Wow.

There is a clear and strong linkage between energy generation and computing. In the early days of computing, there were a small number of very large computers, made by a small number of manufacturers, all working independently. Interconnection was mostly as a second thought. Then came PCs, and for a long time, they were novelties, and then started working together a little, and even a little with the big computers, but only with a fight.

The Internet changed everything — it forced a standard set of ways that computers could inter-operate; you could either accept the standard (which was, by the way, none of the ones by big companies like IBM, Microsoft, Novell and others), or be all alone. By the mid-1990s, finally everyone supported that standard, and things began to happen.

The computing standard supported two way communication, distributed computing, instant and automatic routing, fault-tolerance, and all built on an open, non-proprietary standard.

All of these lessons, and sadly some of the challenges, apply to energy. Local generation today is mostly a novelty — rooftop solar or wind seems quaint, and even if you do plug it in to the grid, the power company has no idea how much you generate, or what to do with it.

Smart Meters are one part of the open standard that will allow your house to be part of a power network; they are smart because they can communicate, whether back to a large power plant, or to your next-door neighbor.

The Smart Grid is the Internet for power — providing efficient routing, inter-operability (coal, gas, solar, wind, nuclear, whatever!), and an open platform that can instantly balance supply and demand.

Getting from the extremely dumb and fragile and inefficient system we have today to one that can support a peer-to-peer or other decentralized energy distribution platform will take a lot of work, but mostly it’s about getting all the big companies who want to “win” to look back and realize that the real winners of the Internet are and will be the companies that seek open standards.

We need to do everything we can to support the efforts of the Smart Grid and make sure that the open standards as proposed by the US and other governments are adopted quickly; with that out of the way, we may be able to move quickly to enable an energy revolution.

And as a side note…

The idea of local generation is far from new. I have on my bookshelf a copy of “Soft Energy Paths”, written by Amory Lovins, in 1977. He presents a very strong argument for local generation and distribution, and not once with any mention of global warming — one of his main arguments was that local generation provides greater security (no central plant to bomb), and reliability, and flexibility, and efficiency. If you look up the Smart Grid, you’ll see that these are exactly the same goals. 30 years later, we’re getting started.

Lovins founded a great organization called the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) — they are still around and thinking the next great thoughts we’ll all come to see as wisdom in the future :-)

I came across this interesting piece tonight and thought I would share….this sounds like a fairly good idea, no?

April 21, 2009
Peer-to-peer power through microgrids
Filed under: Complexity, Economics, Electricity — Tags: Complexity, Economics, Electricity — lkiesling @ 6:10 am
Lynne Kiesling

When we think of concepts like peer-to-peer networks and disintermediation, we usually think of industries that are very Internet-centric. But these concepts can, should, and will apply in electric power networks too: smart grid technology enables peer-to-peer power.

The study referenced in that BBC article analyzes the potential for microgrids, and argues that the real potential from applying smart grid technology to create microgrids is in the ability to create a neighborhood peer-to-peer network in which neighboring customers can buy and sell from each other:

“A microgrid is a collection of small generators for a collection of users in close proximity,” explained Dr Markvart, whose research appears in the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Ingenia magazine.

“It supplies heat through the household, but you already have cables in the ground, so it is easy to construct an electricity network. Then you create some sort of control network.”

That network could be made into a smart grid using more sophisticated software and grid computing technologies.

As an analogy, the microgrids could work like peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies, such as BitTorrents, where demand is split up and shared around the network of “users”.

As distributed generation and plug-in hybrid vehicles proliferate in the market, more numbers and types of electricity consumers will have the resources to be both buyers and sellers in such a peer-to-peer network. Look, for example, at the picture of a P2P network at the Wikipedia peer-to-peer entry.

Now imagine that instead of computers, each of the entities depicted on this network is a home or small business in a microgrid network. Power, and commercial transactions, can flow in both directions between pairs on the network, and they can flow between any pairs of agents who have agreed to participate. Just think of what that can do to reliability, especially if you pair it up with transactive, price-responsive end-use technologies that have the type of behavior I described in this post on smart grid and complexity and this post on how intelligent end-use devices make a transactive smart grid valuable.

