1,027 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. From a mechanical perspective, designing a hydrogen storage system is significantly more complex than a diesel storage system. Hydrogen has more storage options available however, it presents higher risks than diesel such as greater flammability and explosivity, higher pressures, potential for low temperature, or chemical storage methods which are all hazardous. This therefore requires the mechanical design for such a system to comply with rigorous safety standards.

      Ok, so h2 unsurprisingly is wast more explodey, and hard to store safely and cheaply

    1. The key benefit and primary motivation for installing hydrogen fuel cells within a data center is to reduce carbon emissions. As stated, some fuel cells, such as SOFCs, can use natural gas. While it is less damaging to the environment than diesel, it still results in significant carbon emissions.

      Is this some of the missing context for the CCS next to datacentre patents from M$?

      If you can capture the CO2, and use the waste heat to separate the CO2 from the absorbing material, then it might improve the economics of the SOFC fuel cells, AND deal with the CO2 emissions problem.

    2. SOFCs and PEM fuel cells differ from one another in their construction, materials, and operation. In a high-level view, the primary differences are the electrolyte materials (where the hydrogen and oxygen react) and operating temperatures. SOFCs operate at high temperatures, requiring longer start-up times and as a result, only being suitable for continuous power supply. PEMs, by contrast, operate at lower temperatures and are capable of fast-start or continuous operation, but are a more expensive option.

      Oh wow, so there are two kinds of fuel cells, and the expensive one is the fast ramp up one

    3. The majority of fuel cells currently in use in data centers are solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), providing constant power. SOFCs can generate power through the conversion of fuels such as natural gas and biogas, into hydrogen, which is then reacted in the fuel cell to generate power. While using natural gas still results in carbon emissions, SOFCs are able to generate power with higher efficiency than combustion engines. SOFCs can also be fuelled directly with hydrogen, although this is not the norm due to hydrogen’s cost and availability.

      Wow, greater efficiency than gas turbines / engines?

    1. And if you look at the total consumption of semiconductors by the Chinese manufacturing industry, then China imports more semiconductors than they import oil.

      China spends more importing semiconductors than on importing oil? really?

      This is from Peter Wennink, CEO of ASML

    1. Google has argued that switching search engines is just a click away and that people use Google because it's the superior search engine. Google also argued at trial that Microsoft's failures with Bing are "a direct result of Microsoft’s missteps in Internet search."

      This is interesting - I wonder how 3rd parties like Mozilla or Vivaldi testify?

      If they say it's hard, they contradict their own marketing, and risk their main source of revenue.

      If they say it's easy, they risk undermining all their own comms around the importance of choice, and the necessity of more diverse ecosystems.

    1. Provide a transitional implementation for network operators and protocols that do not yet support standards-based Layer 2-3

      This suggests to me that there is a lot of proprietary layer 2-3 in IOT. Is this the case?

    1. Despite the unknowns, the technology definitely piques the interest of owners and operators of data center facilities, with analyst firm Omdia noting that more than 80 percent of survey respondents will most likely deploy grid-interactive UPSs within the next five years. As usual for this industry, the technology will require more deployments and for it to mature before it becomes the standard way data centers and other mission-critical facilities will be built.

      I wonder how much extra flex and capacity this would represent?

    2. While exact numbers are not disclosed, such as battery capacity and how much Microsoft is willing to make available for grid interactivity, the company claims that, over the next couple of years, this move will remove about two million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise be generated from Ireland’s National Grid.

      This is about an eighth of Microsoft's reported emissions in 2022, I think

    1. Let’s just pause to emphasise this point: no amount of R&D, innovation or technology will allow us to remove CO2 from the atmosphere without spending at least 191 kWh per tonne of CO2.

      Even if we acheive perfect efficiency we tax the global economy 10% to remove annual emissions

    1. Table 5.10a. Solar REC prices during the period March 2020 – March  2021 (US$/MWh)

      This are nearly 100x the cost of Hydro RECs in come cases

    1. It should be noted that the third normative approach considers the global need for electricity asoutlined by the International Energy Agency (IEA) for different scenarios and develops an interim1.5DS within which ICT should not expand its current share of electricity. This electricity budgetuses the IEA trajectories for a 2°C scenario (2DS) and a below 2°C scenario (B2DS) to derive a 1.5°Ctrajectory for world electricity usage through doubling the difference between them and subtractingit from the 2DS as described in [IEA ETP]. This is an interim approach as IEA has not yet establisheda 1.5DS. The budget is then used to determine the amount of electricity that could be used by thesector if keeping its share at the current level. As the IEA is planning to include a specific 1.5DS, thetrajectories will be reviewed when the new IEA scenarios are published.

      This is the only mention of a "fair share" of global electricity use by the ICT sector

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    1. The VIC system created maintains a list of available URLs or DNS entries for the service requiring computation, each of which live in a different datacenter in a different part of the world. When the service receives a request, it routes that request to the datacenter that best matches the required criteria

      LOL it's DNS again!

    2. A TCP/IP based system was built to investigate the feasibility of a VIC as per Fig. 1. This considers routing Microsoft Azure workloads to datacenters around the world to best satisfy the required criteria. Three criteria were applied: (1) reduce load on a particular electricity grid at peak times, (2) follow green energy and low emissions energy around the world with computation, thus reducing curtailment of renewables and facilitating more renewable energy and (3) take advantage of variable electricity market prices.

      Three criteria reworded:

      (1) reduce peak load on the particular electricity grid (2) reduce fossil generation in the compute (3) reduce cost of electricity use for the compute

    3. Furthermore, many markets grant Capacity Payments to eligible generators and interconnectors for being available to follow dispatch instructions, irrespective of actual generation. VICs would also be eligible to receive such payments but they should be directly to the VICO rather than any users. This allows users to bid without the influence of capacity payments and rewards the datacenters providing the VIC.

      Under this scenario, a grid operator would pay a datacentre to be prepared to switch off local physical load.

      The load would still be served through, albeit on a different grid or grid region where you didn't have the same strains on the electricity network.

    1. Potential to combine with steam turbines to generate more power

      I assumed gas turbines use water to heat up steam to generate the power. This suggests this is not the case.

    2. gas engines & gas turbines

      engines and turbines are different things

    1. Teleoperators are the world’s second-largest consumer of batteries. Elisa is also offering its Distributed Energy Storage solution to teleoperators in other countries so that they can improve the reliability of their own mobile networks and do their part in accelerating the green transition by investing in a distributed battery reserve and utilising it to provide balancing services in their electricity markets.

      What is a teleoperator?

  2. Sep 2023
    1. Net Zero Sales covers scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions on an intensity, full equity-share basisacross the value chain and seeks to reduce these:a. By 5% by 2025b. By 15-20% by 2030c. To net-zero by 2050
    2. Net Zero Emissions Commitment covers scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions on an intensity, partialequity-share basis across the value chain and seeks to reduce these:a. By 15% by 2025b. By 28% by 2030c. By 55% by 2040d. To net-zero by 2050.
    3. Net Zero Production covers scope 3 emissions on an absolute, full equity-share basis inthe upstream sector, excluding 3rd party crude, and seeks to reduce these:a. By 10-15% by 2025 [20%]b. By 20-30% by 2030 [30-40%]c. To net-zero by 2050
    4. Net Zero Operations covers scope 1 and 2 emissions on an absolute, operated-asset basisacross the value chain and seeks to reduce these:a. By 20% by 2025b. By 50% by 2030c. To net-zero by 2050

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    1. “A reporting organization should not purchase renewable electricity and simply apply it to scope 3 emissions without involvement from its supplier or customer.” Renewable Electricity Procurement on Behalf of Others: A Corporate Reporting Guide (page 4), EPA, 2022.
    2. Microsoft’s 2021 Environmental Sustainability Report includes 11 of the 15 scope 3 categories (page 19), while Google reports business travel and employee commuting as one total and “other” scope 3 emissions in a second total (page 11). Apple(page 84) and Amazon (page 97) report lifecycle emissions from customer trips to physical stores under scope 3 which are not categories prescribed by the GHG
    3. Certigy, a European EAC registry, has enabled hourly certification across many EU countries

      This is a tool offered by Unicorn.com specifically for energy reporting

    4. Apple, which has a relatively long history of reporting its scope 3 emissions, states in its 2022 Environmental Progress Report that it is actively evolving its scope 3 accounting methodology. “In fiscal year 2017, we started calculating scope 3 emissions not listed above. In fiscal year 2021, these include electricity transmission and distribution losses [...] and life cycle emissions associated with renewable energy. We have not accounted for emissions resulting from employees working from home [...] we are still evolving our methodology.“ Environmental Progress Report (page 84), Apple, 2022
    5. This also explains why, even though Norway’s grid-levelemissions factor is 10 kg CO2/MWh17 (98% carbon-free), the residual
    6. emissions factor is 402 kg CO 2/MWh (7.4% renewable), reflectingthat most EACs produced within the Norwegian grid are claimedand retired outside of the country.
    7. Data demonstrate that many companies do indeed pursue thispractice. For example, Norway was responsible for 43% of allguarantees of origin (GOs) exports in Europe in 2022, many ofwhich were purchased by companies whose operations have noconnection to the Norwegian grid on which these EACs wereproduced.
    1. Wind and solar are, of course, intermittent, but battery costs too are plummeting, to the extent that they often underbid so-called peaking plants burning natural gas

      Where would I look to find public evidence of this?

