Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: Infrastructure as a web service to reduce carbon 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

Infrastructure as a web service to reduce carbon emissions

[I received several interesting responses on my recent posting on Internet Evolution on Infrastructure as a web service (IaaS). Enabling the IT infrastructure as a Web service allows administrators to virtualize not only computing resources but also a variety of LAN and WAN network hardware and storage devices including routers, switches, application servers, etc.

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=506&doc_id=142359

As Paul Whyte reports in his response "there is a company in Indianapolis who are pioneering efforts in this direction:http://www.bluelock.com). Going through their website makes interesting reading as they catalogue the financial, technical and business benefits of IaaS."

Eoin Kenney from Heanet comments that "infrastructure as web service ..is happening from a whole bunch of different directions. For example, Amazon have already provide infrastructure web services and you can build your own APN [Articulated Private Network] using Amazon web services as
building blocks.... Putting all these web services together, storage, bandwidth etc and you get your own APN. Its only a matter of time before some student starts providing a simple little GUI that will do all of this for you.

Alan Judge of Amazon gave a great presentation at the recent HEAnet conference on how researchers and educators can use Amazon Ec2/S3 in IaaS applications. A good example is the UC Santa Barbara program: Scalable Internet Services. Course materials, lessons learned, and projects all available online: http://courses.voneicken.com/ucsb-cs290f-fa06

Finally the New Scientist article " Can we stop the internet destroying our planet?" brings this all together by pointing out the new "Green Grid" initiative which is a partnership of Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Dell to explore how data centres can be made more energy efficient to support these new IaaS applications and services.

The New Scientist also reports that IBM "...pledged to invest $1 billion annually in a project called Big Green, which aims to double computing capacity at IBM's data centres without increasing energy consumption.
Like many members of the Green Grid, IBM is making virtualisation software a central part of its greening strategy... virtualisation is now seen as the low-hanging fruit in data centres' green transition."

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19726372.700-can-we-stop-the-internet-destroying-our-planet.html

The ultimate goal as I have reported in the past is to build zero carbon data centers in order to assist companies and individuals to relocate their energy consuming computers and servers to these facilities. More importantly zero carbon data centers will enable the next generation of high speed Internet applications that will be used to trade bits and bandwidth for carbon.

For more information please see my Green Broadband/IT blog at http://green-broadband.blogspot.com
--BSA]