[NCLUG] Re: "Green" power

[danbob]

This is a really interesting conversation.
There are two very large gaps in renewable energy and energy efficiency
technology right now:
-- air conditioning and other cooling. Geothermal is an option for a
building, but you pretty much have to put it in first, underneath,
before you construct the building. There's a company in Greeley/Windsor
that installs systems making ICE and storing it to cool buildings--and
that's a big efficiency gain over current systems, they are selling
them. Sheesh!
-- electricity storage. Lead acid batteries are 1915 technology, and
inefficient. Everything else is way too expensive. There's NOTHING to
store energy on a large scale, other than pumping water up to a lake,
and letting it flow back down (like they do west of Loveland). Fuel
cells are hardly even in the picture yet, and have huge maintenance
costs. And the new Li batteries are great, but expensive....just for
fun, I priced them to run my house (I'm off grid). Including all the
special charging equipment, it was just under $100k for 20 kwh capacity,
for which my current lead-acid batteries cost $2k
DAN




On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 20:09 -0600, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 01:29:20PM -0600, danbob wrote:
> >> in the USA are 9.5 percent, between the power plant and your electric
> 
> Good point, as is John's about heat pumps being more effective (as opposed
> to efficient).  As Chad says, as compared to some other methods of heating,
> that 9.5% is hitting you in either case.
> 
> > of your electric furnace to that of your computer's tendency to turn
> > electric power into heat, I would think.
> 
> One thing about electric heat is that it tends to be much easier to
> spot-heat.  Where a heat pump dramatically drops in efficiency if you close
> the registers in rooms that you aren't using, electric heat you can easily
> use to heat just where you need it.  If your Folding computers happen to be
> close to where you want the heat, that may be a good thing.
> 
> I have had fairly good success with keeping the house thermostat lower, and
> using spot heating to increase the comfort level where I am if I feel like
> I need it.  A mug of tea can be quite effective (and maybe even efficient,
> I haven't really thought about it :-) for this.
> 
> John's idea of providing money you would otherwise spend on power to help
> F at H build a power efficient supercomputer is interesting, but as far as I
> know the only way you can currently do that is by setting up a local F at H
> client and running it and paying for the power.  Is there someplace you can
> contribute direct funds to F at H for them to put folding machines on-line?
> Because if there isn't, it may be an efficient suggestion but not very
> effective.  :-)
> 
> However, even in that case I'm not sure it really saves that much power.
> Personally, at least half of my work-units come from systems that would be
> up anyway, so the real cost isn't what it costs to run that machine for a
> year, but the difference between that it costs to run it when idle or
> largely idle and what it costs to run it with F at H.
> 
> This, of course, depends on your power savings settings.  My laptop when it
> runs F at H runs it at only 800MHz, unless I kick off something else that's
> fairly heavy CPU, where it pushes it up to 2.5GHz.  So there is some tuning
> you can do there as well...  In that case, running F at H may not cost you
> anything more than what you'd otherwise be paying.
> 
> Of course, that's not true with my PS3...  I really have no need for it
> being on the remainder of the time except when running F at H.  2 of the other
> machines I'm running at home for folding are on all the time anyway because
> one is acting as a server I use all the time and the other is a server I
> use regularly.  The first is consolidated down from a pair of servers, and
> is running the most efficient power supply I could find, so I've made some
> movement towards improved efficiency...
> 
> It would be pretty awesome to set up an off-the-grid F at H system though...
> Perhaps there would be some interest in having danbob or someone give a
> presentation on something like that?
> 
> Sean
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