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How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

204 points by tshannon 7y ago

m_coder 7y ago
>>More likely is that we eventually switch to a more poetic small-scale compressed air energy storage system (CAES). Please do this!! I want to see that article on CAES actually worked out in real life not just theory with no howto steps .
- alacombe 7y ago
  City-wide application are discussed regularly here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760 Also online.. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of-the-compressed-air-economy.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-o... Down the line, problems are efficiency and all the downside of working with gases.
  - m_coder 7y ago
    Yes, I did read those articles and it has me very interested. What I would be more interested in is some sort of applied DIY situation. Something I could cobble together myself and it would have the potential to get the efficiency that is discussed in lowtech mag. It seems to me that with the sorts of articles they write, I would be able to follow along on a small scale if I wanted. In particular, how do you make a compressor going one way and a generator going the other?
    - alacombe 7y ago
      It could be argued that DIY and pressure vessels don't work well together :-)
agentultra 7y ago
I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for it though. The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power, efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications. As well as the network and content being resilient to local changes in climate events (flash floods, fires, etc). And possibly bringing access to more areas where network connectivity is slow, expensive and unreliable.
- bmgxyz 7y ago
  There was a project I stumbled upon over a year ago that implemented a P2P Web, but I can't seem to dig it up now. There was a client that mediated the connection between your machine and the network, and you'd just browse the web normally by pointing your browser at localhost:someport. It was kind of neat, since everyone who visited a resource could act as the server for somebody else, but it looked to me like it was pretty much only used by Chinese dissidents. Good for them, I say, but not so useful for someone casually looking for a better version of the existing Web. I think until technologies like this are better than the Web for ordinary use, not just hiding from authorities for whatever reason, they'll only find use in those areas. Of course, there's always IPFS, but that project comes with its own issues (e.g. modifying content).
  - gibspaulding 7y ago
    Were you thinking of i2p? I believe it's a similar project that I've always intended to look into, but never actually have.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Check out Beaker Browser!
    - bmgxyz 7y ago
      That looks neat. I'll put it on my list of things to play with eventually.
alex_young 7y ago
Even with the additional upfront expense, lithium batteries would make this setup much more efficient due to the larger allowed cycles and would also reduce the environmental impact due to the low impact nature of lithium extraction.
- ip26 7y ago
  Lead acid batteries are eminently recyclable. Something like 99% of the lead in a new car battery is from old recycled car batteries.
  - alex_young 7y ago
    That's interesting, I couldn't find any reference to that statistic. I've seen estimates in the range of 60-80% recycled content for new lead batteries in the US, but that data seems pretty shaky. I have seen statistics around a recycling rate of 99% or higher in the US, but also that much of that is done in Mexico or other places with very weak environmental and occupational regulations. In any case, lead poisoning is a very serious problem which is exacerbated by lead recycling and production.
    - generalpass 7y ago
      Take a look at the domestic manufacturers, such as East Penn, and you find that they have their own recycling plants and they charge their customers money when they don't receive a scrap battery on purchase of a new one. They also own most of the distributors of their batteries which run trucks to their customers. The lead acid battery industry is incredibly competitive and prices unbelievably low due to this vertical integration and mechanized production. Pretty much the only way to beat the U.S. car battery prices is to subsidize (Korea) or pollute like hell (Mexico). The U.S. is a net importer of lead, largely because all of the SLA batteries coming in from Asia end up in the waste stream as scrap, so there isn't very high demand for virgin (smelted lead concentrate) when all that scrap is sitting around.
- generalpass 7y ago
  Lithium-cobalt can be profitably recycled due to the value of the Cobalt, but nobody wants to pay the price for the batteries at that size. Lithium batteries can explode when the lithium comes in contact for water. I'm not clear on what the waste stream is doing for all the non-cobalt chemistries (mostly manganese).
bmgxyz 7y ago
It may be worth repeating what the article already states: this project is based in Barcelona, where there is considerable sunlight. Other locations may be unsuitable for this sort of thing. I do like the idea, though, and its implementation is impressive.
kragen 7y ago
It's an interesting exercise. In some ways it's similar to what we were doing at Satellogic: a Satellogic satellite is solar-powered, runs on batteries, and contains computers running Linux. (All of that is public; I'm not revealing anything unpublished here.) They seem to be running on a Raspberry Pi that uses two watts, so they can run Linux. But a website wouldn't have to run Linux. Contiki includes a webserver and can run on an STM32F103. (I'm not sure if the Contiki webserver fits on an STM32F103, though; Contiki is pretty customizable.) They say they have 865,000 yearly visitors, but unfortunately don't explain how many hits that is; if we assume it's 1000 hits per visitor, that's 865 million hits a year, which is 27 hits a second, in the ballpark of what you could do on a 486. So it ought to be within the capacity of a 72MHz 32-bit STM32F103, which uses 50 mA going full tilt — 165 mW if you're running on 3.3 volts. That's better than an order of magnitude less power. This is probably an interesting experiment to do for resiliency purposes, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense for reducing resource usage in this case. If we assume "Kris De Decker" is the name of a human body that dedicates most of its time to writing this magazine, well, that body dissipates about 100 watts. You could run the magazine on 102 watts by using a 2-watt webserver, or 100.17 watts by using a 165 milliwatt webserver. But if they eat beef once a week, well, beef wastes about 96% of its energy input, converting it to cow poop instead of food; that's 4.8 watts of beef produced from 119 watts of soybeans and corn. By replacing one of those beef meals per year with a vegetarian meal — eating beef 51 times a year instead of 52 — they could reduce their energy consumption by more than the entire web server power budget. Or, to look at it another way, eating beef once a year uses as much power as the web server: 72 MJ/year, 2.3 W. (I'm ignoring the embodied-energy calculation because the article shows that it's small compared to the ongoing power use.) Average marketed energy consumption in the rich world is about 10 kilowatts per person, although typically that figure doesn't include things like corn and beef. Interestingly, in another article https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-in-your-apartment.