Wind For Sale !

I read an interesting article ( http://bit.ly/9q5nqh ) this morning about how a sudden wind-storm in the Columbia River Valley (Oregon, USA) caused the power transmission company to ask the Wind-Farm operators to feather off the turbines. Seems they were generating too much power !


And yet the wind-generators are howling, because that excess capacity is being wasted, instead of being sold. Their neighbour to the south, California suffers annually from rolling blackouts and power-shortfalls. Due to the pollution typically associated with power-generation, California has further mandated the continued growth in the use of energy coming from renewable sources. Even the Obama Administration is promising funding to support the growth of technologies which will lessen America's dependence on fossil fuels. http://bit.ly/VEAiO

Seems the bottleneck in Oregon is the power-transmission company. Power-generation has always been in the purview of government - they were the only ones who could afford to build these huge coal-fired generation stations, or the wildly expensive nuclear reactors. Then the power-transmission lines were built & privatized. So power was steady-state in production & those who wished to consume it merely connected to the grid.

But what happens when there is a storm ? We hear about it in the news all the time - power-lines down; thousands without power; crews frantically working to restore power. It is the grid itself that is fragile. 

In the case of Oregon, the producers were asked to feather off production because the power-transmission company couldn't handle the excess capacity. Seems they were built to handle steady-state power production, with no consideration for surges. Since there is no form of power storage, and excess generation is wasted.

In the renewable energy circles, there are stories of "shade-tree engineers" who are generating their own power, using solar, wind or hrdro generation technologies & selling their power BACK to their local power company. How very Utopian. Only one problem - at least where I live - the power company won't allow producers of renewable energy to tie their systems to the grid. The reason ? During an outage, they can't control the power coming onto the grid & there is a risk of electrocution for the crews attempting to affect repairs ! Don't get me wrong - I don't want to see anyone get hurt ! But, once again the grid is the issue.

As we saw in a previous blog ( http://bit.ly/awotwM ), the paradigm in compute-resourcing is shifting and workloads are being massed onto Mainframe computers again to achieve economies in power consumption & heat-generation. Perhaps the paradigm for power generation & consumption should change.

If we shifted away from a model where power is centrally generated and moved to a more self-sufficient method, would that take the pressure off ?

Near where I live is a small commuter town called Okotoks, Alberta. They have embarked on a model of self-sufficiency whereby all the homes in a community (Drake Landing) participate in the collection & consumption of solar hot-water. http://bit.ly/17uoOg  In my mind, this is a great opportunity to examine the model in action. We see a co-operative which is no longer dependent on the Utility company to provide for them. They generate & store 90% of their heating requirements, and save some 5 Tonnes of carbon footprint !

Imagine then,  a street where there were no power-lines running above the sidewalks. A street where every home had panels of photovoltaic cells on the roofs. A street where small inobtrusive vertical-axis wind turbines are installed on the peaks of the roofs. A street where each house generated & stored enough power for their own consumption. Better, imagine a street where each home collected solar heat for all of its hot-water needs - providing heat for space heating & washing clothes & dishes & showering.

The pressure would be off the grid, because we would no longer NEED the grid. Each home & building would become self-sufficient. The economics make sense. To buld a reliable system to provide adequate power to a household of four would cost approximately $10,000. Given that the average new home price in Calgary is roughly $340,000, that represents an incremental increase of 2.9% ! The ROI, based on my household electricity & gas usage would be approximately 5 years !

Retro-fitting an existing home would be more expensive, only because of the need to change the way we heat our homes. Gone would be the inefficient forced-air furnace, and in its place in-floor-radiant heat. So the costs would be somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000. The ROI is longer, but still well within a single generation.

In return, we could have clean, renewable energy. We could have no rolling blackouts, and we could have spawned a new set of industries to replace the utilities. Companies which build, install & service renewable-energy solutions for homes & offices. Further, one would presume that the economies of scale would come into effect - the prices of photovoltaic cells would drop, etc. due to efficiencies in mass-production.

Very Utopian, indeed !

Renewable Energy in the Data-Centre

In my previous blog, we explored how the paradigm of computing methodologies needs to shift. We saw that the economics of the situation don't always  make sense. Moving workloads to the mainframe would drastically reduce the power consumed for the same amount of computing work done. Less power consumed is less heat generate, right ?

The conventional wisdom is to use air-conditioning to lower the temperature of the computer room. These units consume even MORE energy, with no useful by-product. Since we can't (today) avoid the heat generated completely, why not harvest it & do something useful with it ? What if, instead of eliminating it, we use the heat for something ?

In renewable energy circles, heat is a prized form of energy. One of the common uses of solar energy is to heat water - which can be used for heating ones home, or for powering a heat-differential motor. Which could in turn be used to generate energy ! While the effficiency would likely never approach 100%, if coupled with a Photo-Voltaic array and some wind turbines, then perhaps they could offset 50% of the power required to run the data-centre in the first place. Couple that with conservation efforts and the cost of operating the data-centre would drop significantly.

