A Green reason for Electric Cars

I have often wondered if the use of Electric Vehicles, cars and Scooter’,s would ever become viable. And I had a revelation about how they could be more integrated into a green lifestyle. Almost everyone knows that that an electric car needs to be recharged while at the home. But what if you stop thinking of the car as a separate object from the other household equipment.

One of the biggest drawbacks from utilizing Solar electric, and wind power generators is their inconsistent output. Wind power only works in a stiff breeze and solar, only during the day. And to make matters worse, neither may happen when there is a peak requirement for the power. Power fluctuations are a bane to green power. Thus all these technologies still require power from a main grid to fill in the gaps. And while you can pump power into the grid during peak green ellipsoids, you can’t store any locally to supply yourself, or if the grid should be down.

Unless you have an electric car that is. If you stop thinking of the eAuto as a separate entity, and think of it as a portable energy storage device, the problem is partly solved. If the power storage of the eAuto were large enough it would act like a power buffer, storing power during peak green output, and supplying supplemental power back into the house during peak requirements. A power filter regulator for the green fluctuations.

Frequently when the eAuto might be needed as transportation, power requirements are at a minimum as the occupants of the house are the ones traveling. It also could be moved to a location to recharge elsewhere and return to supply power to the house, much like a bucket of water, when your pipes freeze up.

The possibilities are endless.

The distributed Internet

A posting from Bernie Goldbach Powering the Information Age reminded me about the nature of the Internet. The underlying structure of the Internet is distributed, fault tolerant networking, initially intended to continue operating after a nuclear war. In the current climate, it routes around ‘damages’ like ‘censorship’ firewalls, and corporate throttling of bandwidth.

But one of the other things it’s good at is distributed computing, two nodes in the same domain can be geographically separated by an entire planet. This seems to escape the mindset of current datacenter deployment. While it might make sense to concentrate servers into small areas, in an energy constrained world perhaps powered by distributed power sources, it doesn’t. the loss or degradation of the power source to a datacenter places it on the back foot operationally, constrained to secondary generation, it server’s, all the server’s in the datacenter become vulnerable to the same ‘outage’ which the Internet will also treat as ‘damaged’ and route around.

Given a properly functional broadband infrastructure, servers located at the endpoints of the networks will as a whole, be less likely to be dropped from the Internet as damage. The likelihood of power being eliminated from a large distributed server domain is also contained. In a potential alternative energy future where solar and wind could be the primary source, distributed ‘green’ servers fit the requirement.

Compaq Presario CQ2009F

Have you ever looked for the perfect thing, and find that no one in Europe carry it, and no one will ship it to you. I have! I have been considering a low power, very green, server platform to use as a MySQL / Sybase / HTTP server system. My perfect system would have been this, Compaq Presario CQ2009F however nether Amazon.com Nor the HP Home Store will ship to Ireland, and neither sell it in Europe.

In this Recession, would you think that anyone would give up a market opportunity, or give up revenue?

In the end, I’ll probably end up with this thing Asus Eee Box and pay more for less computer! Rip off Ireland indeed!

UPDATE: to add insult to injury, Misco won’t ship this Shuttle X27D Mini ITX into Ireland from the UK!!!

UPDATE 2: It looks like someone at HP heard me, and have now relaeased the Compaq CQ2000M to Europe. Now all I have to do wait until someone actually carries it. 🙁

Internet to shutdown to help environment.

In this article Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches the Times On-Line quotes from an energy researcher who has no access to Google energy data to state “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.” Much like posting his article online. Perhaps he should reflect on the old adage Without Reliable Data, I’m Just another A__Ho_e with an Opinion!

Google Rebuttals: Powering a Google Search