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-i... the author explains that their laptop uses 20 watts of power, and their external monitor uses 16.5 watts, together 18 times the power used by the web server. If they could manage to do their writing with a USB keyboard plugged into an Android cellphone with an OTG cable, they could probably reduce that to 3 watts, a reduction of 11 times the web server's entire power (although maybe they only write 8 hours a day, so maybe it's only 4 times.) If they could use an incrementally updated e-ink screen, an option I explored in some detail in Dercuano, they could use another order of magnitude less still. I feel like sustainability is a bigger question than resource use, though. I can't sustain the laptop I'm writing this on because it contains parts I don't know how to fix, even if I could supply it all the energy it needs with like a bicycle generator or something. In fact, nobody in my country knows how to build a laptop like this; a lot of the knowhow only exists in China, and other parts only exist in Korea. Exploiting its CPU backdoors requires knowledge that is presumably only available in certain companies in the US. These seem like much bigger sustainability concerns to me than the really quite minimal power usage of the machine, which is a tiny fraction of the power usage of, for example, a candle (≈80 watts).
kome 7y ago
Better link to the same article: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is... (it's on the solar powered website itself)
markovbot 7y ago
>The owner of this website (www.lowtechmagazine.com) has banned your IP address ([redacted]) Anyone else seeing this? Looks like they allow me to access it via https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is..., but if they actually banned my IP specifically I don't really want to violate their wishes, I just wonder why I'm banned :/
- frabert 7y ago
  Seeing as how their website is run from a low-power device, maybe your IP (range?) was submitting too many requests and they decided to ban it.
agumonkey 7y ago
side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)
- jandrese 7y ago
  You can run a fair bit of web traffic off of something like a Raspberry Pi, and you don't need a ton of battery to keep that running overnight. Heavy database driven websites probably won't be an option, but the bottleneck for static sites would likely be the Ethernet interface. In fact that's pretty much exactly what they did. 168Wh battery pack is a small Deep Cycle SLA. A 50w Solar Panel and associated charge controllers and the like is like $80 at Harbor Freight. The whole thing is quite achievable on a budget.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    I tried running an rpi on a lead acid battery and a 40w panel. It seemed to be running fine for the first 2 weeks but then I think it had a few days where it drained the battery to 0 which ruined it and then it was turning off every night. I'm not sure what to do with the setup now since it seems like lead acid is not the way to go but all of the DIY solar charge controllers use lead acid.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      Did you use a deep cycle battery? Letting a standard lead acid battery go to 0 is a surefire way to kill it.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        It was just a standard one but the deep cycle ones are super expensive and it doesn't seem worth it for a rpi that costs about $1 a year to run.
- ip26 7y ago
  As is often the case, the most obvious target for optimization (the computer, 1-2W) has already hit diminishing returns. Their biggest energy hog is the router (10W), which they aren't running on solar.
jedberg 7y ago
I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my computer wants to auto-correct it. :(
- kragen 7y ago
  That is an excellent idea. With three or four servers they could entirely avoid batteries. I think you mean anycast, not multicast, but a less exotic option would be to use DNS failover, or even just round-robin DNS with no explicit failover: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-multiple-a-records-for-my-domain-do-web-browsers-ever-try-more-than-one https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-m... https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Yeah I meant anycast (fixed above). And it's true, the other options would work too, but there would be added latency.
    - kragen 7y ago
      With DNS failover there is only added latency during the time interval between when a server goes down, causing the DNS to get updated, and when the dead IP times out everywhere, which can easily be a few minutes. If the server can anticipate that it is going to go down it can remove itself, and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency.
      - jedberg 7y ago
        > and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency. In my experience running large websites, that's about 10% of the internet, if not more. When I made a DNS change, only about 70% of the traffic dropped off in the TTL. The rest took anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks (and some never dropped off, we had to just let them fail after a while).
cjnicholls 7y ago
Previous Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619
- dang 7y ago
  Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847, and from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143
hannob 7y ago
This may sound snarky, but... I really wonder how helpful such projects are. Making the Internet greener is undoubtedly an important goal, but I feel this is perpetuating a myth that we're gonna fix the climate crisis with small-scale projects from below. Practically this is doing nothing to provide any relevant fix for the problem. What we should be doing is thinking about how we can fix the problem at scale, e.g. pressuring large IT companies to get real about the green image they like to peddle. (i.e. care more about news like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858 )
