Energy consumption
It intrigues me that despite the massive amounts of recent coverage of climate change and the prospects of running out of energy sources there is so little discussion of this issue wrt technology. Google and Microsoft are having to choose sites for their large data centers based on where they can get close enough to a big enough power supply. Google has in fact called on the PC industry to redesign PCs to consume less energy. And I was particularly taken with Nicholas Carr’s calculation that a Second Life avatar consumes as much energy as an average Brazilian. “They don’t have bodies,” he concludes, “but they do have footprints.”
I spent a month this summer writing about energy issues (as it turns out, not for publication, sadly), and between that and the ongoing media coverage I think about this every time I listen to someone do a presentation on new medical or information technologies: if we no longer have the energy sources to sustain our present way of life what are these technologies going to run on? Is this the biggest information assurance issue of them all?
wg
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:38 am
Hi Wendy,
Good post, as usual. Good point as well. And it motivates me on a Monday. I’m going to take a look at energy distribution and availability, as energy constraints seem a bit… global. But for the record, I believe that the first order of magnitude problem would be the inability of government staff to perform their duties due to a) power failure at their facilities or b) inability to travel due to unavailability of petrol for vehicles.
One of the peculiarities of Blindside is that we have tended not to look at technologies that a) have been widely subject to discussion and b) may tend to have broader effects on society than on specific information assurance issues. Another example of this is skills shortages. This has probably been a mistake, especially on my part, as government can just as easily be blindsided by energy as nanotechnology–although it might be because we all think we understand the issues around energy.
Let’s start the discussion with some baseline figures:
• The UK is now once again a net importer of gas, and is set to be importing around 80% of its gas requirements by 2020.
• By this time, current plans indicate that gas-fired power stations will provide two thirds or more of the UK’s electricity.
• Substantial amounts of baseload coal and nuclear capacity are scheduled to close over the coming decade.
• Electricity demand is growing at around 1-2%
The average annual household consumption in UK is 4,700 kwh
Up to 8GW of nuclear and 19GW of coal and oil-fired plant will need to be replaced in the UK by 2015. This is equivalent to nearly a third of the UK’s total electricity generating capacity.
The DTI estimates that the UK North Sea contains around 1.5 billion barrels of oil which could be recovered using CO2-EOR.190If this is not produced by EOR during thenext 10-20 years, these assets could be stranded, with no prospect of production. The timeconstraint arises because decommissioning of the North Sea oil and gas fields has already started and will increase in rapidity and scope over the next 5-10 years
55% of UK oil consumption is for transportation.
September 4th, 2007 at 6:40 am
(Gratuitous plug for my employer ahead…)
Sun woke up to the ecological footprint of computing at least as early as the rolling blackouts around California, around 2004. Since then, we’ve been designing server processors which optimise on the bang-per-buck-per-watt curve. See http://www.sun.com/solutions/eco_innovation/.
Also, for folk happy to have a thin client rather than a PC on their desk, the new Sun Ray 2 pulls a mere 4W, and doesn’t have the 3-4 year replacement cycle (they’re reckoned to be good for 10-15 years).