Virtual energy production and delivery at IWB

In our post on the virtual print factory, we saw how an art director can be simulated and used in a simulated press check to optimize print production. There are other applications that can be revolutionized through the online simulation of production. Today, we have a look at the future of energy production and delivery. Society is improved by making it more efficient.

In 1852 Basel, the private company Gasindustrie was founded and in 1867 it was nationalized. Over the years other utilities were added: water delivery, water production, electricity, long-distance heating, refuse processing, and a fiber network for broadband internet and telephony. The name became IWB, forIndustrielle Werke Basel. It was privatized in 2010 (CEO David Thiel), but all shares belong to the Canton Basel-City. IWB is responsible for the supply of energy, water, and telecom; it has a mandate to optimize its operations (smart IWB 2020).

During industrialization, like in most countries, Switzerland's main energy source was coal. After World War I, not having coal mines, Switzerland boosted the education of engineers, who could then electrify the country. For example, the Crocodile locomotive was an engineering feat that could pull up a freight train on the Gottardo line. Actually, the regenerative braking energy from two trains could pull up one train on the other side of the Alps. When in the 1930s the regime in Germany started flexing its muscle and using its coal to wield power, Switzerland invested considerable brain power to wean away from coal as much as possible. For example, the cantonal buildings in Zurich are heated with heat pumps extracting heat from the Limmat.

The ETH cranked out generation after generation of skilled engineers who designed hydroelectric dams, turbines, and power distribution systems. Many plants were of the pump type, consisting of an upper and a lower reservoir: during the day water falls and generates power, while at night cheap electricity is imported from fixed throughput plants to pump the water back up.

This history is reflected in IWB's energy sources. In 2015, the energy sources for electricity in percent were

hydroelectric	96.14
wind	0.22
solar	0.14
other renewable	3.50

In the 4th quarter of 2015, on the European domestic market, the cost of a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of power was 3.3 cents. However, in Basel, at the public car charge boxes, the consumer price varies between 45 and 70 cents per kWh. This is an opportunity to increase efficiency. Smart IWB 2020 aims at reducing and stabilizing the end-user energy costs.

The old big central power plants will remain and keep producing and storing energy. New small decentralized systems have been built to produce and store energy at the regional level. Now, end-users are starting to produce, store, and consume energy. Excess energy is shared at the neighborhood level.

This is how a 1 MW lithium-metal-oxide battery in Zurich looks like:

End-users must also store energy in some form to even out the network dependence during the day. There may be excess solar energy in the afternoon and a lack of energy during a cold winter night.

This is made possible by the new control network shown in dark gray in the figure below (for an animation see here). IWB can collect data everywhere on the network and feed it to its simulation that allows it to optimize the overall energy generation and conversion system.

Electricity companies have been using simulations for many years. For robustness, a distribution system cannot have a tree topology, because a failure at a node will black out the entire subtree. The required mesh topology is difficult to manage because the system has to be kept in equilibrium, otherwise, a failure will cascade to a blackout of the entire network.

What is new with smart IWB 2020, is that the regulation is no longer made by dropping more water when the network frequency drops under 49.8 Hz and by pumping up water when the frequency rises over 50.2 HZ. As the figure above shows, there are many more sources for electricity that have to be synchronized and balanced out.

In 2000, Germany introduced a law to subsidize renewable energies by guaranteeing the producers a profit, i.e., by taking out a major part of their risk to conduct business. In 2004, the European Union liberalized the power market, adding to the mix the windmill farms in Denmark among others. In Germany alone, renewable energy production surged from 6,277 GWh in 2000 to 153,000 GWh in 2015.

The availability of this low-cost renewable energy from the north wrecked havoc in the business model of the Swiss generators, who were generating expensive electricity during the day by draining the high reservoirs and importing cheap electricity at night to pump up the water from the low reservoirs. Today, solar plants in Germany deliver the maximum energy around noon, exactly the time when pump plants in the Alps used to generate the highest profits.