- mpfundstein 7y ago
  before you'll be able to run you need to learn to walk u know.... at least this shit is inspiring
- nothal 7y ago
  I think that seeing things like this should serve more as a point of inspiration, not a full faceted solution.
- mc3 7y ago
  For real efficiency we'd need renewable feeding the grid, then massive and efficient server racks, with your tiddly website running in a docker container on there somewhere, hopefully this is on an edge node close to the person viewing the site. In other words economies of scale. The nice thing about that is that you don't have to change the tech much, you can still use digital ocean or whatever, but they need to get their power from renewable, which in turn means their grid needs to. The not so nice thing is we are not changing fast enough. I hope pure price pressure from tech advantages will get us from fossils to renewable.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  One use case I imagine would be for folks that live off-grid, but still want to have some home automation. Realistically these folks are using large banks of batteries, large solar panels and big inverters, but there is no harm in optimizing the load for long run time when there are periods of low sunlight and wind.
ReactiveJelly 7y ago
I see they're still using dithered PNGs instead of JPEGs for images. The first time I saw it (I don't have the numbers handy now) I ran some experiments and it seemed clear to me that a JPEG would work much better, and if dithered PNGs were really a good option, more people would be doing them. This was on photographs, where JPEGs are kind of a home-run and PNGs aren't good no matter what you do to them. This time they're doing diagrams, which would probably be best as regular PNGs - The dithering requires you compress a pattern that's almost noise, and a JPEG would add artifacts without being any smaller. Here's some other thoughts: - WebP does exist, but of course you have to do some negotiation to avoid blank images on browsers that won't decode it. - The site is behind CloudFlare anyway, so if it's a static site with no auth you can probably just put the whole thing on CF / AWS / whatever and it won't use more energy in the cloud than proxying for your own server already does. - CloudFlare probably has a button that re-compresses everything as WebP for you. - Economies of scale always apply. On scale: The transmission losses for the whole US grid is well under 10%. If solar is such a great idea, build a solar farm and run 1,000,000 websites. Or 1,000 houses. It'll be more efficient than putting panels on individual houses or servers. There is no power source that gets more efficient when you have a bunch of individuals running it instead of a power company. Whether the power company is trustworthy is a question of politics, not technology. This always gets to me when I see EV chargers with VAWTs at a grocery store. If VAWTS are so great, why isn't the grid building them? The grid already has the big wind turbines which are presumably more efficient than a VAWT. So why not buy power from the grid? Because it's a PR stunt. In short, I wish they'd be more clear about it being a cool thing and not a practical thing. Solar is practical. Wind is practical. At scale.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  “At scale” has to include several standard deviations of insufficient light/wind availability. When batteries deplete, you have no power. This gets very expensive when you’re backing up for cases that won’t happen more than one day per year (or decade).
ctdonath 7y ago
To compare, I’m a solar powered user. All summer I work outside on a notebook writing apps, powered by several combinations of solar panels and matching batteries. On the whole it works. Excess PV panel capacity charges battery, ensuring enough backup to run during unfavorable angle, cloud cover, weather, shadows, and night. Most common issue is re-positioning panels every few hours to favorable angles & avoiding shadows. Greatest concern is prolonged cloud cover, depleting batteries after a couple days of insufficient light. The cost of preparing backup against “multiple standard deviations” is substantial, buying rarely used batteries (and extra panels to charge them in reasonable time) - hundreds of $ of gear (2-4x base cost) used maybe one day a month. Winter makes this outlier the norm, magnified by its own outliers. Also, one becomes very aware of app power consumption. Found one web page (AgileCraft logout page) pulls 30 ways for no good reason. I’m sure solar powered web server would face comparable issues. Depleted batteries are a brick wall, waiting for not just light & time to recharge, but to run the system ASAP.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  Can you link to what panel/battery/supporting hardware/etc. you purchased + used?
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    GoalZero.com : Boulder 100 Briefcase, Nomad 20, Nomad 13, & Nomad 7 panels; Yeti 400, Yeti 100, Yeti 100AC, Yeti 50, & Guide 10+ batteries. Running a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhones, & iPad Pro.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  The extra batteries can be justified because they reduce the load over the entire setup so maybe you could get by with half the batteries but you would be using the batteries twice as much and they would wear out twice as fast.
clarry 7y ago
> Solar PV power has high embodied energy compared to alternatives such as wind, water, or human power. Did they calculate the energy required to construct a human that is capable of powering this server?
maelito 7y ago
> However, we’re comparing apples to oranges. We have calculated our emissions based on the embodied energy of our installation. When the carbon intensity of the Spanish power grid is measured, the embodied energy of the renewable power infrastructure is taken to be zero. If we calculated our carbon intensity in the same way, of course it would be zero, too. I don't get it. The carbon intensity of the national grid should result from a life-cycle analysis, so all emissions should be included in the figure. As far as I know, apples and apples are compared, and the home-made version is worse.
- lowtechmagazine 7y ago
  The carbon intensity of the national grid is calculated as follows: carbon emissions of burning coal and gas in power plants (say 600 g/kWh) + carbon emissions of wind turbines, solar panels and the like (0 g/kWh). Embodied energy is not taken into account.
  - maelito 7y ago
    Is it particular to spain ?
    - lowtechmagazine 7y ago
      No, it's not just Spain. I only looked at European power grids, but their carbon intensity is all calculated in the same way.