    1. This article in effect requires local authorities to only use data centres that a fully compliant with the requirements of the specified directives.

      Minimum, mandatory standards for public procurement.

    2. Article 33 Delegated Acts 3. The Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 34 to supplement this Directive by establishing, after having consulted the relevant stakeholders, a common Union scheme for rating the sustainability of data centres located in its territory. The Commission shall adopt the first such delegated act by 31 December 2023. The common Union scheme shall establish the definition of data centre sustainability indicators and shall set out the key performance indicators and the methodology to measure them.

      There's a policy deadline to work - end of this year, so it's likelt there'll be a push to try to weaken it even more.

    3. 5. By 15 May 2025, the Commission shall assess the available data on the energy efficiency of data centres submitted to it pursuant to paragraphs 1 and 3 and shall submit a report to the European Parliament and to the Council, accompanied, where appropriate, by legislative proposals containing further measures to improve energy efficiency, including establishing minimum performance standards and an assessment on the feasibility of transition towards a net-zero emission data centres sector, in close consultation with the relevant stakeholders
    4. . The Commission shall establish a European database on data centres that includes information communicated by the obligated data centres in accordance with paragraph 1. The European database shall be publicly available on an aggregated level.

      It will be law to collect this data now, so we know orgs will have to have it in structured form.

      If it's gonna be in the public domain anyway, there's a good argument for paving a path to make it easy to look transparent, by making it easy to disclose this info in a well presented way human readable way

    5. We think that the threshold for reporting being 500kw is too low, as it will not pick up aggregated edge sites (organisations that have multiple facilties that individually are below the threshold but aggregated would be considerably higher), Mobile Phone basestation sites and Points of Presence (PoPs)

      So ths lobbying will have now effectively hidden 4G/5G infra, as well as a lot of edge

    6. This links back to the lower limit for reporting of 500kw, clearly the EC see no reason to collect data from 'distributed compute' such as individual server rooms (at this time)
    7. This is very interesting, we've seen some national government initatives in various countries relating to the collection of data centre energy data, in the UK we have the Climate Change Agreement for Data Centres which started in 2014 and according to the latest figures (4th Period) indicated that total UK energy use of the period for commercial data centres (colocation sites) was 12TWh. Back to the EED and the very interesting thing is the mention of 'interventions' will this mean the imposition of fines for poor energy performance?
    8. This introduces the requirement for a data centre register and the rating of data centres for sustainabilty, this could become an utter bag of worms, as sustainability is closely linked to the amount of renewable energy systems on an individual country grid, the 'grid mix' and could favour those countries and data centres that are directly linked to low carbon energy sources (Norway, Sweden, Finland (Hydro), France (Nuclear), Spain (Solar/Wind) & Denmark (Wind).

      This also means that though that countries ought to be less keen on selling their EACs though

    1. It’s pretty simple: don’t let carbon removal excuse ongoing or worsening emissions. That means no deal with fossil fuel majors. And if you really must sell carbon credits, here’s my idea: they can only apply to the earliest emissions first. Once we’ve dealt with the ~2,500 ish human-added CO2 gigatonnes in the atmosphere, THEN you can apply credits to new emissions. We go from oldest to newest, not from newest to oldest.

      What about the compounding of warning for these tonnes?

  3. Aug 2023
    1. This approach results in our Scope 2 market-based emissions being greater than zero, per the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Scope 2 Guidance, despite us achieving our 100% renewable energy match globally.

      I think is the first time Google has mentioned this in texr that's the same szie as their regular copy.

    2. Electricity purchased from renewable sources (%) is calculated on a calendar-year basis, dividing the volume of renewable electricity (in megawatt-hours) procured for our global operations (i.e., renewable energy procured through our PPA contracts, on-site renewable energy generation, and renewable energy in the electric grids where our facilities are located) by the total volume of electricity consumed by our global operations. This metric includes all renewable energy purchased, regardless of the market in which the renewable energy was consumed

      I read this to mean that they purchase energy for the same calendar year - so usage in 2022 ought to have corresponding environmental attribute certificates for 2022 as well.

      It may be the case that the date of retiring is 2023, because I know that some clodu providers purchase certificates, then sell ones they don't need on the market if they were able to adjust their energy usage to no longer need the same number of cerrtificates.

  4. letsencrypt.org letsencrypt.org
    1. Will Let’s Encrypt issue Organization Validation (OV) or Extended Validation (EV) certificates? We have no plans to issue OV or EV certificates.

      This here is the gap

    1. If the signature over the nonce is valid, and the challenges check out, then the agent identified by the public key is authorized to do certificate management for example.com. We call the key pair the agent used an “authorized key pair” for example.com.

      OK, that's how signing the nonce with the private key helps.. Lets Encrypt already has access to the public key, and so once if has the nonce signed with the private key, it has a way to check the it that the server has both parts of the key pair without needing to see the private key

    1. WeencourageSouthPoletoembraceadifferentapproach,suchasthe“dollarfortonne”methoddescribedbyVCMI,wherebyacompanypricesitsinternalunabatedemissions,andspendstheleviedfundsonmitigationprojects(suchasthroughthepurchaseofcarboncredits).

      Who, or what is VCMI?

    1. Thismightnotbeadeterminingfactor,butitisoneofthefactorstoincludeaspartoftheadditionalitydetermination.Plantswithlowloadfactors(i.e.utilisationrate)shouldbeexcludedfromeligibility.

      Many of China's coal fired ppower plants are running at less than half capacity, now

    1. Reverse proxy implementation in nginx includes in-band (or passive) server health checks. If the response from a particular server fails with an error, nginx will mark this server as failed, and will try to avoid selecting this server for subsequent inbound requests for a while.

      Handy!

    1. Without having to take any risk themselves, they collect increasing profits that are indirectly paid for almost entirely by the European taxpayer. At the current interest rates, this costs the European treasuries 135 billion annually. Dutch banks receive about 11 billion of that sum, of which only 8 billion – 5.8 per cent of total payments – is being borne by Dutch taxpayers. The rest is being paid for by the taxpayers of other European countries, because the interest payments of all central banks within the Eurosystem are mutually settled via a fixed capital key.

      What is a fixed capital key?

    1. WattCarbon decarbonization projects are measured using official government grid data1, site level metered energy data, and open source avoided energy use methodologies2, which provides the highest degree of transparency and integrity for every project on our marketplace.

      This appears to use the open source OpenEEmeter, to figure out a baseline that any interventions would be measured against. This is written in python, so the code can be examined, but it's not obviosu to me how well this would work outside of California

    1. Players confront challenges mirroring those in the real world: they extinguish forest fires, obstruct illegal logging, replant native trees and clean up rivers.

      And destroy mining equipment in the video - amazed an ad agency would let that through

    1. It proved to be so effective that criminalisation spread across Latin America and is now deployed globally as part of a playbook of tactics to divide communities, and detract attention away from legitimate debate and protests about environmental and climate harms.

      Uh, yes, it seems.

    2. Experts say that what happened here helped to establish criminalisation as a go-to tool for polluting industries and governments seeking to discredit and silence activists. Guatemala was a textbook example of a draconian crackdown, becoming a laboratory of sorts, with arbitrary charges used against countless community leaders opposing environmentally destructive projects.

      So this essentially created a playbook for extractive industries to use the law to stifle resistance from local communities?

