carbon intensive data centers on campuses, some leading edge universities are starting to look at relocating these systems to zero carbon data centers which may be at distant sites off campus, or even sharing these facilities through grids across several campuses. Not only does this reduce the carbon impact of such systems, it also provides for disaster recovery in the event of major disruptions such as earthquakes, fires, etc

Many university computer clusters are often under utilized. But by sharing these facilities though grids and other means their carbon impact can be significantly reduced. And in some cases universities, Virtual Organizations or R&E networks can earn real dollars through carbon offsets, by sharing these facilities and increasing their overall utilization.

Of course, all of this is only possible, if the universities are attached to a high speed optical research network. Relocating or sharing cyber-infrastructure systems off campus only works if researchers and students can still have the same performance and throughput as if these facilities were located next door on campus. This can only be achieved by a high speed optical network.

And yet collaboration and sharing of cyber-infrastructure is often a tough sell to many researchers, even though many recognize it is the future of science and research. The inertia in the way they currently carry out their research can be a powerful disincentive to move to the world of cyber-infrastructure. But saving the climate may provide a more compelling moral incentive to these researchers to encourage collaborate and share these cyber-infrastructure facilities in the exciting new world of eScience and eResearch. So universities and research networks like BCnet who implement green broadband strategies can help accelerate their researchers to move to the world of cyber-infrastructure and leading edge science--BSA]