Building networks and cyber-infrastructure to survive climate change - lessons from Sandy

[Hurricane Sandy has been a badly needed wake up call for the Internet community as to the threat of climate change.

The next big challenge in computing and networking: increasing on demand electrical consumption

[There is an excellent article in this week’s Economist on the difficulties Germany electrical grid and power plant operators are facing as the amount of renewable power on the grid approaches 20%.

How Quebec can be a world leader in next generation zero carbon transportation systems

[It is exciting to see Quebec make a significant commitment to spend $2.7 billion on climate change efforts.

Hewlett Packard and other companies deploying zero carbon data centers

[I am pleased to see that several companies are starting to recognize that building zero carbon data centers is a more sustainable direction rather than focusing on energy efficiency (i.e. PUE).

Globe and Mail: Only radical thinking will solve environmental problems

The Globe and Mail has a good article on why we need to get away from our traditional thinking in terms of addressing climate change:

Guardian - Until we get a 100% decarbonised grid, the marginal impact of efficiency is always to add more coal to a power station

[There is a great article in today’s Guardian about understanding the real challenges of decarbonizing our society with respect to the recent decision by Germany to shut down its nuclear plants- http://goo.gl/e6WCF.

When India and China are adding a coal plant a week, energy efficiency in the western world is meaningless

[I am constantly amazed how the western world continues to focus on energy efficiency, smart meters and other energy silliness to address the problem of climate change.

Rutgers to deploy follow the sun solar center using GreenHadoop and GreenNebula

[Here is a very cool project at Rutgers that demonstrates how we can build “adaptable” ICT green solutions that will be needed for a much warmer planet and yet at the same are also excellent solutions for mitigation.

Iceland to host supercomputer for universities and researchers in Scandanvian countries

[Here is a great example of how research supercomputing and clouds can be hosted in remote environments that use only renewable energy.

Must watch video: The Iron Law of Climate Change Policy and why we must move to adaptation

[Here is an excellent video of a lecture given by noted political economist Roger Pielke Jr that powerfully demonstrates the challenge we face in trying to prevent climate change:

A new Bit-Torrent proxy to enable green file transfers

[Integrating this BitTorrent proxy with a Greenstar network node powered by wind or sun would be a novel way to enable green file transfers.

Why we need to bypass electrical utilities if we want to build a low carbon society

[I have long argued that we need to bypass electrical utilities if we want to build a low carbon society.

Another innovative low carbon brokered cloud strategy - Mastodon C

[Mastodon C is a new service from Magic Dashboards, a London-based startup.It helps developers and data scientists to minimize their environmental impact, by sending their Hadoop jobs to the greenest available locations, without reducing their productivity or significantly increasing cost.

Carbon Accounting and Green IT strategies for networks - TERENA workshop

[TERENA in partnership with SURFnet and GEANT is hosting a 2 day workshop on carbon accounting and Green IT strategies for R&E networks.

Green IT is revolutionizing UK cyber-Infrastructure via networks, cloud, outsouring and financial incentives

[As readers of this blog may know I have long argued that advances in research and education through cyber-infrastructure (or eInfrastructure) can be largely justified, if not entirely paid for through the energy savings of using clouds, networks or outsourcing.

Stanford university research on dynamic charging of electric vehicles for future Energy Internet

[It is exciting to see prestigious institutions like Stanford University, which has been the incubator for many companies that created the original Internet, to now undertake work leading to the development of the Energy Internet.

Green Revolving Funds can help fund costs of cloud computing and R&E networking

[There have been some interesting new developments in university Green Revolving Funds (GRF) that I believe could be a significant revenue opportunity for cloud suppliers and R&E networks

How to make the Internet DNS green

[The Dutch Internet registry SIDN has launched a unique program in partnership with CleanBits to identify what proportion of .nl domain names were hosted on a green or CO2-neutral basis.

A classic example of why energy efficiency never works

If you live in the United States and value fuel efficiency, you might catch yourself looking longingly overseas at super efficient vehicle fleets and wondering, why not us?