892 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Following an attributional approach, and with the assumptions retained, the Iroco study evaluates the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to one week's use of a mailbox at 63.2 gCO2eq.

      So about 3.5 kg per year

  2. Apr 2024
    1. However, corporate governance in the telecoms sector is notconducive to the kind of radical decisions that separationrequires. Decision makers and boards are incentivised onmetrics that require short term continuity, not disruption

      So to make this argument in cloud/AI, you need to make the argument that firms are too conservative in terms of corporate structure, and as a result are missing out on greater value coming from two individually more valuable entities - something that the org or compensation structure is not set up for

    2. Rural broadband in Europe is increasingly deployed in aneutral host model with a single fibre networkconnecting homes and multiple service providersdelivering services over that network.

      This is like the unbundled approach already then

    3. as pure infrastructure players borrow atlower rates and expect lower returns, they will deployinfrastructure where vertically integrated players won’t,and with no (or less) public subsidies;

      Infra with more patient capital isn't chasing such high risk returns like getting everyone to buy into AI

    4. We have one leading example of voluntary structural separationresulting in increased valuation of the separated entities -Telecom NZ, in 2011. Post de-merger, after years of flat marketvaluation, both Chorus (infrastructure) and Spark (services) sawshare prices rise. Between 2015 and 2023, the combined market1 Tower companies (or towercos) are infrastructure companies that managemobile towers for multiple mobile network operators.capitalisation of Chorus and Spark grew by 150%, whereas thatof European and US vertically integrated telcos2 grew only by15%.The plan also delivered full FTTH coverage to 87% of NewZealand homes with 72% adoption.

      So breaking them made led to greater share price raises AND better service in New Zealand

    Annotators

    1. So should we collectively accept a radical shift in our policy and regulatory framework in order to ensure that the beacon of the European economy can deploy infrastructure that Sweden, Denmark, Spain, France, and many of the smaller European countries started successfully deploying long ago? This, in a nutshell, is why the Commission never talks about Germany.

      This appears to be making the argument that rather than admit Germany has underinvestment compared to the rest of the EU, it's easier to change all the entire EU telecom policy so vertically integrated telcos can make a better return.

    1. The article confirms many of my suspicions — that, as The Information wrote, "other software companies that have touted generative AI as a boon to enterprises are still waiting for revenue to emerge," citing the example of professional services firm KPMG buying 47,000 subscriptions to Microsoft's co-pilot AI "at a significant discount on Copilot's $30 per seat per month sticker price." Confusingly, KPMG bought these subscriptions despite not having gauged how much value its employees actually get out of the software, but rather to "be familiar with any AI-related questions its customers might have."

      This seems like spending 17 million a year to help them sell consulting about what AI.

    1. It's important to understand these complexities because they are currently being flattened not just by corrupt government officials in Global South countries or fossil fuel executives in Texas, but also by a whole ecosystem of pundits like Jordan Peterson, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Epstein and even Joe Rogan, who use the idea that fossil fuel development will solve poverty in Africa as justification for continuing fossil fuel's dominance in the world. In fact, fossil fuel development hasn't even solved energy poverty in the African countries that have embraced it; Nigeria has the continent's largest and oldest fossil fuel industry and yet still has the world's lowest energy access rates.

      Wow, I had no idea that energy access was so low in like this.

    1. To plug the financing hole Intel has had to rely on a wide variety of capital sources to fund everything: traditional debt financing, government support, and even more creative financial engineering schemes like the Brookfield fab deal to find a way to pay for everything.

      thisis what? around 60bn of government subsidy?

  3. Mar 2024
    1. As noted by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, carbon-intensive sectors like electricity generation actually contribute relatively little to the world economy, compared to high-value but lower-emitting sectors like IT, real estate, and social work. 

      what? the industries below RELY on electricity!