    1. As plaintiffs’ counsel Nate Bellinger, senior staff attorney at Our Children’s Trust, stated in his closing: “It’s worth remembering other times in our nation’s history when the political process didn’t work to protect people’s basic human rights. Segregation, women’s rights, equal and adequate public schooling, marriage—time and time again, the political will of powerful majorities was struck down by courts, based on the compelling evidence before them, courageously correcting the injustices thrust on the people. Today, the injustice squarely before this Court is the proven harms of these young people wrought by climate change caused by a fossil fuel-based energy system imposed and perpetuated through the law.”

      YES BRUV

    2. But as climate policy analyst Peter Erickson explained during his expert testimony on the plaintiffs’ side, Montana’s total annual CO2 emissions – 166 million tons (based on 2019 data) – are on par with annual emissions of entire countries like the Netherlands and Pakistan. “To call [Montana’s] emissions miniscule is then to call the emissions of over 100 countries of the world miniscule,” Erickson said. “Montana’s emissions matter”, he emphasized.

      Wow, the same as a country with hundreds of millions of people? That seems high

    1. You may have heard of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. It means having at least three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site.

      TIL

    1. The value of provenance information  Adding provenance information to media to combat misinformation is not a new idea, and early research seems to show that it could be promising: one project from a master’s student at the University of Oxford, for example, found evidence that users were less susceptible to misinformation when they had access to provenance information about content.

      How computationally expensive is this to tag content in this way?

    1. They also worked their media mogul pals, like Mike Bloomberg, who added their names to the "Friends of Mike" list that Bloomberg reporters were required to consult before writing negative coverage

      Wow, there’s a friends of Mike?

    1. Full text seach is a way to avoid these two issues. With SQLite, you enable full text search by creating what is called a "virtual table" using one of the FTS engines included with SQLite: FTS4 or FTS5. FTS5 support is the most recent and has more advanced searching features, including ranking and highlighting of results and is what is described here.

      This is the advantage of using FTS5 - it'you get the ranking and highlighting that you might otherwise assocaite with Postgres or other bigger databases that have search capabilities

    1. Let’s dissect this piece of Mojo code. First, you'll notice that we have new variable declarations let and var which may look odd at first glance since this is not familiar Python syntax. Mojo offers optional (except in some cases, more on that later) variable declarations to declare variables as immutable with let (i.e. cannot be modified after creation) or mutable with var (i.e. can be modified).

      this is the opposite of javascript. why not make use 'const'?

    1. P-States

      What is a P-State?

    2. In this example we have run sysbench --cpu-max-prime=25000 --threads=1 --time=10 --test=cpu --events=0 --rate=0 and put a CPU % limiting on the process and increased that in 10% increments. The blue curve has been done with the schedutil CPU frequency govenor which dynamically scales the CPU frequency. And the red curve has been done with the performance scaling govenor which scales the CPU frequency to a maximum as soon as even a minimum amount of load happens on a core.

      In addition to all the stuff above, there are also governors, who decide how a CPU's frequency is scaled in the face of new load being introduced.

    3. Suprisingly we see that on an unloaded system the energy actually increases! The assumption made here is that the cost per instruction goes down. This is an effect that can also be seen in SPECPower benchmarks where the sweet-spot for a system is typically somewhere around the higher third quarter of the peak performance.

      This is weird - basically the energy per instruction is lower under load, because systems are more efficient when they are at around 3/4 peak performance, a bit like a car engine can be more efficient at a specific RPM compared to others

    1. The legislative proposal risks rendering obsolete such ambitious and holistic industry-led initiatives that provide a tool for more informed consumer decisions, encourage improvements by manufacturers and demonstrate European leadership on sustainability questions. The Regulation should instead enable such schemes (which go beyond environmental claims, and consider aspects like durability, recyclability, etc.) to continue being used.

      OK, so this paper is essentially arguing "please use our industry approved way to rate kit, and do not regulate us"

    1. These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It's called the "shitty technology adoption curve":

      "Work your way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else." Yeesh

    1. Funneled into the colocation space, this rising demand has almost completely saturated Tier I data center markets like Ashburn, Dallas, and Silicon Valley. As a result, hyperscale workloads are driving growth in Tier II and Tier III markets, occupying existing capacity and spurring new developments.

      I hadn't realised this was such a trend - I was aware the older centralised approaches might not work as well as they used to, but it hadn't occured to me that the hyperscalers were behind the push in the other areas too

    1. New technologies can change who holds power and threaten how things work. Decisions about technology become wrapped up in fights to preserve or change political culture. When thinking about technological changes, we can’t just approach it as a project of modernisation – we need to have a view on the culture we want to create.

      What a quote

    1. As it stands, Intel will walk away with the lion's share of the funding for its Magdeburg megafab, where it plans to produce angstrom-class parts beginning in 2027. After months of negotiations over rising operating and materials costs associated with building in the region – the facility is now expected to cost €30 billion to complete – the x86 titan received commitments from German officials in June for €10 billion in support.

      10bn is about the same as the 9 euro ticket would have cost for all of 2023

    1. Storage –Increasing solar penetration causes the number of high-load hours (within 5% of peak) to decline from seven hours in the Base scenario to just two hours in the Accelerated scenario.

      More solar on roofs means the number of high loads hours is 3 times smaller

  5. Jul 2023
    1. Decarbonize Alibaba (Scopes 1 and 2): By 2030, we will achieve carbon neutrality in our own operations.Green the value chain (Scope 3): By 2030, we will collaborate with our upstream and downstream value chain partners to cut emission intensity by 50% from the base year of 2020. Alibaba Cloud will achieve Scope 3 carbon neutrality during the same period.Enable a low-carbon circular digital ecosystem (Scope 3+): Beyond our own operations and direct value chains, we pledge to leverage our digital platforms to encourage even broader participation by stakeholders that can be reached by our efforts. By 2035, we will facilitate 1.5 gigatons of GHG emission reduction over 15 years across Alibaba's digital ecosystem.

      These are the three high level commitments.

      Carbon neutrality, which is as close to Net Zero as I can find, but they include "Scope 3+".

      This isn't a term in the GHG Protocol lexicon that I know of.

    1. In 2021, Alibaba set ambitious targets of achieving carbon neutrality in our own operations and halving the energy intensity across our value chain by 2030 and driving emission reduction of 1.5 gigatons over 15 years in our platform ecosystem

      There's a 2030 end goal target

    1. Not that an E2E rule precludes algorithmic feeds: remember, E2E is the idea that you see what you ask to see. If a user opts into a feed that promotes content that they haven't subscribed to at the expense of the things they explicitly asked to see, that's their choice. But it's not a choice that social media services reliably offer, which is how they are able to extract ransom payments from publishers.

      I don't understand how you could audit this, unless you had to force a default of chronological presentation of posts etc.

    2. This is nonsense: when users are given the choice to block surveillance, they overwhelmingly do. Apple's iOS devices offer users a one-click opt-out from app-based surveillance. Ninety-six percent of iOS users have opted out (presumably the other four percent were confused — or on Meta's payroll).

      Note: find this link

    1. First and foremost, where will a largely desert country source the water for electrolysis? Secondly, will Namibia export only hydrogen, ammonia, or some of the industrial products made with the green inputs? It would be advantageous for Namibia to develop a heavy-chemicals and iron-smelting industry. But from Germany’s point of view, that might well defeat the object, which is precisely to provide affordable green energy with which to keep industrial jobs in Europe.

      This is an interesting point - shipping the gas vs shipping the higher value products enabled by the gas

    1. The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy – the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime – from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind. For that to work, though, they’ll need investment, access to raw materials and the equipment to process them.

      How high?

    2. They’ve come a long way since then, with Catcher and related projects receiving nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

      Waaaaaaaaat

    1. The arrangement will see Contact provide Microsoft with all the renewable energy attributes generated by Contact’s new 51.4MW Te Huka Unit 3 geothermal power station.

      But not all the power?

    1. Tonne-for-tonne offsetting has historically relied upon the cheapest possible carbon credits that do little to benefit the climate and represent no real pollution cost for companies. Polluters should move to money-for-tonne contributions instead, based on an internal carbon price (WWF recommends $50-250), which would encourage the purchase of higher quality carbon credits with co-benefits. The internal carbon price in turn could be proportional to companies’ revenues or profits. 

      Buying carbon credits with co-benefits, not offsets

    1. Finally, the Act still requires facilities to use 50 percent renewable energy by 2024, and 100 percent by 2027. An amendment is expected to clarify that this demand can be met by using certificates brought from Nordic suppliers; instead of relying on German green power.