In the North-East of the USA, the main power company - Con Edison - has pretty much told Corporate America "No more data-centres - we have no more power". Worse, the power they DO have comes from coal-fired generation stations, which are extreme polluters. So what if the Data-Centres were to generate their own power ? Google did it - they built their own hydro-electric dam in Oregon, and are (so far) the only privately-owned utility in North America. Now other companies have built their data-centres on the banks of the same river & acquire their electricity from Google.

And hydro-electric dams are a shining example of clean, renewable energy. Google did it because of the rolling brown-outs & black-outs in California. They needed power that was always available and would also allow Google to live up to their corporate mandate of "Do no evil". I like that.

The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !

Renewable Energy & the Data-Cantre

Yesterday, I read a post on www.slashdot.org,  which was a discussion about the possibility of using renewable energy in Data-Centres. The author of the post was interested in opinions about whether a Data-Centre could generate their own power, as per this article: http://bit.ly/a5wj9W  or whether conservation would be enough, per this article: http://bit.ly/9guYru   .

In the first article, it was determined that the solar facility, which consumed 7 acres of land to present enough photo-volaic arrays to generate 1 Mega-Watt, would only provide some 16% of the power required for the Data-Centre ! Now, conventional wisdom would dictate that you have P-V panels as one component of the system. A common thing to do would be to add in some wind-turbines to augment the system. Where I live in Southern Alberta, if it isn't so sunny, it is often VERY windy, and vice-versa !

But there are other sources as well. The use of hydro-generation is becoming common. There are solutions that see simple hydro-electric dams, like Google's solution in Oregon, through to more "experimental" solutions, which see energy created by the action of waves or tides. These last two really aren't suitable for an individual Data-Centre, however.

So presuming we could double the output from 16% to 32% of the power required, then looking at ways to conserve or re-use the consumed energy seems prudent. From a conservation perspective, the major manufacturers of computer processors (Intel, AMD, etc.) are very consumed with the idea of lowering the number of watts consumed per processor core. This translates into lower power consumption, which is in turn converted to heat, which must be dealt with.

The other paradigm that must be looked at is the actual computing model. Since the dawn of the computing age, we have seen a constant oscillation between centralized computing - the mainframe, and distributed computing - what we call "open systems". The underlying principle is that a number of open systems could equal the computing power of a single mainframe, and would cost less money to acquire. This could translate into more parallel computing, whereby many processors can work on the same task at the same time, and therefore complete it faster. Or it could address issues of high-availability, whereby a single processing core being offline doesn't stop the processing altogether.

The last two years I worked for Red Hat, I travelled the world talking to customers about the costs of this paradigm. A client in the mid-west (can't name them under NDA, sorry) had performed a study with some startling results:

• 1 Mainframe core capable of running Enterprise Linux could provide the same processing capabilities as ~250 Distributed core
• ~250 rack-mounted computers would occupy some 17 42U racks, taking up about 2000 square feet, allowing for room to get to the backs & sides
• 1 Mainframe would occupy ~ 24 square feet
• That's a difference of taking an entire house for your computing needs vs taking the bathroom !
• Cooling the space required for the 17 racks of computing equipment would take 17 times the amount of cooling required for the mainframe 
• From a manpower point of view, the racks of computers would require 4-5 Systems Administrators to manage, while the Mainframe would only require 1, although the client did mention that there would always be two staff for the systems, in case the first one got hit by a bus !
• Finally, the client tallied up the costs, and estimated they would SAVE some $1.5 M USD by staying on the mainframe platform, rather than moving their workloads to Distributed platforms.

As you can see, before we even examine ways to reduce the power consumed & what to do with the heat by-product, we have to consider ways to AVOID even creating the heat...

The three R's are: Reduce, Re-Use, Recycle. The fourth should be renew...

The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !

Is there value in free ?

One of my best friends used to use the line "There is no value in free !" to describe how it would be impossible to derive monetary value from something free. I think he was trying to describe why he thought (at the time) open source software would fail. 

As I consider the open-source nature of my life, the question that begs an answer is simple - how can I get paid for this ? My father taught me years ago a simple lesson - "Find something you love to do, and then find somebody to pay you to do it". In this way, whatever you choose to do in life is not work. It is something that you are passionate about.

So could I turn this interest in open-source into a way of life ? Could I apply Sales 101 and monetize my passions ? I suppose the model to follow would be Red Hat's. They made a successful business out of selling free software !  Could I sell the sun ? Could I sell the wind ? Who would buy it ?

Jeffery Gitomer teaches that Sales is all about finding ways to monetize the VALUE of whatever you are selling. So then I would need to describe the value of the Sun, and the value of the wind. That should be straightforward. As we watch the events of the world, we see the US Presidential Administration wax rhetoric about the need to "lessen our dependence on foreign oil". Is it oil that will continue to provide the US with its energy needs ?