    1. The above report is an underestimation of datacenter power demand, but there are plenty of overestimates too

      Wow, so semi-analysis is seeing the IEA estimates as a low ball? I did not see that coming

  4. Feb 2024
    1. The FTC, of which Khan is now chair, contends that Amazon has found a way to push up prices after all, without losing shoppers. It does this, the FTC argues, by imposing ever-higher fees on third-party sellers, who have no choice but to pass these costs on to shoppers by raising their prices. If those businesses try to sell more cheaply elsewhere, Amazon throttles their sales on its platform—which, thanks to the central place in e-commerce that Amazon has built up over the years, can be a death sentence for these businesses. So, according to the FTC, sellers generally absorb the high fees by inflating their prices not just on Amazon but across the web—precluding the price competition that could loosen Amazon’s grip on e-commerce.

      This sounds like the "favoured nation status" from Cory's book

    1. The disclosure required by paragraph 33 shall include the total energy consumption in MWhrelated to own operations as follows
    1. and superconductors will at some point do to conventional power cables what fibre-optics did to conventional telephone cables.

      ? I assume this is referring to stuff like graphene.

  5. Jan 2024
    1. Because we use systemd for most of our service management, these stdout/stderr streams are generally piped into systemd-journald which handles the local machine logs. With its RateLimitBurst and RateLimitInterval configurations, this gives us a simple knob to control the output of any given service on a machine. This has given our logging pipeline the colloquial name of the “journal pipeline”, however as we will see, our pipeline has expanded far beyond just journald logs.

      I did not expect to see journald being used as the basic building block

  6. Dec 2023
    1. Overall, Iceland produces approximately 20 terawatt hours of electricity per year.

      About the same as Google?

    2. Landsvirkjun built Kárahnjúkar despite protests, it started operating in 2009. But the controversy changed Iceland's energy policy. A fourth aluminium smelter was never finished, and in an announcement made in 2022, Landsvirkjun writes that it "will for the time being not focus on attracting new large-scale customers in the metal industry or other industrial commodities."

      I did now there was push back even power in Iceland

    1. Meta previously bet on CPUs and its own in-house chips to handle both traditional workloads and AI ones. But as AI usage boomed, CPUs have been unable to keep up, while Meta's chip effort initially fizzled.

      I did not know they tried to make their own chips

    1. It’s past time for the IT and BPO Services industry to jump to a new S-curve driven by technology arbitrage if they wish to get back to another season of hockey stick growth:

      Yikes. So basically, time to fire the people we outsourced to, and replace them with ChatGPT ?

    1. wrote about this in 2012 in a book called Liars and Outliers. I wrote about four systems for enabling trust: our innate morals, concern about our reputations, the laws we live under, and security technologies that constrain our behavior. I wrote about how the first two are more informal than the last two. And how the last two scale better, and allow for larger and more complex societies. They enable cooperation amongst strangers.

      Morals and reputation

      Laws and tech

    1. They were national strategic programs. The strategic programs were aligned with nuclear weapons programs. The government picked and enforced a single design for all of the reactors. The reactors were GW-scale due to thermal efficiencies required for cost effectiveness. The government ran human resourcing. The programs ran for 20 or 30 years. They built dozens of nuclear reactors to maintain the teams and momentum and to share lessons learned.

      These are 5he seven conditions necessary for nuclear to work, asked on the historical evidence

    2. A key point to remember about the US DOE is that 55% of its budget is related to commercial nuclear generation. The other 45% covers dams, geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, wave, biomass and biofuel energy.

      An! Numbers here! This is super helpful!

  7. Nov 2023
    1. A second MoU on gas export partnership was agreed between Riverside LNG of Nigeria and Germany's Johannes Schuetze Energy Import AG. Under the accord, Nigeria will supply 850,000 tons of natural gas to Germany annually which is expected to rise to 1.2 million. The first deliveries will be in 2026, Ngelale said.The deal will help process about 50 million cubic feet per day of natural gas that otherwise would have flared.

      ok, so instead of being flared for no money, it's being bought by German to burn instead.