      From Nordic greenpower? Thats BS

    1. In Neubauer, for example, legal advocate Roda Verheyen has been part of other strategic climate cases, such as the high-profile case of a Peruvian homeowner, Lluiya, suing RWE for compensation for climate harms

      Cripes. Were they successful?

  6. Jun 2023
    1. This a summary of the conference, and the key takeaways for me are:

      • lack of local adoption: **climate alerts and news in general is often in English, and indexes assume a European norm, so for a hotter place it's hard to tell when things are much worse than normal. A as result they're not used so much,
      • climate killing the least vulnerable water bornes diseases are increased by flooding, and the leading cause of child deaths ends up being amplified
      • downscaled climate models are helpful not not widely available there is a lack of infra to use them
    2. Dr Lisa van Aardenne, the chief scientist of the University of Cape Town’s climate system analysis group, discussed the use and utility of thermal stress indices. She pointed out that, by the definitions of the universal thermal climate index, much of Africa is under heat stress most days of the year.  Van Aardenne noted that these indices have been developed from a European perspective and do not align with the reality on the ground in Africa. She added: “I’m very concerned that these indices are not fit for purpose here.”

      So for Africa, the figures are so bad that they always look like they're in an emergency? I'm guessing the impact would be that people are more likely to ignore them

    3. Prof Kris Ebi from the University of Washington started off the third day of the conference with a presentation on heatwaves and early action plans. She pointed to the 2021 Pacific north-west “heat dome” event, which resulted in around 800 excess deaths and was later found to be a 1-in-10,000 year event. The rarity of that event means, in effect, “these people died because of climate change,” Ebi said. She added: “Every heat-related death is preventable.”

      I hadn't realised the attribution was so clear like this. Wow.

    4. Dr Sokhna Thiam, from the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya, added that water-borne enteric diseases are among the “primary expected health impacts” of climate change.

      Basically climate changes makes the leading cause of child deaths much worse

    1. Together, the plants will enable more than 120 gigawatt-hours of U.S. battery production annually and displace more than 455 million gallons of gasoline per year, LPO reported.

      The target according to Jigar Shah is 800 GWh each year, so this is about 15% of that target all by itself

    1. Calhoon of ClimateWells acknowledges the worry that oil operators will simply drill new wells in other places, canceling out any emissions reduction benefit from plugging older ones. In the carbon credit market, this notion is called “leakage,” meaning that the emissions are not prevented but essentially moved.

      Given that you need to drill new wells for some shale in the US every couple of years or so, this is a fair statement.

    1. We don’t provide banking services to or invest in organisations that use excessive power to systemically promote public behaviour that is harmful to individuals, groups or to the whole of society in order to maximise their own profits. This may include, for example, arms manufacturers and tobacco companies.

      Does this include fossil fuels?

    1. For now, we haven’t included emissions relating to loans and investments in our Scope 3 carbon footprint breakdown as these are worked out separately with the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). We were the first UK digital bank to join PCAF, which asks members to calculate emissions from loans and investments by following industry best practice

      so this something like induced carbon emissions from the activity enabled by the investment?

    1. As a policy, end-to-end has a lot going for it. First, it is easy to administer. If you want to find out if a company is reliably delivering posts from willing senders to willing receivers, you can easily verify it by creating accounts and performing experiments. Compare this to more complicated policies, like "platforms must not permit harassment on their services." To administer that policy, you need to agree on a definition of harassment, agree on whether a specific user's conduct rises to the level of harassment, then investigate whether the platform took reasonable steps to prevent it.

      I wonde how this works in a world of climate misinformation and disinformation

    1. It adds that there is “no shortage of physical capacity”, with Chinese coal plants running an average of 52% of hours in the year (4,600 out of 8,760 hours). CREA continues: “Thus, simply adding more coal capacity across the whole of China may not fundamentally address the power shortages in China.”

      OK, the CREA report is the one to refer to when talking about such low capacity factors. For context 52% is comparable to some offshore wind generation.

      https://www.equinor.com/news/archive/20210323-hywind-scotland-uk-best-performing-offshore-wind-farm

    2. The country is also slowly shifting from an “equal share” dispatch system to an “economic dispatch”, which is more responsive to consumer demand. (CREA notes that the “equal share” system is another barrier to greater flexibility.)

      Is there really no merit curve based dispatch order in China? Mind blown.

    3. “Given the rapid growth of clean energy and expected slower electricity demand growth, the massive additions of coal-fired capacity don’t necessarily mean that China’s coal use or CO2 emissions from the power sector will increase.” 

      So basically, generation is not the same as capacity. As an example, China might have cross the 50% mark for capacity in terms of renwables, but the actual generation is much lower, as renwables have lower capacity factors. Coal in china is a similarly low capacity factor so even if it's built, that's not the same as it being used

    4. China’s power market remains primarily coal-fueled. Coal made up 61% of electricity generation in 2022, while wind and solar power – despite making up a growing proportion of power capacity – accounted for only 14% of generation.

      Even with all the massive growth in solar, renewables make up only about a 6th of the grid generation

    1. The average price for a solar panel delivered in the United States was 38 cents per watt as of June 7, which is double the global average, according to BloombergNEF and PV InfoLink. The U.S. price has been about the same, going up or down just a penny or two, since last fall.

      Wow, so much more?!

    1. This move was heavily pushed for by the three-party coalition’s smallest member, the Free Democrats who are in charge of the transport ministry. This means if a target in one sector such as industry, transport, or buildings is missed, another sector can compensate for it.

      Everything I read about the FDP basically seems like they're absolute wreckers when it comes to climate Actiom, just so rich people can keep driving their petrol powered porches.

  7. May 2023
    1. To that end, we’re excited to announce the launch of the VMware Zero Carbon Committed cloud partner initiative. We envision catalyzing and accelerating the transition to zero carbon clouds through VMware Cloud Partner data centers powered by renewable energy sources by 2030. This initiative is a collaboration with our VMware Cloud Verified providers that operate infrastructure-, energy- and carbon-efficient data centers based on VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies and have commitments to using renewable energy power. Exemplifying VMware’s ongoing commitment to product sustainability innovation, this initiative aims to: Catalyze the transition to a zero carbon internet through our partnerships with public cloud providers. Help customers reach their sustainability and decarbonization goals by connecting them with cloud providers that have aligned goals. Accelerate sustainable computing with VMware’s SDDC technology.

      What does the partnering process look like?

    1. Without public access to the emissions data SBTi sees, its climate targets are “effectively inscrutable,” she and other scientists told the organization in October

      Fair!

    2. Under SBTi’s net-zero plans, companies can counterbalance up to 10% their emissions with “permanent removal” of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These efforts, it expects, will have negated 20 to 40 billion tons of emissions by 2050.

      Parmanent removal would imply not tree planting or mangroves, and generally very few nature based solutions

    3. SBTi has recently stopped approving plans for this looser target

      Well, this is at least science based, amirite?

    1. We can solve this problem by defining separate types for different kinds of IDs with a “NewType”:

      This is really neat. I didn't know you could add a type to something like an int, that followed it around so you could see when the 'wrong' kind of int was used

    1. The first successful trust was Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which amassed a 90% share of all US oil. Other "capitalists" got in on the game, forming the Cotton Seed Oil Trust (75% market share), the Sugar Trust (85%). Then came the Whiskey Trust and the Beef Trust. America was becoming a planned economy, run by a handful of unelected "industrialists" with lifetime appointments and the power to choose their successors.

      Mind blown. I had no idea there were so many trusts setup in the states like this

    1. The authors then divided that figure by three, proposing that the total costs should be shared equally by the governments that allowed companies to pollute, the consumers who bought fossil fuels and the corporations that produced them.

      This at least seems somewhat fair, and doesn't lay all responsibility at the feet of the producing companies.

    1. The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

      I'm guessing this might addresses some of the enforcement and incentive problem.

    1. There are snakes, and the turnover is horrible. People are like, ​‘The heck with this. I’ll go work at an Amazon distribution center.’

      Wow, what a quote

    1. OpenCost and Kubecost are helpful for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing Kubernetes costs granularly. Both monitor Kubernetes costs in K8s environments, but neither goes beyond that. For costs outside of Kubernetes, or to consolidate costs of containerized and non-containerized resources in one place, you’ll likely need another service, adding complexity and expense. Alternatively, you can use a Kubernetes cost optimization platform that does both. CloudZero provides granular Kubernetes cost analysis across major cloud providers, including single-cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid clouds — down to individual customers (unit economics).

