* Energy *

[Arab Nights]

There was an interesting article Tuesday in the Wall Strreet Journal: "Renewable Energy Cannot Run the Cloud."

Facebook stores 100 petabytes (100 million gigabytes) of data at several data storage facilities around the US. Its newest is a 300,000 square foot facility in Prineville, Oregon. The Prineville facility uses as much electricity as 28,000 homes. If it were powered by wind, that would take windmills covering about 6 square miles.

Apple says it will use solar to help fuel its 500,000 square foot facility in Maiden, NC. An engineer on Amazon's web services team calculated that to power it entirely by solar would take 6.5 square miles covered completely with solar panels.

Worldwide, data centers now consume more electricity that either Mexico or Australia.

I wonder if it would affect global warming if the outback were covered in solar panels? Except it gets hot out there. Solar needs sun, but heat cuts it output. And engineer-type where I am working some in AZ says that their little solar panels put out about 5% less in the summer than in winter.

Anyway, anybody an engineering type who could argue with the above numbers?

[Arab Nights]

http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/radon/usagamma.gif - Moi, move to the Great Lakes region, background radiation level there is much lower than in California.
You'll live longer

I vote Langtry, TX for Moi.

http://www.texasescapes.com/TOWNS/Te...gtry_Texas.htm

Low radon and only about 30 other residents for low people mrem exposure. And I am sure they have internet so he can keep posting. However, if he decided to end it all, there is always (gasp) Pahrump located right about the edge of a whopping anomaly.

[Riverwind]

I also herd on the news that solar panels work best in the winter, if its to hot they don't work as well.

I think the point is that we need to develop all of the different energy sources that we can if we are ever to get off our dependency of fossil fuel.


Winter, colder weather, I KNOW Alaska, cover the whole damn state, nothing is really there except Moose and moms with guns er was that lips on a pig?


River

[A-1]

Don't forget the RED lipstick...

Honestly, River, we could not make this stuff up no matter how hard we tried. These folks are WAY over the top...

The doctor said to me yesterday, "...if oil is down to 84 bucks a barrel now how come the price of gas has went up?"

[Riverwind]

Thanks, I forgot about the lipstick but then there is so much to work with.

River

[A-1]

There was an interesting article Tuesday in the Wall Strreet Journal: "Renewable Energy Cannot Run the Cloud."

Facebook stores 100 petabytes (100 million gigabytes) of data at several data storage facilities around the US. Its newest is a 300,000 square foot facility in Prineville, Oregon. The Prineville facility uses as much electricity as 28,000 homes. If it were powered by wind, that would take windmills covering about 6 square miles.

Apple says it will use solar to help fuel its 500,000 square foot facility in Maiden, NC. An engineer on Amazon's web services team calculated that to power it entirely by solar would take 6.5 square miles covered completely with solar panels.

Worldwide, data centers now consume more electricity that either Mexico or Australia.

I wonder if it would affect global warming if the outback were covered in solar panels? Except it gets hot out there. Solar needs sun, but heat cuts it output. And engineer-type where I am working some in AZ says that their little solar panels put out about 5% less in the summer than in winter.

Anyway, anybody an engineering type who could argue with the above numbers?

Sure!

I resemble an "Engineering Type"!

To a seasoned engineer, the whole subject makes about as much sense as stating that You cannot plow snow with a Harley Davison motorcycle.

The internet, (including the 'cloud') was NEVER designed to operate on "Green Energy". Either the ignorance of the author of this article about the Internet is ASTOUNDING, or he has set out to write a provocative, political article denigrating solar energy and all things green.

As you know, "the cloud" is a loose referral to all of the information storage sites that have been created to store information at a centralized location. There are many individual information storage sites offering their storage services for a fee and that fee is much cheaper than purchasing and maintaining large enough servers in which to store your company's information on your particular site.

In addition, the separation of these physical storage system's hardware by many miles, sometimes in different states, is a redundant safety feature that few companies bother to do, are organized enough to do or who can afford to do.

Arab Nights, ask your engineer under what conditions were solar panels designed to operate. If he or she is truthful, they will tell you that solar panels were designed to operate under normal sunny conditions, not in the EXTREME temperature conditions of a desert.

So, bottom line, the "Cloud" was NEVER designed to operate solely from "GREEN" power sources. The article stating the obvious sets out to criticize energy efficiency and stupidly attempts to draw people into it's web of deceit.

The article makes as much sense as criticizing Harley Davison motorcycles because they cannot plow snow in Minnesota in a blizzard.

No engineer in their right mind would think that using a motorcycle to plow snow was an efficient plan.

[moi621]

We should use tax incentives to encourage PC *Energy*

End oil depletion allowances and promote solar depletion deductions.
Geothermal could be promoted through a geothermal depletion. . .

Maybe I should have put this in the Epiphany thread.







Truth: I remember this argument by Ralph Nadar. Not my invention. Just recalled.
The truth is always in the "fine print" don'tchyaknow

[A-1]

Don't worry about the AMOUNT... After all, we are NOT going to start out replacing fossil fuel with GREEN fuel technology overnight.

Remember, you must GROW a technology. It never starts out BIG...

[moi621]

Don't worry about the AMOUNT... After all, we are NOT going to start out replacing fossil fuel with GREEN fuel technology overnight.

Remember, you must GROW a technology. It never starts out BIG...

Ah yes.

However, Profit is the fertilizer for the GROWTH of a new technology.



I should have read that in a fortune cookie.

Moi

[Riverwind]

We should use tax incentives to encourage PC *Energy*

End oil depletion allowances and promote solar depletion deductions.
Geothermal could be promoted through a geothermal depletion. . .

