[NCLUG] Re: "Green" power

[John L. Bass]

ROTFL ... obviously we have some discussion points from your reply :)

Depending on where one lives, electricity is produced mainly by oil, 
gas, or coal which all produce CO2 in the best case, and in the worst 
case many other not so nice gases depending on the impurities of the 
fuel. These gases are great concern to those with power plants in their 
back yards, and greatly cause concern of residents when plants are 
proposed to be built in their back yards. In case you have not noticed, 
but this carbon foot print is one main part of global warming, and great 
concern to all environmentalists. Electricity produced by fossil fuels 
is only clean where it's used, not where its produced.

Of a greater concern, is that these are not renewable. And as we push 
our economy away from oil for transportation, both gas and coal use will 
replace it, and place higher demands on both for electric cars and H2 
generation for use in fuel cells.

So,  excessive electricity use is all about contributing to global 
warming, and our nations carbon foot print.

If you would have read the reference I provided, you would have noticed 
that a typical high end desktop/server produces a very pitiful 
contribution to the folding.stanford.edu project, where PS3 and certain 
high end graphics cards with powerful GPU's complete much higher work 
units on much lower power. An order of magnitude better work to power 
ratio, thus making the practice of leaving a desktop powered up just to 
run a distributed computing client very wasteful. This just doesn't make 
sense from a conservation standpoint.

Currently, wind and solar are an insignificant portion of power on our 
grid ... and building dams for hydro has been off the table for 40 
years. Heck, even little water projects get some environmentalists up in 
arms ... read about the local opposition to the "Glade Project" dam 
here. I personally believe building dams for hydro is one area the eco 
group is going to have to compromise if they want to reduce carbon foot 
prints.


Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Personally, my view is that research is more important than conservation.
> So, good going Hacking Society F at H team for getting into the top 500 teams
> of all time:
>
>    http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=58381
>
> We welcome anyone who wants to join.  Because sometimes size DOES matter...
> Ask any researcher with a small supercomputer.  :-P
>
> Sean
>   
Then do it in a responsible way ... using a technology that has the 
lowest power per work unit. Using a typical desktop/server burns way too 
much power, when Cell and GPU processors knock off a lot more work with 
a fraction of the power. Use a very low power Cell processor, like next 
generation PS3 chips ... and avoid using any desktop/server except when 
it's powered up to do other necessary work, even with a GPU.

John

John