So then why NOT sell the value of energy derived from alternative sources ? What would the economies of scale look like ? Would it be better to set up a giant wind-farm to power a city, or should each building have it's own power source ? Could solar power - either in photovoltaic form or solar heating form augment the system enough to allow an entire building to be self-sufficient ?

I like the "local" model better. It eases the dependency on infrastructure. While hydrogen fuel-cells provide a lot of promise for a cleaner source of automotive fuel, the complete lack of infrastructure for delivering that hydrogen will stunt the overall adoption rate. But if each building were able to harness enough energy from alternate sources, the infrastructure would be irrelevant. Instead of having utility companies, charged with the "creation" and transmission of electricity, the tax dollars used to support coal-fired generation systems & managing electrical grids could be used for more "social" purposes - I won't delve into what those options could be here.

So I reflect, wondering if this could be a venture I could monetize. Is there sufficient market demand to enter the world of selling alternate energy ? While there are already many small companies in the space, why aren't they being more successful ? How could I approach the market in a way that would immediately differentiate my company from the others ?

Jeffery Fox teaches that Sales is all about generating demand. You don't wait for a niche market to reveal itself - you create it ! Once that is done, you are immediately poised to fill that niche. And that is step one to success.


The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !

My Open-Source Life...

It never really dawned on me how much I follow the Open-Source "way". I always knew I had a preference for open-source software (OSS), but it appears that way of living has permeated into the fabric of my life. Open-source software is software which is free - as in beer. My good friend Paul used to put it this way: "Yes, water is freely available, but would you drink from the swamp ?". I think this was his way of saying that you can get open-source software anywhere, but you should trust the source.

The same is quickly becoming evident in other areas of my life. About three years ago, a commercial company started making bio-diesel in a plant just near Aldersyde, AB - about 10 km north of where I live. Intrigued about alternative fuel (like alternative software), I began researching how bio-diesel was made. The company in Aldersyde takes the plant matter (canola, rapeseed, etc.), presses the oil themselves & transforms it into usable bio-diesel. Very cool...

Then I stumbled across a group of shade-tree engineers who were creating usable fuel out of vegetable oil. In their system, they had to extensively modify their vehicles to pre-heat the oil so it would combust properly. I didn't like this idea, as it would a) annoy my wife to no end, b) render my truck nearly impossible to sell or trade in, and c) annoy my wife to no end !


However, there was a second group who were converting used vegetable oil into perfectly good bio-diesel using a process called transestrification (www.ezbiodiesel.com). Essentially, they would take the oil, add Methoxide (methanol & lye in specific proportions) and cause the glycerine to seperate out of the vegetable oil. Now this had me intrigued. Being that it seemed too good to be true, I did a LOT of research. Seems this was not only more common than I realized, but even legal. Seemed the only downfall was the fact that if I brew more than 2000 litres a year, Revenue Canada wants 19% road tax ! Although I immediately wondered - 19% of WHAT ?

So I downloaded some plans off the Internet to build an "Appleseed Processor". I think the name has something to do with Johnny Appleseed - but don't quote me. Sam (my now 13 yr-old) and I spent about a week collecting all the parts, building the base plan, and then making minor modifications.

The rest, as they say is history ! I will admit, I have stumbled... OK Bob, yes I had a catastrophic failure that cost me an injector & a fuel pump in the truck ! But we learn by our mistakes...

Now I am considering other alternative sources of energy. Sam & I (budding shade-tree engineers ourselves !) are planning to build small-scale wind-turbines, photovoltaic panels, and possibly a solar hot-water collector (using www.builditsolar.com as a starting point). As you can see, we are keenly interested in renewable energy. Not because we wish to lessen our carbon foot-print (or some such nonsense), but because the whole concept of investing a little to get free (NOT as in beer) energy from a small up-front investment is intriguing.


This is the open-source way my life is going...

The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !

Thinking Green Thoughts...

So I will be the first to admit that I am not really going green. While I respect people's beliefs that shrinking their carbon footprint as honorable, I am not so altruistic. I am interested in these projects for financial reasons. Followed closely by the fact they appeal to the geeky technologist inside me.

For me, the financial aspect is the FIRST consideration. Whether it be that I lessen my costs for a specific product or service, or I lessen my dependence on somebody ELSE providing that product or service, both represent a net-gain (or win) for me. Examples include the fact that I stopped having my e-mail hosted by a 3rd party. This is because they couldn't reliably provide me with service.

In the case of Bio-Diesel, I am interested primarily in lowering my costs, but the technology behind trans-estrification appeals to the geeky side of me. The fact that it lowers tail-pipe emissions is a bonus, but not a principal goal. Especially since the raw product - waste vegetable oil - is abundantly & freely available to me. Free as in zero cost.

The Solar components interest me because it would lessen my dependence on the power-grid. While they are ultimately very reliable, a power outage never happens at a good time. And then there's the cost. While power is relatively inexpensive, the main uses of that power are wasteful. Uses like heating hot-water for on-demand use. Why NOT use solar - it's free & always available. When coupled with a wind-turbine, there is pretty much a limitless supply of energy close at hand.