      - maelito 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure these numbers are LCAs : https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=FR https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem... Hydro, nuclear, wind turbines would all be 0g/kWh if it was only about fuel.
SeanFerree 7y ago
Enjoyed this article!
philipkglass 7y ago
The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules. The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of solar panel." The source for that assertion is this article from 2017: "Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot System" https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3Ach%3Abel-1002434%3Arecycling-02-00010.pdf/recycling-02-00010.pdf https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3... That article cites this article from 2006 as its source for energy intensity of solar manufacturing: "Embodied energy analysis of photovoltaic (PV) system based on macro- and micro-level" https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.enpol.2005.06.018 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.enpol.2005.06.018 That publication finds that silicon purification and processing accounts for the lion's share of embodied energy in solar PV. But if you read section 6 of the paper, "Embodied energy of silicon purification and processing", you see that those authors are using material production energy intensity numbers from 2004 and 1998. They are also assuming the use of electronic grade silicon for solar manufacturing, and a silicon requirement of 12 grams per watt-peak of solar module. Cheaper and less energy intensive solar grade silicon has entirely replaced electronic grade silicon in PV since the early 2000s. Modern solar module silicon use is about 3 grams per watt-peak, not 12; see Table 1 in https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/ee/c9ee02452b https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/ee/c9ee0245.... What first appears to be a reasonably recent citation for PV embodied energy is actually a chain of painfully outdated assumptions going all the way back to the 1990s.
- lowtechmagazine 7y ago
  Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3 http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final_Report.pdf http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final... Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much smaller than the ones oin those studies. This means that things like the frame, wires, connections become more important for embodied energy.
falcolas 7y ago
About $100 in gear ($30 144wh battery, $20 controller, $50 50w solar panel) to offset around $2 worth of electricity (9.53kwh * 0.17 euro/kwh) per year. The battery should be replaced about every 5 years, the solar panels 25 years, the controller every 10 years.
- lowtechmagazine 7y ago
  A cost analysis remains to be done. But it's not as bad as it seems: we save $600 per year on hosting services.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Comparing a static site on a Raspberry Pi to a commercially hosted CMS is like comparing an apple to a walnut grove.
unnouinceput 7y ago
Quote: "The solar powered website bucks against these trends. To drop energy use far below that of the average website, we opted for a back-to-basics web design, using a static website instead of a database driven content management system. " For a website that proud itself on being against trends, I would had more appreciation if they went against the trend to use 3rd party sites and be totally on their own. My NoScript reports for them these as 3rd party scripts: google-analytics.com, google.com, googlesyndication.com, gstatic.com, jquery.com, s3.amazonaws.com, statcounter.com, typepad.com This reminds me of that joke with electric cars that recharge their battery using a diesel generator.
- csours 7y ago
  In the distant future after humanity crumbles there will be only one website left, available for 4 hours a day, and the content won't render correctly because they didn't self host their scripts or css.
- lowtechmagazine 7y ago
  That's because you're not on the solar powered website. Hackernews is linking to the old site. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...
generalpass 7y ago
I wonder if hosting images elsewhere helps out with reducing load?
seanwilson 7y ago
Does anyone know of any good sources of information about which web hosts are the most sustainable? I had a quick look and didn't find an obvious resource online to study. I messaged a couple of popular web hosts and each said they don't have any specific policies on sustainability or any energy usage stats to share.
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  This would be a useful thing to lobby hosting companies on. All it would take would be to convince a dozen or two of the largest, most visible hosting companies to put sustainability/power efficiency/consumption stats front and centre on the website and the rest of the horde would be more-or-less obliged to follow suit.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    You'd need a legislated standard, I fear. There are so many ways you could lie statistically and still appear to be giving good info.
TheEnder8 7y ago
This misses the elephant in the room. Every major tech company is already pushing hard towards renewable and/or zero carbon. The problem isn't tech, it's the other companies (chemical, oil, agriculture, etc). https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/ https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ https://sustainability.google/environment/ https://sustainability.google/environment/ https://news.microsoft.com/climate/ https://news.microsoft.com/climate/
- mrpopo 7y ago
  The problem is, of course, tech. As explained in the article, websites have become more energy-hungry over time. This is partly explained by the rebound effect (Jevons paradox). More efficient hardware leads to faster page load times. Unfortunately, the result was heavier pages loading roughly as fast, or even slower, than old-school websites. Unless facebook, AWS, google and Microsoft start encouraging more efficient webiste designs (static websites, limited library usage, no more 1MB fonts, etc.), the work done by the author is absolutely relevant. Limited hardware capacity has always been the most reliable way to limit energy usage.
WizardAustralis 7y ago
If that is not good enough for some folks, there is also the print version of the site. A big 700+ page thing that really need to get my chops into. Been on my bookshelf for about 6 months just calling me to delve into its full glory.
hinkley 7y ago
There are a handful of reasons I’ve been farting around with SBCs, but one of them is an informational website for an outdoor attraction with no good spot to string power. Not quite how this article meant solar-powered, but still some useful food for thought.