According to Alpiq CEO Jasmin Staiblin (SFR 25 April 2016), the producer Alpiq can generate only ¼ of its hydropower at a profit, while ½ breaks even and ¼ is sold at a loss. On average, to Alpiq, hydropower generation costs 6.5 cents per kWh, twice the European market price. Even at its newest generation facilities with the latest turbine designs, the cost is 3.8 respectively 4.5 cents per kWh. Alpiq expects that next year or the year after, the open market price will sink to 2 cents per kWh or even slightly less.

The numerous nuclear power plants in France and Switzerland, while also causing losses to the hydroelectric generators, cannot compete with the renewable sources. At the Gösgen nuclear power plant, production costs in 2014 were 3.4 cents per kWh. In 2015 they were 5.1 cents per kWh, but this was due to accounting changes and costs are supposed to sink again, but 3.4 > 2. According to GE Chief Productivity Officer Philippe Cochet in Fairfield CT (NZZ 13 January 2016), before the 2008 financial crisis, in Europe each year 7 GW of new power generation capacity was sold; after the crisis, sales dropped to 1.3 GW and in the past two years sales were less than 1 GW.

The solution is to use online simulations to not just optimize electric power generation, but all energy management: electricity, hot steam for electricity production, hot water for heating, and warm water for washing. Heat is produced by burning refuse, natural gas, biomass (wood refuse), etc. It is also recovered from data centers, instead of dispersing it in the atmosphere through air conditioning chillers. This photograph by Mathias Leemann shows the refuse burning plant of Basel.

Heat can be stored in water, soil, and stones, as has been done since Roman times. A more contemporary method used by IWB is the use of fuel cells. When there is excess electricity, electrolysis of water is used to generate hydrogen. Hydrogen is also produced from natural gas when consumption is low. This hydrogen is easy to store. When electricity prices are high, hydrogen fuel cells are used to generate electricity.

Coordinating and timing all these sources, stores, carriers, and consumers of energy is a very complex task. When IWB will sell its electricity at the public charge boxes (photograph by Simon Havlik) around the Canton for a much lower price than today's 45 to 70 cents per kWh, cars based on burning fossil fuels will disappear very fast. Such is the impact of smart energy management.

So far, we have seen how the online simulation of a complex energy provision system can considerably reduce the cost of energy. However, this does not yet help with the goal of the 2000 Watt Society. If we build our houses with recycled glass shards in the outer concrete walls, then use 12 cm of insulation and cover it with 16 cm of solid wood on the inside, and also give up private ownership of cars, we might achieve a 3500 Watt Society, said ZHAW sustainability expert Prof. Andreas Hofer (SRF 26 November 2015).

50 years ago, people got by with less than 2000 Watt. Where is the problem? It is not at the individual level but at the society level. We have become much more mobile: if you live in Lugano, you not longer go to San Moritz for an extended weekend, but to Paris. Also, we have become digital packrats. All over the world, we have huge server farms that store all that digital media we never consume but is valuable for social network companies to dissect our lives and sell us stuff we do not really need.

Back to the virtual print factory:

The output of the prepress stage is a PDF file. The two presses take raster images, therefore the computer in front of the press has to do the ripping and is called the digital front-end. In John L. Recker et al.; Font rendering on a GPU-based raster image processor; Proc. SPIE 7528 (January 18, 2010), the authors calculated that over a year of usage, the regular front-end RIP consumed 38,723 kWh and generated 23,234 Kg of CO₂, while for the GPU-RIP they built, the corresponding numbers are 10,804 kWh and 6,483 Kg.

This is the kind of innovation that is required to achieve the 2000 Watt Society at the society level rather than at the individual level. There is still a lot of work to do. We recently wrote that the internet of things is a power guzzler: fortunately the cited report has some good advice.

The internet of things is a power guzzler

A study commissioned by the International Energy Agency and conducted by Prof. Alexander Klapproth's iHome Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences made a sobering determination: The internet of things is a power guzzler! Instead of saving energy, that light switch that today does not use any power when connected to the internet uses a lot of power.