If you are interested in learning more about a microgrid project, here’s a report on the Galvin Electricity Initiative prototype microgrid project at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It focuses on the technical details and capabilities of a microgrid to provide reliable, high-quality electric power service, not on the microgrid’s transactive capabilities, but it’s a good introduction.

The technology exists for P2P power networks. The institutional structure, though, does not allow for such a decentralized, transactive network — the regulatory environment typically does not allow microgrids for a variety of reasons, including the monopoly granted to the local utility on the construction of distribution wires that cross public rights-of-way.

I agree that Amazon can operate at a higher operating capacity than 25%, but there still needs to be available resources, as it could be bad if someone needed a lot of resources and Amazon couldn’t deliver.

Having a backup plan is easier and cheaper when using cloud computing, since really you’re just running a few services on a virtual machine, plus your own codebase. I highly recommend looking at a few other companies who do cloud computing, and have a backup plan in place. EC2 is likely very complex, and a bad upgrade of server hardware could really hurt things. There was a several hour outage in the last 12 months where new EC2 instances could not be provisioned. This wasn’t a problem for most, but at a crucial time, it could be. While a full on outage is likely able to be mitigated, having a disaster plan is always a good idea. And with cloud computing, it’s easier to do, as you don’t need to deal with physical hardware.

From your blog standpoint, I agree that that cloud computing will result in less energy usage for the same amount or more capacity to serve your customers, while simultaneously making you more nimble.

What you say is true, although I would say you’re talking about a pretty serious catastrophe. Our sites are eCommerce — I am looking for almost no downtime, but we’re not a bank, a flight control center, an online porn site, or some other absolutely critical resource that can’t go down ever.

Our former data center is also in a single location in Boston so from a facilities standpoint we’re about at par. From a backup and redundancy standpoint we’re far better off, if only because it’s so simple to make a volume snapshot, and Amazon claims to store their S3 data in multiple physical locations. It’s also the case that Amazon has an entirely different data center now in Europe, and is working on getting a West Coast US center hooked into the EC2 fabric. It’s true that Amazon’s SLA for up-time is not quite at the level of the first-tier providers … however what matters to me is the ability to recover from an outage quickly; having no physical hardware removes a great deal of logistical issues.

As for the utilization of hardware (which is what my post was really about :-), a friend who works at Amazon explained about their strategy. In effect, the larger their scale, the more they can use the excess capacity of a given machine to handle their own load and storage requirements. Of course their machines at not at 100%, but as scale increases, a smaller and smaller percentage of idle capacity is needed, and the cost per compute-unit (and storage unit) falls for Amazon, as well as for customers.

While there are highly predictable daily and weekly trends for usage, the fluctuations that characterize our business are different than others; when we need more, someone else may need less — it’s the same model as insurance: spread risk over volume. Of course the same costs are required to run their servers — power, cooling, UPS, etc., but because it is done at scale, it can be done more efficiently.

In our case, at least, there’s no doubt that the total cost of energy (both running and embedded) is far less (many times) in a cloud environment than in our traditional co-lo data center.

Tom

Because Amazon uses a modified version of Xen, consider finding a second cloud-based company that supports Xen (or any other cloud computing method) and make sure their datacenters are somewhere other than Amazon’s. This way, if there is some sort of problem with Amazon, you can at least get a few servers with the bare essentials started up, change your DNS, and be back up, even if at a somewhat lower capacity.

And though YOU aren’t paying for it directly, all of your virtual machines are running on hardware that is, potentially, at 1/8 to 1/4 in capacity most of the time. It is likely that Amazon does everything in its power to, well, use less power per computing unit, and that their datacenters are more efficient than the one you are replacing, but there is still the cost of running the systems — A/C, power, filters, UPSes, multiple phases, etc.