204 points by tshannon 7y ago

>>More likely is that we eventually switch to a more poetic small-scale compressed air energy storage system (CAES). Please do this!! I want to see that article on CAES actually worked out in real life not just theory with no howto steps .

alacombe 7y ago
City-wide application are discussed regularly here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760 Also online.. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of-the-compressed-air-economy.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-o... Down the line, problems are efficiency and all the downside of working with gases.
- m_coder 7y ago
  Yes, I did read those articles and it has me very interested. What I would be more interested in is some sort of applied DIY situation. Something I could cobble together myself and it would have the potential to get the efficiency that is discussed in lowtech mag. It seems to me that with the sorts of articles they write, I would be able to follow along on a small scale if I wanted. In particular, how do you make a compressor going one way and a generator going the other?
  - alacombe 7y ago
    It could be argued that DIY and pressure vessels don't work well together :-)

agentultra 7y ago

I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for it though. The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power, efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications. As well as the network and content being resilient to local changes in climate events (flash floods, fires, etc). And possibly bringing access to more areas where network connectivity is slow, expensive and unreliable.

bmgxyz 7y ago
There was a project I stumbled upon over a year ago that implemented a P2P Web, but I can't seem to dig it up now. There was a client that mediated the connection between your machine and the network, and you'd just browse the web normally by pointing your browser at localhost:someport. It was kind of neat, since everyone who visited a resource could act as the server for somebody else, but it looked to me like it was pretty much only used by Chinese dissidents. Good for them, I say, but not so useful for someone casually looking for a better version of the existing Web. I think until technologies like this are better than the Web for ordinary use, not just hiding from authorities for whatever reason, they'll only find use in those areas. Of course, there's always IPFS, but that project comes with its own issues (e.g. modifying content).
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  Were you thinking of i2p? I believe it's a similar project that I've always intended to look into, but never actually have.
- fwip 7y ago
  Check out Beaker Browser!
  - bmgxyz 7y ago
    That looks neat. I'll put it on my list of things to play with eventually.

alex_young 7y ago

Even with the additional upfront expense, lithium batteries would make this setup much more efficient due to the larger allowed cycles and would also reduce the environmental impact due to the low impact nature of lithium extraction.

ip26 7y ago
Lead acid batteries are eminently recyclable. Something like 99% of the lead in a new car battery is from old recycled car batteries.
- alex_young 7y ago
  That's interesting, I couldn't find any reference to that statistic. I've seen estimates in the range of 60-80% recycled content for new lead batteries in the US, but that data seems pretty shaky. I have seen statistics around a recycling rate of 99% or higher in the US, but also that much of that is done in Mexico or other places with very weak environmental and occupational regulations. In any case, lead poisoning is a very serious problem which is exacerbated by lead recycling and production.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    Take a look at the domestic manufacturers, such as East Penn, and you find that they have their own recycling plants and they charge their customers money when they don't receive a scrap battery on purchase of a new one. They also own most of the distributors of their batteries which run trucks to their customers. The lead acid battery industry is incredibly competitive and prices unbelievably low due to this vertical integration and mechanized production. Pretty much the only way to beat the U.S. car battery prices is to subsidize (Korea) or pollute like hell (Mexico). The U.S. is a net importer of lead, largely because all of the SLA batteries coming in from Asia end up in the waste stream as scrap, so there isn't very high demand for virgin (smelted lead concentrate) when all that scrap is sitting around.
generalpass 7y ago
Lithium-cobalt can be profitably recycled due to the value of the Cobalt, but nobody wants to pay the price for the batteries at that size. Lithium batteries can explode when the lithium comes in contact for water. I'm not clear on what the waste stream is doing for all the non-cobalt chemistries (mostly manganese).

bmgxyz 7y ago

It may be worth repeating what the article already states: this project is based in Barcelona, where there is considerable sunlight. Other locations may be unsuitable for this sort of thing. I do like the idea, though, and its implementation is impressive.