The study found that today, the about 10 billion IoT devices deployed worldwide suck up 10 TWh of electricity. By 2025, they project a total energy waste of 46 TWh. 78% or 36 TWh will be wasted by home automation devices, followed by connected home appliances with 15% or 7 TWh, and smart lighting with 7% or 3 TWh.

The main culprit is the power supply, which wastes more energy than the internet control device itself. The latter also uses too much power because inappropriate communication technologies are used.

Fortunately, energy-saving technologies already exist, as proven by smartphones, laptop computers, and other personal digital assistants. All the IoT vendors have to do, is to hire engineers with expertise in power management.

M. Friedli, L. Kaufmann, F. Paganini, and R. Kyburz. Energy efficiency of the internet of things. Technology and energy assessment report prepared for IEA 4E EDNA, iHomeLab, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland, April 2016.

Old telecoms should be let to die

Today's techno-melodrama is on the damage old incumbent telecoms like AT&T are doing to the American economy by reducing our efficiency as their customers. We should just let them die of natural causes and move our service as soon as we can to newer technologically savvy companies.

In 1984, when I started working at Xerox PARC, I did not get a plain old telephone. Instead, at PARC we were using the Etherphone, which was packet based instead of being circuit based like plain old telephone service (POTS). We were wearing active badges, so the Etherphone system knew where we were in the building. When a phone call came in (this was before robocalls) the system would transfer the call to the nearest phone and play our personal tune (Doug Wyatt had skillfully arranged a Beethoven Prélude for my tune). To make a call, you could either dial a number, or just type "phone jane doe" in a command tool viewer and the Etherphone would look up Jane's number in the phone book and initiate the call.

Not being a great communicator, at home I have kept living for the last 30 years with the same anti-diluvial POTS from Ma' Bell. This was until May 7, 2014 when I made the bad decision to switch to AT&T's voice over IP (VoIP) service. More precisely, the bad part of the decision was to stay with that moribund dysfunctional colossus that is AT&T. I should have done my homework and switched to one of the new skilled VoIP providers.

I am not using the phone a lot, so at first I did not notice the line had been cut by AT&T for a couple of days. It was only when my roommate noticed that I was no longer getting robocalls (that theater of the absurd where the computer of a solicitor illegally calls the computer of my AT&T digital answering machine and bizarrely tries to sell to it some useless service such as carpet steam cleaning), that I checked if a phone was off the hook and noticed the line was dead.

Indeed, that same day on May 7 AT&T had promptly disconnected my landline, but instead of giving me VoIP, they switched my number to a service they call "AT&T Wireless Home Phone" which is run by their subsidiary Cingular Wireless, as their service people keep calling it. In my house I get zero to one bars on AT&T wireless, so I am not interested in that. Also, they gave me the Uverse equipment for VoIP, not the Wireless Home equipment.

So far, I have made three trips to the AT&T store in Palo Alto and I have been on the phone literally for several days with a number of people in AT&T’s support organizations (they have several and they do not talk to each other: they are dysfunctional). However, except for once for a few hours last Saturday’s morning, AT&T has not been able to restore my phone service.

This is where companies like AT&T are recklessly damaging the American economy. The life task of us scientists and engineers is to invent technologies that make society more efficient. The task of service companies is to deploy these technologies so general wealth is increased and we get to live in a better world.

Dysfunctional companies like AT&T not only prevent us from becoming more efficient: through their dysfunction they prevent us from doing our work and therefore they are a dead weight to society by slowing down its productivity.

AT&T is a $127 billion conglomerate led by Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President Randall L. Stephenson. Obviously, he does not know how to run an efficient organization. Maybe the campaign "It Can Wait" for which he is famous refers to his inability to integrate the companies making up his conglomerate.

According to the target compensation table on page 44 of AT&T’s 2014 proxy statement, Mr. Stephenson’s total target compensation is $20,600,000 per annum. Assuming Mr. Stephenson works 48 weeks a year and shows up five days a week, he works 240 days a year. Therefore, he makes over $85,833 a day.