      Ok, this is the pitch for cloud zero and why they wrote this piece in the first place.

    2. With Kubecost, you can estimate costs using a model calculation or connect your hypervisor to get exact figures.

      So presumably, Kubecost provides more precise measurements compared to opencost

    1. The Guardian recently revealed that Turkmenistan was the worst in the world for methane “super emitting” leaks. Separate research suggests a switch from the flaring of methane to venting may be behind some of these vast outpourings.Flaring is used to burn unwanted gas, putting CO2 into the atmosphere, but is easy to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon in recent years. Venting simply releases the invisible methane into the air unburned, which, until recent developments in satellite technology, had been hard to detect. Methane traps 80 times more heat than CO2 over 20 years, making venting far worse for the climate.

      This sort of implies that if you ban flaring, then unscrupulous companies will just vent it instead, causing much worse emissions, because detecting venting has been hard before, and enforcing a bans against rich and power entitites is will not be easy

    1. With CPU TDPs skyrocketing, these typical datacenter racks are now more power-constrained than space constrained. Stacking a rack full of high-density blade servers with high-power Xeons would blow out this power budget many times over, requiring specialized datacenter infrastructure with higher cooling capabilities. We also see this with Nvidia’s AI servers. Their DGX SuperPOD design is not able to fully populate each server rack due to the huge power consumption. Nvidia AI servers are often as much as 5U to 6U, with the A100 DGX servers being ~6.5 kW and the H100 10.2kW.

      Wow, this would imply that a rack full of A100s would be between 40 to 50kw, and 75kw to 85kw for the H100s

    2. Ampere also places a large emphasis on clock speed consistency. Intel and AMD CPUs vary their core clock speed significantly based on how many cores or threads are in use and what type of code is being executed. This helps their CPUs maximize performance within a given power and thermal budget, which is a huge advantage in many workloads.

      So you can think sort of think of the clock speed like the throttle in a car, or perhaps engine speed like RPM.

    3. They believe the future of computing will rely heavily on microservices, containerization, and serverless execution models. These concepts are generally about scaling performance out via a large amount small jobs and processes and not overly focusing on single-threaded CPU performance. Both AMD and Intel are releasing CPUs with similar strategies over the next year

      The trade off is pretty explicit here

    1. The continued funding of fossil fuel projects remains a grey area

      Oh.

    2. Simultaneously, another evolution is also taking place at the World Bank. From July, all projects that go to the board for funding will have to demonstrate that they are in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

      This would imply no more fossil fuels, as the science spells this out now, surely?

    1. One example algorithm aims at switching on/off Pico-BSs in a heterogeneous network (see Fig. 1) [5]. There is one Macro-BSs that is always active and provides coverage in the area, while several Pico-BSs can be intelligently activated/deactivated depending on the current traffic volume. E.g., one could imagine that Pico-BSs are needed during the daytime in the city center where a lot of people work, but during the nighttime, some of them can be put into sleep mode as most people came back to their homes in the suburbs. The process is driven by the so-called Reinforcement Learning (RL), i.e., learning through interaction. The aim of the agent is to learn which set of active Pico-BSs would provide the best EE under a given spatial distribution of users.

      Decomposing network into macro (for coverage) and pico (for scaleable thorughput) nodes

  8. Apr 2023
    1. Another key argument for community energy is that involving ordinary people in energy generation and distribution boosts local acceptance for renewables. Not-in-my-backyard protesters have slowed the expansion of new wind farms across Europe in recent years. But where the wind farms are "owned by local community stakeholders, such as farmers, landowners, individuals, [and] municipalities," they "often enjoy higher levels of trust than commercial developers, which are usually not embedded locally," concludes a 2020 study by the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Norway.

      in addition to the profits, this maes them more likely to be accepted. Having REs put up is still a burden for communities, and this is key for acceptance if you want to maintain the speed of deployment that is needed

    2. Nevertheless, proponents of community renewables argue that they are integral to the goal of achieving carbon neutrality and should continue to receive state support. They point out that community renewables boost local economic activity through investment, jobs and tax revenue. One German study showed that a seven-turbine community wind park of 21 megawatts generated $71 million in regional income over a 20-year operating period, while the same-sized park in the hands of commercial developers produced only $8.6 million for the local economy. The difference lay in the profit, tax revenue and job creation that stayed in local hands.

      Circulating the money led to much more economic activity being captured, compared to seeing the profits leave the region

    3. In Denmark, Europe’s other community energy powerhouse, community initiatives took off in the early 1980s. Danish communities invested in onshore wind turbines and district heating systems. By 2016, 67 percent of onshore wind energy in Denmark was generated by citizen-owned parks. This production, together with bioenergy and offshore wind generation, grew the country’s share of clean electricity to more than 50 percent of consumption by 2019.

      You can argue that community energy moved faster than industry, because communities were more prepared to put sharedholder returns aside in favour of community / environmental goals. Whether that can hold now is a different matter.

    4. In Germany, citizen energy stretches back to the 1980s and '90s when environmentally minded groups began striking out into renewable energy. Communal energy projects in Germany took off dramatically when the EU broke up the private-sector energy system monopoly in 1998, and the German government set up a price-support scheme that favored renewables in 2000. In the first decades of Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition, grassroots energy projects and private individuals produced the bulk of clean energy, while the utilities held out, believing conventional energy would prevail, as it always had.

      Reading between the lines, this implies that citizen enegy has been very reliant on generous feed in tariffs.

      Only at significant sizes does the cost per megawatt come down to something that might replace utility fossil fuels, presumably.

    1. Nvidia is the largest customer of CoWoS for their A100 and H100 class datacenter AI GPUs. Google, through Broadcom, is the 2nd largest customer for TPUv4 and TPUv5. AMD also utilizes CoWoS in some capacity, but their volume in 2023 is relatively small. Lastly, Amazon’s Trainium through AlChip, as well as Microsoft’s new AI chips, also use CoWoS.The demands of AI training on memory performance are pushing designs to use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which has to be connected using advanced packaging technologies such as CoWoS. Any one of these companies and, more likely all of them are increasing spending heavily and require more CoWoS capacity. To be clear, Amazon’s Tranium, despite big orders through Alchip, isn’t that great, and Microsoft’s 1st gen AI chip won’t be able to replace Nvidia either.

      What is CoWoS?

    2. TSMC also talked about a fab cancellation and how an expansion is now no longer financially feasible. We will be sharing some of our data about TSMC’s utilization rates and how TSMC’s pricing is coming down. We dive deep into TSMC’s 3nm and 5nm ramps as there are some quite heroic assumptions that TSMC is making regarding those in the back half of the year.

      Wow, even TSMC is cancelling Fabs?

    1. Qualifying EVs also can’t contain inputs from ​“foreign entities of concern,” a concept that the Treasury Department has yet to explicitly define, but which is expected to include many Chinese firms. (If you haven’t heard, China dominates the EV supply chain.)

      So basically, no cheap small Chinese card would get access to subsidies, meaning they'd need to be even cheaper, to make headway

    1. This is a very weird imaginative failure. America operated public banks. It had broken up too big to fail banks. These weren't the deeds of a fallen civilization whose techniques were lost to the mists of time. There are literally people alive today who were around when America operated nationwide public banks – a practice that only ended in 1966!

      I had no idea the US had an nationwide public bank so recently 🤯

    1. Wooden towers are promising when it comes to material costs and availability; the company uses Scandinavian spruce from sustainably managed forests, for which regrowth exceeds logging. According to its calculations, a typical turbine tower requires between 300 and 1,200 cubic meters of wood, equivalent to 1.5 to 5 minutes of growth in Swedish forests.

      I've never seen growth framed in terms like that, and it's really confusing!

    1. Alphabet Inc. calculates the total electricity procured from renewable sources by totaling the amount ofrenewable electricity generation from the grids Alphabet Inc. uses, the amount of on-site renewableenergy generation and the amount sourced through contractual instruments (PPAs) globally

      Less than a quarter of Google's renewable purchasing is on the same grid that it's own datacentre usage takes place?

    1. Unlike the Nazis, whose plan involved liquefying coal, the current German government is promoting a cleaner technique that entails extracting hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon dioxide to create fuel. At the heart of both methods is what’s known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a process developed in the 1920s by two German chemists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch.

      Bloody hell - this isn't that far off from saying "you know who else liked e-fuels? The Nazis."