kragen 7y ago

It's an interesting exercise. In some ways it's similar to what we were doing at Satellogic: a Satellogic satellite is solar-powered, runs on batteries, and contains computers running Linux. (All of that is public; I'm not revealing anything unpublished here.) They seem to be running on a Raspberry Pi that uses two watts, so they can run Linux. But a website wouldn't have to run Linux. Contiki includes a webserver and can run on an STM32F103. (I'm not sure if the Contiki webserver fits on an STM32F103, though; Contiki is pretty customizable.) They say they have 865,000 yearly visitors, but unfortunately don't explain how many hits that is; if we assume it's 1000 hits per visitor, that's 865 million hits a year, which is 27 hits a second, in the ballpark of what you could do on a 486. So it ought to be within the capacity of a 72MHz 32-bit STM32F103, which uses 50 mA going full tilt — 165 mW if you're running on 3.3 volts. That's better than an order of magnitude less power. This is probably an interesting experiment to do for resiliency purposes, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense for reducing resource usage in this case. If we assume "Kris De Decker" is the name of a human body that dedicates most of its time to writing this magazine, well, that body dissipates about 100 watts. You could run the magazine on 102 watts by using a 2-watt webserver, or 100.17 watts by using a 165 milliwatt webserver. But if they eat beef once a week, well, beef wastes about 96% of its energy input, converting it to cow poop instead of food; that's 4.8 watts of beef produced from 119 watts of soybeans and corn. By replacing one of those beef meals per year with a vegetarian meal — eating beef 51 times a year instead of 52 — they could reduce their energy consumption by more than the entire web server power budget. Or, to look at it another way, eating beef once a year uses as much power as the web server: 72 MJ/year, 2.3 W. (I'm ignoring the embodied-energy calculation because the article shows that it's small compared to the ongoing power use.) Average marketed energy consumption in the rich world is about 10 kilowatts per person, although typically that figure doesn't include things like corn and beef. Interestingly, in another article https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-in-your-apartment.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-i... the author explains that their laptop uses 20 watts of power, and their external monitor uses 16.5 watts, together 18 times the power used by the web server. If they could manage to do their writing with a USB keyboard plugged into an Android cellphone with an OTG cable, they could probably reduce that to 3 watts, a reduction of 11 times the web server's entire power (although maybe they only write 8 hours a day, so maybe it's only 4 times.) If they could use an incrementally updated e-ink screen, an option I explored in some detail in Dercuano, they could use another order of magnitude less still. I feel like sustainability is a bigger question than resource use, though. I can't sustain the laptop I'm writing this on because it contains parts I don't know how to fix, even if I could supply it all the energy it needs with like a bicycle generator or something. In fact, nobody in my country knows how to build a laptop like this; a lot of the knowhow only exists in China, and other parts only exist in Korea. Exploiting its CPU backdoors requires knowledge that is presumably only available in certain companies in the US. These seem like much bigger sustainability concerns to me than the really quite minimal power usage of the machine, which is a tiny fraction of the power usage of, for example, a candle (≈80 watts).

kome 7y ago

Better link to the same article: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is... (it's on the solar powered website itself)

markovbot 7y ago

>The owner of this website (www.lowtechmagazine.com) has banned your IP address ([redacted]) Anyone else seeing this? Looks like they allow me to access it via https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is..., but if they actually banned my IP specifically I don't really want to violate their wishes, I just wonder why I'm banned :/

frabert 7y ago
Seeing as how their website is run from a low-power device, maybe your IP (range?) was submitting too many requests and they decided to ban it.

agumonkey 7y ago

side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)

jandrese 7y ago
You can run a fair bit of web traffic off of something like a Raspberry Pi, and you don't need a ton of battery to keep that running overnight. Heavy database driven websites probably won't be an option, but the bottleneck for static sites would likely be the Ethernet interface. In fact that's pretty much exactly what they did. 168Wh battery pack is a small Deep Cycle SLA. A 50w Solar Panel and associated charge controllers and the like is like $80 at Harbor Freight. The whole thing is quite achievable on a budget.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  I tried running an rpi on a lead acid battery and a 40w panel. It seemed to be running fine for the first 2 weeks but then I think it had a few days where it drained the battery to 0 which ruined it and then it was turning off every night. I'm not sure what to do with the setup now since it seems like lead acid is not the way to go but all of the DIY solar charge controllers use lead acid.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Did you use a deep cycle battery? Letting a standard lead acid battery go to 0 is a surefire way to kill it.
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      It was just a standard one but the deep cycle ones are super expensive and it doesn't seem worth it for a rpi that costs about $1 a year to run.
ip26 7y ago
As is often the case, the most obvious target for optimization (the computer, 1-2W) has already hit diminishing returns. Their biggest energy hog is the router (10W), which they aren't running on solar.

jedberg 7y ago

I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my computer wants to auto-correct it. :(

kragen 7y ago
That is an excellent idea. With three or four servers they could entirely avoid batteries. I think you mean anycast, not multicast, but a less exotic option would be to use DNS failover, or even just round-robin DNS with no explicit failover: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-multiple-a-records-for-my-domain-do-web-browsers-ever-try-more-than-one https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-m... https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html
- jedberg 7y ago
  Yeah I meant anycast (fixed above). And it's true, the other options would work too, but there would be added latency.
  - kragen 7y ago
    With DNS failover there is only added latency during the time interval between when a server goes down, causing the DNS to get updated, and when the dead IP times out everywhere, which can easily be a few minutes. If the server can anticipate that it is going to go down it can remove itself, and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      > and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency. In my experience running large websites, that's about 10% of the internet, if not more. When I made a DNS change, only about 70% of the traffic dropped off in the TTL. The rest took anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks (and some never dropped off, we had to just let them fail after a while).