So far, Mr. Stephenson wasted 11 days of my life, so he owes me already $944,163. To be honest, he does not owe this money to me but to my employer, because for 11 days so far at work I could only type with one hand since the other hand holds my phone while I am on calls with his various disconnected support services. In my free time I cannot relax to recharge my batteries to get back to work in good shape. Instead I have to interact with powerless AT&T employees.

I am sure this is not only happening to me but to thousands of AT&T customers. When we tally up the wasted time using Mr. Stephenson’s total target compensation, we get a significat number of the economic damage this causing to our society in terms of dollars.

Could Mr. Stephenson just be an innocent victim of a broken system? No! In January 2000, I spent $4,500 ($6,135 adjusted for inflation) to run an underground conduit from the utility box in the sidewalk to the service entrance in the back of the house. The City of Palo Alto had us put in the pipe because they had run an optical fiber cable in our neighborhood’s street as part of their Fiber to the Home (FTTH) project.

After the first 90 or so houses got hooked up with a 100 mbps Internet connection, the City turned off the light in the FTTH cable. This was because AT&T and Comcast had sued the City on this initiative and the City determined it did not have the financial means to fight out a battle in court. This proves that the AT&T executives are not innocent bystanders. Rather, they are ruthless bullies.

When I commute to work, I do not take the Ford street or the General Motors street and pay them a fee of $300 per month for their service. Rather, the respective governments own and maintain the various road communication systems like the interstates, the county roads, the city roads, etc. We call them freeways and we pay them through various taxes, fees, and tolls.

Today the Internet has the same economic importance as the road transportation system. It is time for the various governments to exercise their eminent domain rights and take the communications infrastructure over from inept private companies unable to provide a dependable service.

In light of the 2000 Watt Society, it would make sense to tax the consumption of electric energy to finance the Internet infrastructure, because of the energy footprint of the digital economy. To pay for the necessary new infrastructure investments, the government can levy installation fees, tolls on expensive usages, etc.

Like in road transportation the government provides the freeways but not the cars or the gasoline, the role of ISPs and content providers can be left open for competition to the many skilled new companies that know how to run communications services efficiently.

For example, my current ISP is AT&T, but they outsource the service to Yahoo!, which could provide me the ISP service directly. Similarly there are many efficient content providers and telecom providers that can do this much much better than the old companies. Examples are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Hulu, Netflix, Ooma among the most well known ones.

Let us jump ship from the old companies that are no longer able to provide reliable and affordable services. We do not need people making more than $85,000 a day while not delivering. Let them go back into the trenches and splice optical fiber cables.

In the meantime, I am incommunicado, so if you want to reach me, either come to my door or send a carrier pigeon.

Commuting to work

For most of my life I have been lucky to work just 3 km from home, so I have not been exposed too much to the commuting woes. For example, when I arrived in the Silicon Valley, the 101 freeway had two lanes in each direction separated by a wide median strip planted with oleanders. Over the years, the median strip has disappeared and 101 became a freeway with four crowded lanes in each direction. For the last two or three years, a fifth auxiliary lane is being added in each direction in the portion between Marsh Road (Facebook) and 85 (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft), so I have heard a lot of yammer from my coworkers.

For the past year I have been a commuter myself, barreling down 23 km to the San Jose airport every day. Unfortunately there is no usable public transportation, so I am condemned to this daily freeway maltreatment. It starts after 2 km, when I enter 101 on Embarcadero, where about 20% of the drivers illegally cross two double lines at a 90º angle to force themselves in a passing lane before the actual freeway entrance, while pushy Gbusses force themselves from the high occupancy vehicle lane to the exit lane and a few 100 m later a slew of cars try to make a –90º turn from the leftmost lane to the San Antonio Road exit.

During the past year I have tried to develop a driving model that would reduce my stress, but not very successfully. Last Saturday finally was able to see a sophisticated model in action and it was an eye-opener: I got to ride a Google Car from the Googleplex down 101 to the 280 interchange and back.