  9. Mar 2023
    1. At 0.5gCO2e per person per day, the absolute reduction potentialis negligible and highlights the need for more research to support thedecarbonisation of digital media. While video streaming constitutesthe majority of data traffic in the Internet, and the energy consump-tion of user devices is substantial (in particular TVs), an attributionalapproach overestimates the potential reductions of interventions

      This is comparable to a the carbon footprint of having a single coffee

    1. This is why I believe it’s much more useful, and less confusing, to just talk about Layer 1 government-issued money and Layer 2 bank-issued chips.

      Layer 1 and Layer 2, like caching layers?

    1. A country’s residual mix represents the shares of electricity generation attributes available for disclosure, after the use of explicit tracking systems, such as GO, havebeen accounted for.Without a residual mix, renewable electricity sold with GOs would be double counted because the same electricity would be disclosed to consumers buying “regular” electricity

      This is how green the power is, once the certificates that can be transferred have been transferred. So, when a country has lots of green energy but sells off it's "greenness", this is what the actual carbon intensity should be. Norway is the perennial example.

    1. Reporting via the CSRD will incorporate the increasing demand for digitization. Companies will be required to prepare their reporting in XHTML format in accordance with the European Single Electronic Format Regulation. They are also required to tag sustainability information within the report according to a digital categorization system, which should be developed with the ESRS.

      So, it'll be scrapable, and presumably online

    2. The CSRD will also mandate the reporting of Scope 3 emissions from across the full value chain. This arises from guidance set out by the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group’s (EFRAG) draft European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) - specifically “Disclosure Requirement E1-9 – Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” which states that “The undertaking shall disclose its gross indirect Scope 3 GHG emissions in metric tons of CO2 equivalent.”

      Gross indirect for the whole value chain? Orgs can't leave out the ones in the 15 sub categories they don't want now?

    3. 2028 for non-EU companies (to be reported on in 2029),

      This is like the 2028 deadline for hourly hydrogen

    4. With data for the CSRD needing to be captured as soon as 2024 for EU companies (to be reported on in 2025)

      I think this is different from earlier drafts - where you report in 2024 for 2023.

    1. Google, with their Apollo project, has developed a non-blocking 136x136 optical circuit switch that is both forward and backward-compatible with any bandwidth or wavelength Google uses or will use in its data centers. This switch, according to Google, only uses 108 watts of power consumption. Compared to a standard 136 port EPS switch, which would be in the 3,000 watts range. So while there are disadvantages to OCS, Google has created a solution that has far more upsides than there are downsides for them. And over the past 5 years, “tens of thousands of 136x136 port OCS (eight spare ports) were manufactured and deployed.” Google has created a system that works incredibly very well for them.In the future, Google is looking at a larger port count OCS for further scale-out capabilities as well as faster switching speeds to allow wider adoption of OCS in the lower layers of the network. This broader adoption would be tremendously negative to Broadcom, the leader in hyperscale networking switches. Furthermore, Google says they will also continue to improve reliability and lower insertion/return loss.

      30x power usage improvement

    2. The low latency of OCS comes from the fact that OCS does not have to decode packets; all they have to do is bounce the incoming light from the source port to the destination port.

      There's no conversion back and forth between light and packets. It's a bit like the serialisation / deserialisation cost higher up the stack

    3. Google uses these optical switches in a direct connect architecture to directly connect the leaves through a patch panel. This is not packet switching; this is, for all intents and purposes, an optical cross-connect.

      So this is the big change. The optical switches trade off faster connectivity ( fewer hops needed), but in return take longer to set up to establish the mirror conneciton.

    4. Traditionally the spine of this network uses what is called Electronic Packet Switch (EPS). These are the normal network switches of which Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, and Nvidia are the leading providers. However, these EPS use a ton of power. Furthermore, every 2 to 3 years, networking speeds have doubled. While this doubling improves power consumption, it also comes with the requirement of upgrading the existing spine EPS. As such, there is always a huge wave of Capex associated with every new generation of Broadcom Tomahawk switch.

      These are the Top Of Rack switches?

    5. Before diving too deep into how their custom networking stack works, let’s quickly discuss what it does and the industry implications. First off, Google claims their custom network improves throughput by 30%, use 40% less power, incurs 30% less Capex, reduces flow completion by 10%, and delivers 50x less downtime across their network.

      These are wild figures. What is the counterfactual?

    1. The EU Renewable Energy Directive and Irish legislation permit the use of GOs.Though using GOs is legal and overseen by the energy regulator in Ireland, ASAI found claims companies were supplying 100 per cent renewable power were misleading to customers.The advertising watchdog said six sections of its advertiser's code of conduct had been broken including one section that says "advertisers should not exploit the credulity, inexperience or lack of knowledge of consumers".

      Just because the it follows the law, doesn't mean that it's misleading

    1. Organisations must demonstrate progress towards their science-aligned reduction targets on a three year cycle to maintain climate positive level certification.

      This allows for org emissions to grow, as long as they get more efficient.

    2. absolute reduction (as opposed to intensity reduction) of category 1 and 2 emissions, aligned to 1.5°C warming

      better than science based targets institute and their default to intensity targets

    1. The proposals under the forthcoming Bill are expected to be similar to the CMA’s existing powers in competition matters and would give the CMA the power to decide itself whether consumer law has been broken and impose directions and monetary penalties on companies without having to go through the courts.

      Holy balls, without evening needing a court case?

    1. This past November, Google Cloud hosted an “emissions hackathon” at the offices of Schlumberger, a Houston oil field services company. The winning team was none other than six Aramco oil and gas data scientists who’d devised a method of using Google Cloud’s machine learning features to detect and repair leaks in methane gas pipelines.

      To be fair, this is likely a meaningful intervention to reduce emissions

    1. Addressing the nexus of concerns related to water and electricity consumption — along with the associated impact on carbon dioxide emissions — is one of the biggest challenges faced by any big data center operator. In a blog about its new commitment, Brandt reports that water-cooled data centers use about 10 percent less energy than those using methods related to air cooling. Last year, the company estimated that using water cooling helped Google reduce the "energy-related carbon footprint" of its data centers by about 300,000 tons of CO2. 

      Does this imply the use of water cooled racks?

  10. Feb 2023
    1. Klarna which levies money on a per-tonne basis on its own emissions, and uses the funds to finance mitigation projects.

      oh wow, Klarna is doing this now?

    2. At COP27, governments agreed to create a “contribution unit” as part of the establishment of new carbon markets under the Paris Agreement - a clear sign of support for this evolution in claims

      This is the first time I have come aceoss a "contribution unit"

    1. Based on the comparison between carbon emissions and performance, we can observe that the only task in whichbetter performance accuracy has systematically yielded more CO2is image classification on ImageNet, seen on the topright subplot of Figure 4. Still, the relationship is far from being highly correlated (especially given that that the x-axisin on a logarithmic scale).

      This is a quote, wow.

    2. Another observation that can be made based on our data is that none of the models from our sample were trained ineither Africa nor South America – in fact, the majority of the models from our sample (76) were trained in countriesrepresenting the Global North. This is consistent with previous work examining the ‘digital divide’ in ML and observingthe centralization of power in the field, which hinders researchers from underrepresented locations and groups fromcontributing to the field, given the attribution of computing resources [2,3,9]. Generally speaking, emissions, mattersof equity and accessibility are closely connected to those around climate change, and the centralization of resourcesremains a major problem [33, 34

      One to bring to the fellowship call

    3. Oil

      OIl was the majoir source for 12 models? Which geograhies reach for oil first to power their grids?

    4. However, energy-efficientbenchmarks such as HULK [58] have also been proposed, which take computational requirements and environmentalimpacts into account during model evaluation, allowing a comparison of models based on multiple criteria.

      HULK is a badass name for an AI benchmark

    1. Boosting the efficiency of water usage, too, is a priority, with Google Cloud committing to investing in community projects that “replenish 120% of the water we typically consume in our offices and data centres, in a bid to improve  the health of the local watersheds.”

      Are these basically water offsets?

    2. “A staggering 90% of C-level executives said ESG initiatives are a top organisational priority,” says Keeble. “But only 9% are allocating dedicated resources towards sustainability goals.”

      If you're not allocating resources to it, then it's not an organisational priority

    1. Amazon retires, or has retired on its behalf, environmental attributes for Amazon renewable energy projects included in the renewable energy percentage calculation. We may choose to purchase additional environmental attributes to signal our support for renewable energy in the grids where we operate in line with the expected generation of the projects we have contracted.

      Are these purchased in the same grid?

