Re: [BLUG] NOV meeting topic

David Ernst wrote:
> Dare I say it?
>
> 25 power plants to double the number of computers in the world seems
> like a bargain to me. Looking at:
>
> http://www.industcards.com/ppworld.htm
>
> I roughly counted how many power plants are in the world right now,
> and easily got over 2500. So, a 1% increase in world power plants
> would enable a 100% increase in computers..? That's quite a return on
> investment, and that's using the numbers that seem high by Mark's
> reckoning (which makes sense to me).

> Looking at it another way, apparently Indiana and Ohio together
> produce roughly enough electricity to power all of the worlds
> computers. Probably a little bit short, but... these two states are a
> sliver of the world's land area, and the air here is still clean even
> though we're burning a lot of dirty coal in old plants.

Wait a minute.

Dig a little deeper and check out:
http://www.industcards.com/top-100-pt-1.htm
No 1 - Itaipu 14,750 MW
and http://www.industcards.com/top-100-pt-4.htm
No 100 - Cordemais 3,185 MW

We're not looking at 25 more average power plants (thus 1% increase in
world power consumption), we're looking at 25 more Itaipus, which would
be roughly 370 MW, roughly a little less than the combined output of the
rest of the top 100 power plants on the planet.

And keep in mind that as we bring electricity to the parts of the world
that still lack it, they're not ONLY going to be using it for computing,
that figure only reflects the chunk of the new needed electricity that
computers will be sucking on.

Only 17 power plants currently in the world generate more than 5MW.

Indiana and Ohio together wouldn't make a dent in that figure.

Notice, the top three power plants are all hydroelectric. Itaipu, Three
Gorges, and Guri (incidentally in Venezuela). But we've pretty much set
up all the big hydroelectric dams we can, as far as I can see. Any
reasonable location for a big hydroelectric plant has already been
jumped on or ruled out.

So.

We can look at how to generate all that extra energy in an
environmentally friendly (read: no more carbon output) way.

We can look at how to make our existing power plants less
environmentally offensive (read: carbon sequestration, etc.).

We can look at how to reduce the amount of power we're currently using.

We can look at making future power-using products more and more efficient.

In point of fact we NEED to do ALL of that, if we care at all about what
kind of world our children, and those of the rest of the human race,
will inherit from us.

Not addressing the issue from every angle is tantamount to mass suicide.

> If we want to conserve energy, we're much better off focusing on
> vehicles than computers. Meanwhile, we're probably all drawing more
> power for lighting than we are for computing (60W?!? I've got
> individual light bulbs that draw that much! (though fewer and fewer of
> them)).

Modern first-world energy-consumption patterns are not scalable or
sustainable is the basic point.

Just because computers are less offensive than cars doesn't absolve us
from addressing the computer angle. Every single Watt per person counts.

I'm a computer geek, so I look at the computer angle, and I expect the
car geeks out there to look at the car angle, and the plane geeks to
look it the plane angle, etc.

> Having said all of that, I love the idea of thin clients, and I see it
> as a minor tragedy that they aren't more popular. But, I would focus
> on deploying them in business environments. Gone would be the days of
> people wondering whether to save to their computer or to the
> server... and if their computer broke, just give 'em a new one, have
> them log in, and they're right back in business... Save power? All
> the better!

Thin-client are definitely going to be the norm in business
environments, but is I believe they'd also be useful in the homes of
non-enthusiasts in areas where the ISP can have a nice fat pipe to the
home. An apartment complex, for instance, would be an ideal place for
this sort of thing.

I think the main problem keeping thin-clients from being a big thing is
the market dynamics.

Linux can change the market dynamics.

It may have to be indirectly here. It may have to become the standard
everywhere else to demonstrate it's viability before American industry
even considers jumping the Microsoft full-workstation-per-person/Hummer
ship.

> David

Thanks for your thoughts!

Simón
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