Sitting behind the "driver" I had a good view of the laptop on the lap of the lady in the front passenger seat, displaying the car's model of the surroundings based on the lidar spinning on top of the car and also a radar in the front of the car, an inertial sensor in the rear wheel axis and last but not least on countless hours of tweaking the model based on the feedback of skilled professional drivers like Anja—our pilot on this trip—who rides full-time for her work.

On the console we see the freeway lanes, our projected route, and the surrounding vehicles. When a vehicle creates a dangerous situation, it is marked with a danger sign. The model recognizes the lights of emergency vehicles and can pull over according to the law. However, it ignores other car's blinkers. In fact, the American driving culture is that the other drivers are your enemies and you do not want to warn them by letting your intentions to be known: the blinker is either never turned on or left blinking.

While as a human I can model a few cars around me, Google's algorithm can model many cars around our self-driving car, in all directions. When our car gets in the blind spot of another car, the icon of that car is flagged with a danger sign. With a surprising frequency, the flagged cars cut us off at a dangerously close distance. Since I am not driving, I can look in the offending cars and can never see those drivers turning their heads to check the clearance. Therefore, they are all driving erratically without looking, resulting in the car being cut off, breaking and propagating this backwards to the following cars.

Like computers can beat humans at chess because they can predict a larger number of steps, Google's car is better than human drivers because it can by far model more vehicles than a human can. Yet, humans are too stupid and reckless for Google's algorithm to be completely foolproof. For example, at one point in Santa Clara we were in the right lane and a big truck tried to pass us driving above the speed limit and on the shoulder. Our pilot Anja recognized, maybe from the truck's exhaust fumes, that he did not have enough torque to pass us and the shoulder turned into a ditch a few meters further ahead. This would have left the truck driver to either go full speed into the ditch or ramming us, so she floored our brakes.

Those reckless drivers are in part professional drivers who spend their working day on the freeway driving trucks, taxis, limos, etc. This indicates that most humans are unfit to drive cars.

But are driver-less cars the answer? When I was a teenager, I thought that by 2014 I could fly to the moon with TWA or PanAm and get to Paris in a couple of hours on a Trans Europ Express (TEE). It would never have crossed my mind that in 2014 I would be driving a car on a freeway full of incompetent erratic drivers.

The mistake being made by the Caltrans agency is to build those auxiliary lanes. Instead, they should have built a train like the S-Bahn on that old median strip. A skilled professional train driver could get me to work in a few minutes, safely and without stress.

What is your energy footprint?

In the USA, tucked into a 1,500-page budget bill now moving through Congress is a Republican provision that would restore the incandescent light bulbs that were supposed to be phased out in favor of greener lighting technology. Defenders of the traditional bulb say the government is again overreaching, that the marketplace should decide what kind of bulbs are manufactured in the USA. Led in the House by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, Republicans got the funding cutoff provision inserted into an energy and water spending bill that President Obama signed into law in mid-January 2014.

With this freedom of conspicuous consumption, according to the Wikipedia the average USA person consumes 12,000 watts of energy. By comparison, a person in Bangladesh on the average consumes 300 watts. The world average is approximately 2000 watts. Of course, the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world would like to enjoy the same conspicuous consumption as USA people, so world energy production should increase to 7,148,400,000 × 12,000 = 85,780,800,000,000 watt.

Or not.

As Dr. Marco Morosini wrote in a paper on the 2000 Watt Society, in the last decades some authors suggested to consider the opportunity of a voluntary ceiling to the amount of primary energy used per capita. Wolfram Ziegler proposed a voluntary limit in the use of primary energy in central Europe under the level of 0.16 W/m² (Ziegler 1979; 1996); this level was based on ecological arguments and was intended to limit the anthropic pressure on biodiversity. Starting from Ziegler's arguments and data, Dürr calculated and suggested a global value of 9 TW as a voluntary limit in the use of primary energy by mankind (Dürr 1993); this level would be around one fifth of the amount of solar energy transformed by terrestrial organisms, estimated by Dürr at 40–50 TW, for a human population of 6 billions at the end of the last century, Dürr suggested consequently the vision of a "1500-watt society." Goldemberg et al. (1985; Goldemberg 2004) claimed that 1000 watt of primary energy per capita would cover "basic needs and much more." Spreng et al. (2002) suggested to steer human societies towards an "energy window," defined by a lower social limit and an upper ecological limit in the use of primary energy. In Switzerland, the idea of setting a ceiling to energy usage was formulated at the beginning of the '90s (Imboden et al. 1992; Imboden 1993). Paul Kesselring (Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland), and Carl-Jochen Winter (German Aerospace Research Establishment, DLR) punctually suggested a "2000-watt society" as worldwide plausible vision achievable within 50–100 years (Kesselring and Winter 1994).