    1. Among the most deplorable habits of greenwashers is the procurement of unbundled Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). In places like Texas, favorable economics encourage renewable energy deployment, but neither the state energy office nor the grid operator particularly care if the generated electrons are renewable or not. As a result, RECs from these projects are sold separately to offtakers looking to burnish their green credentials.

      This is presumably because there is no RPS for this, and the generation is commercially viable anyway?

    1. The top renewable offsets suppliers for Germany-based E.ON SE and Italy-based Eni came from state-backed hydropower projects in China’s Jiangxi and Sichuan provinces, respectively

      wow, so not even in the same country?

    2. Yet as of last year renewable offsets remain widespread, despite deep doubts about their efficacy. In the broadest investigation yet of how companies have been relying on junk offsets, Bloomberg Green analyzed 190 million tons of carbon offsets purchased in more than 50,000 transactions in 2021. Close to 40% came from renewable-energy projects. According to Ecosystem Marketplace estimates, the total carbon offsets market was worth $2 billion in 2021.

      This is so mich smaller than I thought!

    1. Lithium resources—concentrations of minerals that are potentially economically viable to extract—are not particularly rare. What matters over the medium and near term is how quickly these resources can be developed into reserves, or minerals that are both recoverable and profitably minable in a given price environment.

      Resources are not reserves

    1. Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest utility and a creative adopter of grid storage technologies, decided it had some of those cases. The utility bought Nomad’s first large-scale battery trailer, with 1 megawatt/​2 megawatt-hours of storage capacity. GMP currently controls the battery’s charging and discharging at Nomad’s corporate facility in Vermont, while its new ​“home base” docking station gets built, said Josh Castonguay, GMP’s vice president and chief innovation officer. In the meantime, the utility brings out its Nomad unit to support electric-vehicle charging at special events.

      Green Mountain power again

    1. The growing number of data centers is expected to drive a 38 percent increase in all electricity sales in Virginia between 2020 and 2035, according to a report by the University of Virginia’s Energy Transition Initiative—an increase of around 44,000 gigawatt-hours per year in electricity use. A gigawatt hour is just about the amount of electricity that 1,000 Virginians on average use in a year. 

      44 TWh of each year? The IEA's figures globally were around 210 TWh for 2022.

    2. Among their chief concerns are the massive amount of stormwater runoff from the millions of square feet of paved over surfaces that would imperil the watershed that provides drinking water for Northern Virginia residents, and the hazardous and noisy construction activities next to residential areas. There are also lingering questions over the impact of energy intensive data centers on the state’s clean energy targets and the true economic benefit for the state. 

      How loud are they? Surely as a percentage of the cost of a datacentre, the sound deadening must be a tiny

    1. The source of this seed funding was provided from Microsoft’s internal carbon tax. Companies that implement carbon taxes should implement mechanisms that recirculate those funds back into individual business group accountabilities in a way that empowers employees to take effective action.

      This research was paid for by the internal carbon tax - this is news to me

    1. Most future climate scenarios envisage large-scale deployment of so-called “negative emissions,” where we suck CO2 out of the atmosphere in order to keep warming below 2°C. One proposed method for achieving that is “enhanced weathering”—accelerated silicate weathering done by grinding up silicate rock and spreading it on agricultural fields to react with CO2 from the air and fertilize plants at the same time. Brantley’s work shows that for such efforts to be successful, those fields would need a good supply of water and—crucially—would probably need to be plowed regularly to expose fresh minerals to the air. “If you're not going to be turning it over, you'll start to precipitate secondary minerals, and… most of the surface area could be occluded from reaction,” said Brantley.

      So basically enhanced weathering is much less likely to help us, as it would largely scab over, rather than expose the rest of the minerals

    2. Over geological time, those landscape proportions have changed in response to shifting tectonic plates. This has changed how efficient silicate weathering has been at removing the CO2 emitted by volcanoes, thereby allowing high CO2 levels and warm climates at times, like in the Cretaceous, or lower CO2 levels and a cool climate when plate tectonics was building lots of “kinetic-limited” mountainous landscapes, like over the last few million years.

      Wow, so when there are more mountains, more CO2 is drawn down as there's more terrain to expose the rock for weathering

    1. The amazing thing is that Microsoft knows that LLM insertion into search will crush the profitability of search and require massive Capex. While we estimated the operating margin shift, check out what Satya Nadella says about the gross margin.

      So this is essentially a strategic move in that M$ can afford to lose money on search because it has so many other revenue streams, but google can't.

    1. Attributes (and certificates) must be sourced and purchased from within the same defined geographic region that constitutes a “market” for the purpose of transacting and claiming attributes. Ideally this “market boundary” would be clearly defined, but in general it refers to an area in which the laws and regulatory framework governing the electricity sector are sufficiently consistent between the areas of production and consumption. As such, transactions that are both international and intercontinental are not usually appropriate unless there is physical interconnection (indicating a level of system-wide coordination between countries) and ideally if these countries’ utilities or energy suppliers recognize each other’s instruments

      The RE100 says it's a bit rich to try buying credits in say… the Nordics to account for Asia

    1. Alphabet Inc.’s renewable energy methodology is a custom calculation and is based on a global approach. The numerator includes all renewable energy procured, regardless of the market in which the renewable energy was consumed. Additional details on Alphabet Inc.’s criteria and methodology can be found in theAchieving Our 100% Renewable Energy Purchasing Goal and Going Beyonddisclosure

      This is basically like buying extra green energy where it's cheap and plentiful (i.e. the Nordics), to cancel out where it's not (i.e. lots of parts of Asia)

    1. Renewables and nuclear energy will dominate the growth of global electricity supply over the next three years, together meeting on average more than 90% of the additional demand

      The IEA listing this in this quote is really helpful.

    1. More glaring, the company claims that since 2000, it’s cut emissions by 19%. In reality, when excluding RECs from that calculation, Intel’s climate footprint has jumped by more than a third.

      Yiikes.

    1. The EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager on Wednesday also highlighted how Germany and France had accounted for nearly 80 percent of state aid approved under emergency subsidy rules. “European countries are not equal when it comes to state aid,” she said.

      There's two possible interpretations of this:

      1 .Wow, the two richest countries get the most state aid? That doesn't sound very equitable!

      1. Wow the two countries with the most infra that needs to be transition are gettring the funds needed!

      I dont know enough to know which one it is, where between the two the reality is

    1. When we throw in the fact that some of the parties with the deepest resources, expertise and capabilities in AI are the very same providers of the primitives – providers intent on growth and whose customers are struggling with the size of their respective product catalogs – it’s worth asking whether said providers may be coming around on the idea of a PaaS, but models based on AI rather than prescriptive curation and constraints. One thing, at least, is clear: if any of the above speculation proves true, the industry equilibrium is about to be punctuated.

      This seems to make the argument that the biggest are likely to leapfrog past regular PaaS where devs choose some abstracted services, to some next thing where all the wiring of services together is provided automatically. A bit like "terraform, but AI"

  11. Jan 2023
    1. Sustainability researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology point out that there is significant variation in the types and amounts of critical materials present in different reservoirs of coal waste. This means that not all waste will be profitable to purify. As the researchers have written, “The value of rare earths in a single ton of coal ash can vary from US$99 at a coal plant in Ohio to $534 at a West Virginia plant. With extraction costs expected to range between $380 and $1,200 per ton, not every coal plant’s ash will be a profitable place to find rare earths.” There are also concerns that the chemicals used to harvest critical minerals could be damaging.

      In the best case, the cost of extraction is about 70% of the possible value of the recovered minerals.

    2. Ziemkiewicz has a picture in his office of himself and Senator Joe Manchin, who has expressed support of his program. “Recycling provides a tremendous opportunity to avoid outsourcing the raw supply of critical minerals we need while creating new economic opportunities right here at home,” Manchin said, at a congressional hearing in the spring. Ziemkiewicz keeps his politics to himself. In the past, he has called himself “a Trotskyite,” but he believes that the success of his past three decades of work, reclaiming thousands of miles of rivers and streams in Appalachia, is based on sharing knowledge across a wide array of communities

      Wow, he got Manchin on board?

    1. But that’s just one way to get batteries into low-income customers’ homes. Sunrun also acts as a third-party owner of solar and battery systems that Grid Alternatives installs for customers that can’t or don’t want to borrow money to finance it. Third-party owners can monetize the value of federal tax credits for low-income households that don’t pay a large enough federal tax bill to take advantage of the credits themselves. 

