What kind of configuration is an 'Earth-friendly web server' that runs only on solar power?
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Solar power is a typical renewable energy source, including the start of construction of a huge solar power generation facility equipped with the world's largest battery and the development of new solar power generation technologies that can be replaced with fossil fuels and reduce costs. Efforts to use light energy to consider the environment are expanding every day. On the other hand, it is also true that the spread of the Internet will increase the number of data centers that emit carbon dioxide. LOW-TECH MAGAZINE , which addresses the environmental impact of the Internet, maintains a web server and operates a website using only the power generated by solar power.
How Sustainable is a Solar Powered Website?-LOW-TECH MAGAZINE
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html
LOW ← TECH MAGAZINE
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website.html
LOW-TECH MAGAZINE has been operating a web server using solar power since September 2018, and about 800,000 unique users visited the website in one year. The simplified configuration of the web server is shown below. The basic configuration of the server using the Olimex board, a lead-acid battery , a solar panel, and a control unit.
The battery must have at least enough capacity to run the server during the night without power from the solar panels. Also, it is necessary to determine the size of the battery taking into account the bad weather and the aging of the battery.
To verify the battery capacity, the server was operated in good weather for one year, and the amount of power consumed from the battery was recorded along with the length of the day and night. The average power consumption of the server per hour is 1.97 W, the battery power consumption per day is 17.4 Wh in June when the night time is short, but the battery is consumed from the battery in December when the night time is long. It consumes 29.1Wh of power.
Due to the nature of lead-acid batteries used as batteries, it is not desirable that the charge amount be less than half of the total capacity. In order to achieve 100% server availability, we decided to use a battery with a capacity of 168Wh, which could practically use 84Wh of power. Theoretically, it is a configuration that can run on battery only for about two days, and it seems that it was able to actually achieve 100% availability for one month. He considered the idea of taking the server offline at night, but he said that he was abandoned due to the time difference, because the head of LOW-TECH MAGAZINE was in the United States and Europe.
Server availability depends not only on battery capacity, but also on the size of the solar panels.
Large solar panels generate large amounts of electricity, so they can charge the battery efficiently. This is the relationship between the size of the solar panel and the time it takes to fully charge the battery. Theoretically, a 15.6Wh battery can be recharged in two and a half hours on a 5W solar panel, so the server can be up for a short night. However, considering that it is not always blessed with the weather, the fact is that there is not enough power generation capacity to charge the power used at night during the day, and the server can only be operated while the sunlight falls. is.
The following is the result of summing up the energy loss of the battery and solar panel and the power required to maintain the server, and summing up the energy consumed by the entire server by configuration. Considering the balance between energy consumption and server utilization, the current server configuration seems to use 50 W solar panels and 86.4 Wh battery, but the website can be operated with 95-98% utilization And that.
Websites that are actually operated solely by solar power can be accessed below.
LOW ← TECH MAGAZINE
At the top of the page is a note that says, 'It's running on solar power, so it's sometimes offline.'
The website pages operated by photovoltaic power generation use simpler designs than regular website pages and eliminate dynamic content to reduce server power consumption. The page shows the remaining battery power of the server, and the color of the page is divided according to the remaining amount.
The Internet is consuming more and more electricity, and running environmentally-friendly data centers on renewable energy is not enough. According to LOW-TECH MAGAZINE, it is necessary to reconsider the idea that the Internet must be online at all times in order to make the Internet coexist with renewable energy, which is difficult to supply electricity stably.
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