Primarily through the tireless efforts of Prof. Dieter Imboden, Switzerland is now on the path of a 2000 Watt Society.

If you want to learn more on the 2000 Watt Society, the best source is the brochure Smarter Living made available by Novatlantis. A 2000 watt person would consume 17,500 kilowatt hours or 1750 liters of petroleum over the course of a year.

What is your energy footprint?

You can easily calculate this number from the information provided by your utility company. For example, in Palo Alto you go to www.CityofPaloAlto.org/HomeEnergyReports.

In my case, from 18 June 2009 to 21 January 2014 I have used on average 308 watt of electricity and 1092 watt of gas for a total of 1400 watt, so at first sight I might have reached the year 2050 goal. However, the standard deviation of my gas energy usage is 1070, so clearly the average is not meaningful and I have to look at all the data.

My problem is that in the cool season I use too much natural gas for heating. The baseline for gas are the on-demand water heater and the cooking stove, while the baseline for the electricity are the refrigerator, lighting, and the electronics. In the cool season electricity use goes up a little because the heating furnace uses an electric fan.

As explained on page 16 in the Smarter Living brochure, only 20% of the overall heating energy demand can be determined by the behavior of the building's occupants. 80% of the ultimate energy needs are determined at the planning stage of a building. In 1960, when the Swiss were using 2000 watt, I was living in a new building made of bricks, cement, insulation, double pane windows, and rolling shutters. In 2014 I live in a typical 1948 California ranch house with no insulation, so I cannot do much better. In fact, according to the utilities department I even use less natural gas than my neighbors.

The reason I use more gas energy is that my neighbor's houses are mostly newer and therefore have solid plywood walls and some insulation. By efficient neighbors, the utility department refers to the most efficient 20 percent of my immediate neighbors.

Also my electricity use is not out of line with that of my neighbors.

This means that even with the 20% savings maximally possible with a retrofit, if I really want to be a 2000 watt person in Palo Alto I would have to tear down my house and rebuild it. This might be possible in rich Switzerland, but not in the impoverished USA.

There could be a potentially different way out. In 1960 we had a very low energy use because we were 5 people living in a two bedroom apartment, while now the occupancy of the current 176 m² three bedroom house is much lower.

Indeed, my route to work is now 23.5 km and there is no usable public transportation. My car uses about 17 liters per 100 km or 4 liters per trip. This is a lot of gasoline and I keep it lower by car-pooling and dividing the number by 2. Similarly, I could reduce my energy use at home by increasing the number of residents.

In the intrest of full disclosure, here is the data provided by the City of Palo Alto and used in the graphs above.