    1. Volkswagen teamed up with ClimatePartner GmbH to generate offsets so it can be “independent from the market where you can’t control what’s effective and what’s not,” said Esra Aydin, a spokesperson for the automaker. But the credits didn’t materialize in time last year and it ended up going back to the voluntary market where cheap renewable-energy credits were the only ones that worked with its budget.

      "Worked with its budget"

    2. In other words, the companies decided some offsets weren’t good enough to meet their own climate goals — and yet have continued selling them to customers as a feel-good solution.

      That's a quite a quote

    1. In contrast with the precipitous fallings-off of platforms like Myspace and LiveJournal, the decays of which have been clear and irreversible, Tumblr has kept defying expectations and stayed somewhat thriving against all odds. That is, in part, thanks to the guidance and guardianship of Automattic, which acquired Tumblr for the bargain-bin price of $3 million.

      Holy balls. Only three mil?

    1. The two corporations aren’t directly buying fuel from World Energy. Instead, they’ll purchase certificates representing SAF that gets pumped into the larger supply chain — then count the associated carbon reductions toward their sustainability goals. Microsoft agreed to buy certificates representing 43.7 million gallons of SAF over a 10-year period, while DHL signed a contract for 177 million gallons over seven years.

      These are basically like EACs for fuel!

    1. Provided that reliability and supply improve, the grid could become the optimal solution to provide almost 60% of people with access to electricity in each scenario.In the AC, Nigeria achieves universal access by stepping up efforts to provide off-grid solutions to those populations that live far from a grid.

      Wow, really that much off grid generation?

    1. However, some have criticised the CIPP for providing market-rate loans rather than special financing schemes, which will lead to high costs for Indonesia and could deter other countries from accepting similar deals in the future. 

      Ouch! What's the interest rate in Indonesia compared to North America for energy infra?

    1. Here’s another problem: from 2020 to 2022, shopify claims around 31,000 tonnes of carbon removal. But according to the CDR.FYI database, only 4,000 of the tonnes they have purchased have been actually physically removed from the atmosphere

      If you have increases in temporal resolution for electricity, why not for CDR?

    2. Shopify don’t count the emissions footprint of the products sold by merchants in their actual climate data. No shipping, no manufacturing emissions, nothing (Amazon play a similar trick).

      This an interesting point - shopify can argue they do it to avoid double counting, but that’s not really what scope 3 is designed for

    1. It spent just over $5m to advertise its compact Bolt option over the same time period. Ford spent $61.2m (£48.7m) to advertise its electric F150 , and around $9m to advertise its mid-size electric Mustang. Among the top automotive advertisers, only BMW and Hyundai are spending as much or more to market their more efficient EVs.

      the f150 is its biggest selling autombile. I'd assume this would be higher though, surely?

    1. The CDP, previously known as the Carbon Disclosure Project and the most comprehensive global registry of corporate carbon emission commitments, recently said that of the 19,000 companies with registered plans on its platform, only 81 were credible.

      Sheesh, less than half of one percent of the plans shared with CDP were credible?

    1. Over a year that equates to roughly seven million in savings and is precisely why the biggest names in tech are moving to colder, more remote locations.

      How big does a DC need to be for this 7 million?

    2. Downtime costs roughly $10,000 perminute in a hyperscale and is categorised as the highest risk.

      This is pretty wild quote. I wonder what the source is?

    1. CSP makes it possible for server administrators to reduce or eliminate the vectors by which XSS can occur by specifying the domains that the browser should consider to be valid sources of executable scripts. A CSP compatible browser will then only execute scripts loaded in source files received from those allowed domains, ignoring all other scripts (including inline scripts and event-handling HTML attributes).

      I don't think I've come across this before but I did on a recent project. I didni't know you could block inline styles or inline javascript in this way

    1. The approximate cause of power problems often isn’t that hard to find. Fixing them is often the hard part. Good luck.

      Quotable

    2. Intel processors also support multiple P-states. P0 is the state where the processor is operating at maximum frequency and voltage, and higher-numbered P-states operate at a lower frequency and voltage to reduce power consumption. Processors can have dozens of P-states, but the transitions are controlled by the hardware and OS and so P-states are of less interest to application developers than C-states.