cjnicholls 7y ago

Previous Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619

dang 7y ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847, and from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143

hannob 7y ago

This may sound snarky, but... I really wonder how helpful such projects are. Making the Internet greener is undoubtedly an important goal, but I feel this is perpetuating a myth that we're gonna fix the climate crisis with small-scale projects from below. Practically this is doing nothing to provide any relevant fix for the problem. What we should be doing is thinking about how we can fix the problem at scale, e.g. pressuring large IT companies to get real about the green image they like to peddle. (i.e. care more about news like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858 )

mpfundstein 7y ago
before you'll be able to run you need to learn to walk u know.... at least this shit is inspiring
nothal 7y ago
I think that seeing things like this should serve more as a point of inspiration, not a full faceted solution.
mc3 7y ago
For real efficiency we'd need renewable feeding the grid, then massive and efficient server racks, with your tiddly website running in a docker container on there somewhere, hopefully this is on an edge node close to the person viewing the site. In other words economies of scale. The nice thing about that is that you don't have to change the tech much, you can still use digital ocean or whatever, but they need to get their power from renewable, which in turn means their grid needs to. The not so nice thing is we are not changing fast enough. I hope pure price pressure from tech advantages will get us from fossils to renewable.
LinuxBender 7y ago
One use case I imagine would be for folks that live off-grid, but still want to have some home automation. Realistically these folks are using large banks of batteries, large solar panels and big inverters, but there is no harm in optimizing the load for long run time when there are periods of low sunlight and wind.

ReactiveJelly 7y ago

I see they're still using dithered PNGs instead of JPEGs for images. The first time I saw it (I don't have the numbers handy now) I ran some experiments and it seemed clear to me that a JPEG would work much better, and if dithered PNGs were really a good option, more people would be doing them. This was on photographs, where JPEGs are kind of a home-run and PNGs aren't good no matter what you do to them. This time they're doing diagrams, which would probably be best as regular PNGs - The dithering requires you compress a pattern that's almost noise, and a JPEG would add artifacts without being any smaller. Here's some other thoughts: - WebP does exist, but of course you have to do some negotiation to avoid blank images on browsers that won't decode it. - The site is behind CloudFlare anyway, so if it's a static site with no auth you can probably just put the whole thing on CF / AWS / whatever and it won't use more energy in the cloud than proxying for your own server already does. - CloudFlare probably has a button that re-compresses everything as WebP for you. - Economies of scale always apply. On scale: The transmission losses for the whole US grid is well under 10%. If solar is such a great idea, build a solar farm and run 1,000,000 websites. Or 1,000 houses. It'll be more efficient than putting panels on individual houses or servers. There is no power source that gets more efficient when you have a bunch of individuals running it instead of a power company. Whether the power company is trustworthy is a question of politics, not technology. This always gets to me when I see EV chargers with VAWTs at a grocery store. If VAWTS are so great, why isn't the grid building them? The grid already has the big wind turbines which are presumably more efficient than a VAWT. So why not buy power from the grid? Because it's a PR stunt. In short, I wish they'd be more clear about it being a cool thing and not a practical thing. Solar is practical. Wind is practical. At scale.

ctdonath 7y ago
“At scale” has to include several standard deviations of insufficient light/wind availability. When batteries deplete, you have no power. This gets very expensive when you’re backing up for cases that won’t happen more than one day per year (or decade).

ctdonath 7y ago

To compare, I’m a solar powered user. All summer I work outside on a notebook writing apps, powered by several combinations of solar panels and matching batteries. On the whole it works. Excess PV panel capacity charges battery, ensuring enough backup to run during unfavorable angle, cloud cover, weather, shadows, and night. Most common issue is re-positioning panels every few hours to favorable angles & avoiding shadows. Greatest concern is prolonged cloud cover, depleting batteries after a couple days of insufficient light. The cost of preparing backup against “multiple standard deviations” is substantial, buying rarely used batteries (and extra panels to charge them in reasonable time) - hundreds of $ of gear (2-4x base cost) used maybe one day a month. Winter makes this outlier the norm, magnified by its own outliers. Also, one becomes very aware of app power consumption. Found one web page (AgileCraft logout page) pulls 30 ways for no good reason. I’m sure solar powered web server would face comparable issues. Depleted batteries are a brick wall, waiting for not just light & time to recharge, but to run the system ASAP.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
Can you link to what panel/battery/supporting hardware/etc. you purchased + used?
- ctdonath 7y ago
  GoalZero.com : Boulder 100 Briefcase, Nomad 20, Nomad 13, & Nomad 7 panels; Yeti 400, Yeti 100, Yeti 100AC, Yeti 50, & Guide 10+ batteries. Running a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhones, & iPad Pro.
Polylactic_acid 7y ago
The extra batteries can be justified because they reduce the load over the entire setup so maybe you could get by with half the batteries but you would be using the batteries twice as much and they would wear out twice as fast.

clarry 7y ago

> Solar PV power has high embodied energy compared to alternatives such as wind, water, or human power. Did they calculate the energy required to construct a human that is capable of powering this server?

maelito 7y ago

> However, we’re comparing apples to oranges. We have calculated our emissions based on the embodied energy of our installation. When the carbon intensity of the Spanish power grid is measured, the embodied energy of the renewable power infrastructure is taken to be zero. If we calculated our carbon intensity in the same way, of course it would be zero, too. I don't get it. The carbon intensity of the national grid should result from a life-cycle analysis, so all emissions should be included in the figure. As far as I know, apples and apples are compared, and the home-made version is worse.

lowtechmagazine 7y ago
The carbon intensity of the national grid is calculated as follows: carbon emissions of burning coal and gas in power plants (say 600 g/kWh) + carbon emissions of wind turbines, solar panels and the like (0 g/kWh). Embodied energy is not taken into account.
- maelito 7y ago
  Is it particular to spain ?
  - lowtechmagazine 7y ago
    No, it's not just Spain. I only looked at European power grids, but their carbon intensity is all calculated in the same way.
    - maelito 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure these numbers are LCAs : https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=FR https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem... Hydro, nuclear, wind turbines would all be 0g/kWh if it was only about fuel.