      This feels like the project partner thing from before - income households can't access the support themselves, so you need an intermediary to arrange someone with a tax bill to recude, and presumably take a cut in the process.

    2. Participants will get zero-interest loans to finance the equipment and installation costs, plus monthly credits in exchange for allowing MCE to tap that equipment to reduce its need to buy high-priced energy during the peak hours of 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. The program is open to households that currently lack rooftop solar as well as households that have already had solar installed by Grid Alternatives and want to take advantage of that self-generated power to heat their homes or charge their cars, said Alexandra McGee, MCE’s manager of strategic initiatives.

      If it's cheaper to deploy batteries in low income communities than build peakers, then the flipside is that they have to accept less reliable power. At this way communities are compensated, though I guess?

    1. The UK Energy Research Centre observe that although the current arrangements are increasingly expensive for consumers, they provide a high degree of certainty for generators, because they get paid regardless of the constraints in the network. This favourable arrangement has underpinned the UK’s impressively rapid growth of wind power, an undeniable success story in the race to Net Zero. There’s understandable reluctance to sour the investment environment in a country which is already suffering from other self-inflicted economic wounds 5.

      So the argument is that zonal pricing would slow sown the transition because it would make renewables seem more risky?

    2. But filling a battery up and leaving it charged for days on end is not attractive – most battery operators make money by cycling (charging and discharging) at least once a day. Of all the interesting things to do with batteries, it’s not clear that solving curtailment will be the most lucrative.

      I wonder how much throughput to you need to break even?

  12. Jun 2022
    1. For example, within the literature on 44data centres, top-down models that project energy use on the basisof increasing demand for internet 45servicestend to predict rapid global energy use growth, (Andrae and Edler 2015; Belkhir and Elmeligi 462018; Liu et al. 2020a),whereas bottom-up models that consider data center technology stocksand their 47energy efficiency trends tend to predict slower but still positive growth (Hintemann and Hinterholzer 482019; Masanet et al. 2020; Shehabi et al. 2018; Malmodin 2020)

      This is a useful passage to refer people to when they tlak about runaway energy usage. It does a fairly good job of explaining that how the different models end up with different trajectories that can either give very scary, or somewhat more mundane projections about the energy use of the sector

  13. Apr 2022
    1. “It is concerning to see a vast majority of companies and investors, including major renewable energy companies, do not have policies expressing zero-tolerance against reprisals in their operations, supply chains and business relationships,”

      What does this language look like?

    1. The sui generis database right grants the database maker the exclusive right of “extraction and/or re-utilization of the whole or of a substantial part”. Extraction is defined as “the permanent or temporary transfer of all or a substantial part of the contents of a database to another medium by any means or in any form”. Re-utilization is defined as “making available to the public” (all quotes from Ref. [14]; Article 7), which refers primarily to online publication. In other words, re-utilization here means “redistribution and online transmission”.12

      I interpret this to mean that if you have invest the time to get sui generis database rights, you get to define if it's published as open data or not, and determine the terms for commercial or non-commercial usage.

  14. Mar 2022
    1. onentially rising ‘frequent driver’ charges could be used to fairly discourage excess car use, without penalising those who really need to drive.

      Oh wow, the frequent flyer levy applied to cars?

    1. Roughly one billion people live with some form of disability. For these people, the advent of the Web was a great step forward in their ability to participate in information exchange.

      One in 8 ppl on earth. What proportion of the global population uses the web?

    2. First, we are deploying DNS-over-HTTPS by default so that only a single party sees the target domain. Second, we require the DNS endpoints in Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program to legally commit to gathering a limited subset of data only for operational purposes, keeping the data confidential and deleting it promptly

      I wonder if this program might be an interesting place to explorer carbon.txt related ideas.

    3. Safety is a promise, and maintaining it engenders trust and confidence in the Web. Trust in turn enables casual browsing, empowering individuals with unprecedented freedom to explore, and eliminating the need for gatekeepers to decide what may or may not be part of the Web

      this is useful reference in the context of how using something like Metamask as your agent can paint a huge target on your chest

    4. All of this is possible because people have a user agent — the browser — which acts on their behalf. A user agent need not merely display the content the site provides, but can also shape the way it is displayed to better represent the user's interests

      The user agent feels like a fairly special concept for the webby internet. You can have lots of clients, but user agents generally emphasise user autonomy

    5. The Web is also durable. While not absolute, backwards-compatibility is a key principle of the Web: as new capabilities are added (typically as extensions to the core architecture), existing sites are still usable. The end result is that individuals can easily view older content and publishers can keep their content available and consistent over time without needing to recreate it.

      Resiliency as a synonym for durability.

    1. when I look at climate change as as a issue, I look at it as a journalistic issue. I think that it's not been communicated honestly by journalists for a long time. I think that's our main problem. I think that journalists haven't approached climate change with the same level of vigor and ruthlessness that they've covered other political topics. I think it's because for some reason, the fossil fuel industry has convinced them that that there is no corruption to be seen here. There's a reluctance among journalists today to take climate change seriously as a corruption story, which is the heart of what our profession does. And I think that that's harming democracy, because people don't see climate change the way that they should, in the most truthful way.
    1. The Democratic National Committee’s decision on fossil fuel subsidies is a good example of this. As HuffPost’s Alex Kaufman first reported, the DNC recently erased previously-approved language from its party platform calling for an end to fossil fuel tax breaks. The DNC did this without telling anyone, and have so far refused to explain its decision. Why should taxpayers continue to artificially prop up the industry that causes climate change to the tune of at least $20 billion a year? I don’t know, but the DNC prioritizes climate change, OK?
    1. Energy must be just about the most socially conservative – no, I will use the correct word, backward – industry in the world. At times it seems as if the main criterion for leadership is to be a straight white male, born between 1950 and 1965. This is starting to change, but not fast enough. Women are disproportionately disadvantaged by energy poverty, bearing the extra workload and health impacts of cooking with traditional biomass. Access to modern energy is essential for women to enjoy basic healthcare, particularly during childbirth, and for girls to have time to study1. Gender in the energy sector is not just a question of fairness, it is also a question of effectiveness. Women may hold up half the sky, but more importantly they also buy half the world’s appliances, half the world’s energy and half the world’s cars – and, if they do not, they should and soon will. They are a huge part of the market the energy industry needs to understand. Women also offer half the world’s talent. There is a growing body of work showing that those companies that have diverse management teams and boards outperform those that do not.
    2. Clean energy is inherently more local, more distributed, more accountable. While Germany’s big four utilities own the bulk of the fossil and nuclear generating capacity, they own only a small proportion of its renewable energy capacity; the general public owns many gigawatts of the latter either directly or via retail funds. Some may find wind farms ugly, some may find them beautiful; either way, they make us talk about the trade-offs we are making to generate electricity. In the past, there were no discussions about the relative aesthetics of open-cast coal mines and gas fields in far-away countries.
    3. There is, however, a third level on which the struggle between defenders of clean and fossil energy must be understood, and that is in terms of the social structures in which we want to live. Fossil-based energy lends itself to scale and centralization. Physical centralization – huge oil, gas and coal-fields, massive power stations, a universal grid, pipelines, refineries and the like – as well as the inevitable fellow-travellers of political and economic centralization.
    4. In 1995, when Saro-Wiwa was judicially murdered, I felt helpless. Now, however, I do not. Back then it was impossible to envisage a different world. Back then, health, wealth and happiness were inextricably linked to fossil fuels and their attendant corrupt, corrosive centralization of power. Now we know another way is possible. Back then I was a news industry executive, now I am playing my bit part as the world moves from old energy to new.
  15. Feb 2022
    1. While some of the most advanced, “hyperscale” data centers, like those maintained by Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have pledged to transition their sites to carbon-neutral via carbon offsetting and investment in renewable energy infrastructures like wind and solar, many of the smaller-scale data centers that I observed lack the resources and capital to pursue similar sustainability initiatives

      Access to capital

    1. It’s not a lack of science that’s driving the climate crisis, it’s a lack of democracy.

      This is a really nice framing of the issue - and if you can talk about democracy as a mechanism for considering the needs of more than just the powerful, it's a nice companion to the "it's not about energy, it's about power" quotes when people talk about green energy or tech

    1. Before the pandemic, aviation accounted for 7% of UKgreenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from the sectorhaving increased by 88% since 1990. Yet just 15% of people in4the UK take 70% of all the flights, while around half of peopledon’t fly at all each year.

      Yikes. 70% of that 7% of UK emissions is coming from just 15% of the people flying.

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