Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: World's first demo of "follow the sun/follow the wind" internet and grid

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

Thursday, October 30, 2008

World's first demo of "follow the sun/follow the wind" internet and grid

[At the PROMPT workshop on “Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming” researchers from Barcelona, Amsterdam, Ottawa and Chicago demonstrated the world’s first “follow the sun/follow the wind” Internet and computational grid where routing and computational nodes of HPDMnet, sitting on top of an optical infrastructure provided by GLIF, SURFnet, CANARIE, i2CAT, STAR LIGHT were rapidly relocated around the world simulating the availability of renewable energy sources at these nodes. The researchers demonstrated that virtual machines and logical routers (and associated network topologies) could be quickly moved within a matter of seconds (or minutes if storage also had to be relocated), which is well within the turbine spin down cycle of windmills and the diurnal power curve of solar panels.

Although the story that Internet was originally designed to survive a nuclear war may not be true, the Internet does have the inherent capability to survive a far more serious crisis facing this planet – global warming. The same applies to cyber-infrastructure facilities such as computational grids. As the demand for renewable energy grows because of proposed cap and trade systems in the US and elsewhere, those industry sectors that can use low cost renewable energy sources, “in situ”, as opposed to being connected to the electrical grid will be well positioned to dominate the new zero carbon economy.

The advent of 1000G wavelengths next year and the adoption of many of the UCLP principles by companies like CISCO with their new XR router IOS (based on another Ottawa company’s real time OS-QNX) will allow deployment of global articulated private networks (APNs) using logical routers, which will further enable a future Internet whose nodes can be entirely operated with renewable power facilities that are independent of the electrical grid. Internet routing protocols and network configuration tools like UCLP (Argia) used in combination with logical routers and virtual computers will allow for the rapid re-configuration of virtual networks and distributed computing based on the local availability of renewable power.

In the coming year more nodes of the HPDMnet network will be powered solely by windmills or solar panels. Researchers from around the world are more than welcome to participate in this exciting initiative.

Congratulations to Mathieu Lemay and his colleagues at i2Cat, UoAmsterdam, CRC, iCAIR, PROMPT, SURFnet and CANARIE for this successful demo.

For more details on “follow the sun/follow the wind” project please see
Www.greenngi.com

For information on HPDMnet please
http://www.hpdmnet.net/

For information on PROMPT’s Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming please see
http://www.promptinc.org/documents/NGI_release_en_v2.pdf
http://www.promptinc.org/index_en.html