SeanFerree 7y ago

Enjoyed this article!

philipkglass 7y ago

The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules. The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of solar panel." The source for that assertion is this article from 2017: "Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot System" https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3Ach%3Abel-1002434%3Arecycling-02-00010.pdf/recycling-02-00010.pdf https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3... That article cites this article from 2006 as its source for energy intensity of solar manufacturing: "Embodied energy analysis of photovoltaic (PV) system based on macro- and micro-level" https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.enpol.2005.06.018 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.enpol.2005.06.018 That publication finds that silicon purification and processing accounts for the lion's share of embodied energy in solar PV. But if you read section 6 of the paper, "Embodied energy of silicon purification and processing", you see that those authors are using material production energy intensity numbers from 2004 and 1998. They are also assuming the use of electronic grade silicon for solar manufacturing, and a silicon requirement of 12 grams per watt-peak of solar module. Cheaper and less energy intensive solar grade silicon has entirely replaced electronic grade silicon in PV since the early 2000s. Modern solar module silicon use is about 3 grams per watt-peak, not 12; see Table 1 in https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/ee/c9ee02452b https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/ee/c9ee0245.... What first appears to be a reasonably recent citation for PV embodied energy is actually a chain of painfully outdated assumptions going all the way back to the 1990s.

lowtechmagazine 7y ago
Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3 http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final_Report.pdf http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final... Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much smaller than the ones oin those studies. This means that things like the frame, wires, connections become more important for embodied energy.

falcolas 7y ago

About $100 in gear ($30 144wh battery, $20 controller, $50 50w solar panel) to offset around $2 worth of electricity (9.53kwh * 0.17 euro/kwh) per year. The battery should be replaced about every 5 years, the solar panels 25 years, the controller every 10 years.

lowtechmagazine 7y ago
A cost analysis remains to be done. But it's not as bad as it seems: we save $600 per year on hosting services.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Comparing a static site on a Raspberry Pi to a commercially hosted CMS is like comparing an apple to a walnut grove.

unnouinceput 7y ago

Quote: "The solar powered website bucks against these trends. To drop energy use far below that of the average website, we opted for a back-to-basics web design, using a static website instead of a database driven content management system. " For a website that proud itself on being against trends, I would had more appreciation if they went against the trend to use 3rd party sites and be totally on their own. My NoScript reports for them these as 3rd party scripts: google-analytics.com, google.com, googlesyndication.com, gstatic.com, jquery.com, s3.amazonaws.com, statcounter.com, typepad.com This reminds me of that joke with electric cars that recharge their battery using a diesel generator.

csours 7y ago
In the distant future after humanity crumbles there will be only one website left, available for 4 hours a day, and the content won't render correctly because they didn't self host their scripts or css.
lowtechmagazine 7y ago
That's because you're not on the solar powered website. Hackernews is linking to the old site. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...

generalpass 7y ago

I wonder if hosting images elsewhere helps out with reducing load?

seanwilson 7y ago

Does anyone know of any good sources of information about which web hosts are the most sustainable? I had a quick look and didn't find an obvious resource online to study. I messaged a couple of popular web hosts and each said they don't have any specific policies on sustainability or any energy usage stats to share.

mikro2nd 7y ago
This would be a useful thing to lobby hosting companies on. All it would take would be to convince a dozen or two of the largest, most visible hosting companies to put sustainability/power efficiency/consumption stats front and centre on the website and the rest of the horde would be more-or-less obliged to follow suit.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  You'd need a legislated standard, I fear. There are so many ways you could lie statistically and still appear to be giving good info.

TheEnder8 7y ago

This misses the elephant in the room. Every major tech company is already pushing hard towards renewable and/or zero carbon. The problem isn't tech, it's the other companies (chemical, oil, agriculture, etc). https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/ https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ https://sustainability.google/environment/ https://sustainability.google/environment/ https://news.microsoft.com/climate/ https://news.microsoft.com/climate/

mrpopo 7y ago
The problem is, of course, tech. As explained in the article, websites have become more energy-hungry over time. This is partly explained by the rebound effect (Jevons paradox). More efficient hardware leads to faster page load times. Unfortunately, the result was heavier pages loading roughly as fast, or even slower, than old-school websites. Unless facebook, AWS, google and Microsoft start encouraging more efficient webiste designs (static websites, limited library usage, no more 1MB fonts, etc.), the work done by the author is absolutely relevant. Limited hardware capacity has always been the most reliable way to limit energy usage.

WizardAustralis 7y ago

If that is not good enough for some folks, there is also the print version of the site. A big 700+ page thing that really need to get my chops into. Been on my bookshelf for about 6 months just calling me to delve into its full glory.

hinkley 7y ago

There are a handful of reasons I’ve been farting around with SBCs, but one of them is an informational website for an outdoor attraction with no good spot to string power. Not quite how this article meant solar-powered, but still some useful food for thought.