year	month	electricity	gas	total
2009	July	265.0 W	183.3 W	448.3 W
2009	August	286.7 W	117.3 W	404.0 W
2009	September	299.4 W	248.9 W	548.3 W
2009	October	265.2 W	130.4 W	395.5 W
2009	November	300.0 W	989.9 W	1,289.9 W
2009	December	392.6 W	2,042.2 W	2,434.8 W
2010	January	322.7 W	1,095.0 W	1,417.6 W
2010	February	309.7 W	1,627.3 W	1,937.0 W
2010	March	248.9 W	1,216.6 W	1,465.5 W
2010	April	272.9 W	963.7 W	1,236.5 W
2010	May	253.8 W	364.1 W	617.9 W
2010	June	281.3 W	330.0 W	611.2 W
2010	July	321.4 W	202.3 W	523.7 W
2010	August	286.5 W	227.1 W	513.5 W
2010	September	232.9 W	209.5 W	442.4 W
2010	October	251.0 W	242.7 W	493.8 W
2010	November	261.9 W	984.0 W	1,245.9 W
2010	December	289.7 W	1,941.8 W	2,231.5 W
2011	January	322.8 W	2,265.5 W	2,588.2 W
2011	February	287.7 W	2,081.5 W	2,369.2 W
2011	March	298.5 W	1,850.0 W	2,148.5 W
2011	April	241.4 W	849.6 W	1,090.9 W
2011	May	230.0 W	293.3 W	523.3 W
2011	June	166.3 W	146.6 W	312.9 W
2011	July	204.0 W	234.6 W	438.6 W
2011	August	320.0 W	217.3 W	537.3 W
2011	September	163.8 W	293.3 W	457.0 W
2011	October	251.3 W	256.6 W	507.9 W
2011	November	254.3 W	1,466.5 W	1,720.8 W
2011	December	304.3 W	2,555.9 W	2,860.2 W
2012	January	313.8 W	2,639.7 W	2,953.4 W
2012	February	287.1 W	2,178.8 W	2,465.9 W
2012	March	281.4 W	1,969.3 W	2,250.7 W
2012	April	247.5 W	1,136.5 W	1,384.0 W
2012	May	231.4 W	251.4 W	482.8 W
2012	June	220.0 W	195.5 W	415.5 W
2012	July	214.7 W	156.4 W	371.1 W
2012	August	219.3 W	161.8 W	381.1 W
2012	September	233.8 W	110.0 W	343.7 W
2012	October	217.8 W	130.4 W	348.1 W
2012	November	224.8 W	970.9 W	1,195.7 W
2012	December	309.0 W	2,063.2 W	2,372.2 W
2013	January	655.0 W	3,629.6 W	4,284.6 W
2013	February	533.3 W	3,345.8 W	3,879.1 W
2013	March	512.6 W	2,433.3 W	2,945.9 W
2013	April	432.5 W	806.6 W	1,239.1 W
2013	May	374.3 W	377.1 W	751.4 W
2013	June	355.7 W	377.1 W	732.8 W
2013	July	351.5 W	284.4 W	635.9 W
2013	August	362.8 W	283.2 W	645.9 W
2013	September	354.8 W	264.9 W	619.8 W
2013	October	385.8 W	794.7 W	1,180.5 W
2013	November	487.4 W	2,389.8 W	2,877.2 W
2013	December	541.5 W	3,970.8 W	4,512.3 W
2014	January	418.8 W	3,482.9 W	3,901.7 W

Energy footprint of the digital economy

Back in 2009 we looked at the carbon footprint of ripping color documents for digital presses and published the result in the EI 2010 paper "Font rendering on a GPU-based raster image processor." Assuming the raster image processor is run at maximum capacity, the state of the art system at the time consumed 38,723 KWh and generated 23,234 Kg of CO₂. By using GPUs, we were able to rip the same data with 10,804 KWh respectively 6,483 Kg of CO₂. At the time we thought saving 16,751 Kg of CO₂ per year per RIP was a pretty cool result, but at the end the product never shipped, despite — or maybe because — it was much lower cost. (See the paper for the details of the calculations.)

This month the Digital Power Group published the white-paper "The cloud begins with coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, and big power." The work was sponsored by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which explains why some of the numbers appear a little optimistic in terms of the coal needed to keep the smart phones running and serving contents, but even if we divide the numbers by 5 to make them a little more realistic, the numbers are quite staggering when we add everything up. It turns out, that a smart phone requires as much coal as a small refrigerator. Cloud computing will consume an ever increasing fraction of our total energy consumption. This is a good reason to work on more efficient and greener storage systems.