Maybe I should have put this in the Epiphany thread.







Truth: I remember this argument by Ralph Nadar. Not my invention. Just recalled.
The truth is always in the "fine print" don'tchyaknow

The truth comes out, MOI is a Democrat.

River

[moi621]

The truth comes out, MOI is a Democrat.

River

The truth is the Democratic Party left me, just like it did in 1968.
I registered GOP with the Reagan Presidency because 51% of my gross was going to taxes,
and I was budgeting hard. It didn't feel right. That's I realized who those rich Liberals were willing to tax for their bleeding programs. Not themselves.
I am a Populist, since High School when I learned of them. Aka Progressive.
Amazingly, Progressive views today are more often expressed by the GOP.
I hope the Democratic Party finds its' lost Progressive wing. It starts with a Progressive tax code.

Moi
Truthiness & Freedom

[Arab Nights]

Sure!

So, bottom line, the "Cloud" was NEVER designed to operate solely from "GREEN" power sources. The article stating the obvious sets out to criticize energy efficiency and stupidly attempts to draw people into it's web of deceit.

The article makes as much sense as criticizing Harley Davison motorcycles because they cannot plow snow in Minnesota in a blizzard.

No engineer in their right mind would think that using a motorcycle to plow snow was an efficient plan.

The article - if the engineering figures are right - is helpful to me. As I have said before, I care about blue skies, etc. but not to the point of ruining the world economy. I would be willing to pay, oh say, 25% more clean energy. But I would not be willing to pay 200% more for only having 50% of my current energy usage. I doubt the world would either because it would throw us into the Greatest Depression.

So, I want to know more or less how productive and pricey green sources are. It is really, really easy to find heartfelt opinions about green energy, but it is really, really hard to find somebody that puts real numbers to the issue. I point blank asked an Arizona Public Service manager working on a local solar plant what the costs are and the skirted the issue without answering me. It is obviuos that the author had a position. But at least it was not just words. The article was about engineers was putting pencil and paper to problem and coming up with some numbers. Now, if those numbers are wrong, the guy obviously is a biased idiot. However, if the numbers are right, it helps me understand to what degree I want to support green energy. That is why my first post asks if we have a member who is an engineering type and can vet that the numbers are ballpark correct.

It was helpful for me to understand where I stand on green energy. I am not opposed to supporting research and development (which means building some of the things to refine that part of the puzzle) which seems inevitably to rely on your and my tax dollars or higher utility bills to pay for them. However, if the numbers are at all ballpark, wind and solar are a long way from the big show. Yet we do have a big show. Can we not squeeze the economy while still reducing pollutants? I think yes and I think that can be done with shale gas.

Articles like this one help me to understand to what proportion I would support solar, wind, shale gas, coal, etc. We do live in a real world and real world effects have to be considered.

[gareth19]

I am a Populist, since High School when I learned of them. Aka Progressive.
Amazingly, Progressive views today are more often expressed by the GOP.

Where are these progressive republicans hiding?

Oh yes, I can see those progressive views like purging voter roles in Florida; soon we'll return to the progressive days of poll taxes and racially profiled literacy tests.

Oh and the progressive stance on union busting; maybe we should commemorate the Homestead Strike with a national holiday.

Oh and the abolition of minimum wage.

and the support by all of the major republican contenders for Creation "science"

Then there is the move to restore prayer in public school

and the effort to overturn Roe vs Wade and bring the coat hanger back to family planning.

Don't forget the abolition of Glass-Stiegel; let's get rid of the federal reserve and progress into uninsured, unregulated banks; after all you progressives can always trust in the honesty of J.P. Morgan-Chase

Progressives are supposed to want to move forward, not turn back a century. Wake up! Stop dreaming. The only place the republican party is proceeding is into the dark ages.

[Dave]

The article - if the engineering figures are right - is helpful to me...
...

I started looking at this. There are lots of four, five and six year old articles but not many recent ones that discuss power usage in a useful way.

I can find energy demands for certain things like a "new hospital" in a city requires XXX number of Kw and the power grid has only YYY number of kilowatts. OR "the average server farm is ZZZ Kw" and all numbers like that.

What I find is scattered news articles from some partisan viewpoint (not republican or democrat but partisan none the less) and numbers without references. If an article says a new server farm requested 350 megawatt from the grid, that doesn't mean that it is going to use it. That's the type of number you use to plan. For instance, your house probably has 100 amp at 220v coming off the street just because you have an electric clothes dryer or an electric stove. That doesn't mean your energy usage is 100 amp at 220v.

So when I searched, I found a set of numbers that didn't describe the actual power usage at server farms.
BTW - Google and others with huge server farms keep that number secret.

[moi621]

Where are these progressive republicans hiding?
<edit>

Gary Johnson
Buddy Roemer
Ron Paul, M.D.
You got any Democratic Party Progressives?
I see lots of Liberals preserving their wealth and Blue Dog Conservatives seeking to preserve their personal wealth.

That is what is really odd. The Progressives are coming out of the GOP now.
The Anti-Big Money people. Like the no new tax pledge, I believe the above 3 would sign a Progressive Tax Code pledge.

Moi


My Progressive/Populist heroes from school before college.
James Knox Polk is my #1.
Andrew Jackson. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt.
More recently William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long.
Not Jefferson you wonder. Or not. Jefferson like Obama and Catherine the Great, talked the talk.
If you don't see the common element of the Progressives, you do not 'get it'.
The common element is an economy more in favor of the working person. Percolate up economics.