HB-SIA

Two weeks ago, Switzerland started its new international tourism campaign, projecting a quaint image invented by Romantic writers like Friedrich Schiller and Johanna Spyri, with a few chaps from the Outback fighting in a Schwingen match. This suits well with the political majority party, who would like to place a cheese cloche over the country so it can live in a bubble.

Meanwhile, the Swiss fret over the 2050 energy package, ratified 25 May 2011, after Fukushima and the decision to exit nuclear energy generation. The slogan is that of the 2000-Watt Society, in which each person does not use more than 2000 W per day (today's average is 6000 W) and emits less than 1 Ton of CO₂ per annum.

Such goals require the thought leadership of visionaries and effective demonstrators. Solar Impulse has been one of the best demonstrators. For example, in May 2012 it flew from Payerne across the Mediterranean to Rabat and Quarzazate, convincing the Moroccans that solar energy is the way of the future, supporting the plan by King Mohammed VI to construct the world’s largest thermo-solar power plant in Ouarzazate.

The visionaries behind Solar Impulse are Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, along with their sponsors and their big team.

The numbers of Solar Impulse are quite impressive: with a wingspan of 63.40 m it is the size of an Airbus A340 or a 747, but it weighs only 1,600 Kg, just a little more than a Prius. Its range is infinite, because it can fly perpetually, since it produces much more electricity than it consumes, just as the Swiss hope to do with their houses.

Currently Solar Impulse is in Hangar 2 at Moffett Federal Airfield at Ames Research Center, getting ready for the next mission.

Although the airplane can fly perpetually, in their 2015 flight around the world with the second model, license HB-SIB, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg will take turns every 5 days, because that is how long a trained human can stay awake and pilot, and also sit with very limited motion on the pilot seat/toilet combo:

On the first of May, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg will take off from Moffett Field at a speed of 44 km/h and fly their Across America mission, which will take them to Phoenix, Dallas, Saint Louis or Atlanta, Washington D.C., and finally JFK in New York City.

If you happen to look up and see a jumbo with license HB-SIA soaring silently at a speed of 70 km/h, think what you can do to give back more energy than you consume, so your total usage (think at those servers farms delivering your contents) is below 2000 W per day. In the case of the Solar Impulse, its 11,628 SunPower solar cells have an efficiency of 23% and drive the four brushless sensorless electric engines in addition of charging the batteries for when there is no sunlight.

World's First Plant-Derived Color Toner

Kyocera Mita Corp. has developed a color toner for multifunction printers that is made from resin gleaned from rice husks, palm kernel shells and other discarded plant materials and adds pigments to a resin base. For the new product, it developed a base that contains a 30% mixture of polyester resins derived from plant fibers. By making partial use of the plant-derived resin, the new color toner has a 30% smaller carbon footprint when the spent cartridges are incinerated. Rivals such as Ricoh Co. already sell mono-chrome toner made using such resins, but Kyocera Mita will be the first in the world to market a color toner product from the material.

[Source: Science & Technology News from Japan, Swiss Science & Technology Office Tokyo]

Chicken Broth + Streptomyces Spores = Blue

How cool is that, PLoS Biology has posted an article by L.K. Charkoudian, J.T. Fitzgerald, C. Khosla and A. Champlin entitled "In Living Color: Bacterial Pigments as an Untapped Resource in the Classroom and Beyond".



Turns out with some chicken broth (and some agar) you can use soil bacteria, like Streptomyces coelicolor, as a biopigment for all your educational and/or artistic projects.

For other research on biopigments, see "Biopigments from Monascus: strains selection, citrinin production and color stability" by J. Cesar de CarvalhoI, B.O. OishiI, A. PandeyII and C.R. Socco for color from fungi.

Gotthard pierced again

After 11 years of drilling, yesterday at 2:17 PM the third Gotthard tunnel was pierced. 300 trains per day will travel in the 57 kilometre-long Gotthard base tunnel at 250 km/h. Freight trains will be able to carry twice the weight compared to the old tunnel.

Clipboards, Solar Cells & Fluorescence

Colored solar panels have been covered elsewhere, but reading some of the details gives me a new appreciation for my fluorescent clipboard.