      These exist too, but we can only control them indirectly at best.

    3. Intel processors have aggressive power-saving features. The first is the ability to switch frequently (thousands of times per second) between active and idle states, and there are actually several different kinds of idle states. These different states are called C-states. C0 is the active/busy state, where instructions are being executed. The other states have higher numbers and reflect increasing deeper idle states. The deeper an idle state is, the less power it uses, but the longer it takes to wake up from.

      Mental note: Think "C for the CPU cool down"

    1. Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
    2. The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
    3. Among his proposed solutions to the tragedy of the commons was coercive population control: ‘Freedom to breed is intolerable,’ he wrote in his 1968 essay, and should be countered with ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’. He feared not only runaway human population growth but the runaway growth of certain populations. What if, he asked in his essay, a religion, race or class ‘adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandisement’? Several years after the publication of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, he discouraged the provision of food aid to poorer countries: ‘The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident, bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons,’ he predicted. He compared wealthy nations to lifeboats that couldn’t accept more passengers without sinking.

      YIKES

    1. Mobile network operators, often government sanctioned monopolies granted via spectrum licenses, are in increasing competition with an explosion of “open spectrum” technologies and new operating models for wireless networks.
    2. there are well understood risks of turning unchaperoned engineers loose on social problems
    3. there are well understood risks of turning unchaperoned engineers loose on social problems. And more so as the engineering tools become more specialized: if your only tool is an abstract algebraic curve, all the world becomes a cryptographic nail. 

      Crypto as the hammer that turns everythign into a nail.

    4. This liminal space, often vaguely described as the “Internet of Things” (IoT) doesn’t hold much resemblance to the Internet, at least as originally conceived. And the “things” commonly encountered are toasters, washing machines, and toothbrushes, with an often inexplicable desire to “connect.”
    5. IoT’s current failures are also an opportunity. Beyond the absurdity of overly chatty microwaves, plugging the physical world directly into extractive (and often tenuous) business models has raised public awareness of the shortcomings of how we currently build digital infrastructure. Whether it’s a bike that stops working when its manufacturer goes bankrupt, or a home appliance with unclear allegiances, it has created real harms from exfiltration of personal data, and unnecessarily reducing the lifespan or increasing fragility of devices we depend on as part of daily life.

      Overly chatty microwaves, and home appliances with unclear allegiances - there are so many quotable bits in this post!

    6. a home appliance with unclear allegiances,

      This is wonderful turn of phrase

    1. For an example of an unintended consequence, let’s say the result of your optimization project is spare capacity at a cloud provider. Then that capacity is then offered on the spot market, which lowers the spot price, and someone uses those instances for a CPU intensive workload like crypto or AI training, which they only run when the cost is very low. The end result is that capacity could end up using more power than when your were leaving it idle, and the net consequence is an increase in carbon emissions for that cloud region.

      This is because capacity, utilisation and power used are related, but different concepts.

      Your capacity, which you share back to the pool is then avaiable to someone else, who ends up buying it to use for a task that has a higher average utilisation, resulting in more power being used in absolute terms, even if less is attributed to you.

      This also raises the question - who is responsible - the customer for making the capacity available, for the cloud provider who accepts this workload?

      The cloud providers get to set the terms of service for using their platform.

    1. King Kamehameha

      THAT'S where the Kamehameha comes from?

    2. Average retail electricity rates in Hawaiian Electric territory are higher today than they were a decade ago, per state data. Kauai’s rates have dropped from the highest in the state to the lowest, as KIUC shifted from costly imported fossil fuels to cheaper solar generation.

      WOW

    1. but also depend on a global renewable energy production whose capacity cannot exceed 30% globally (EIA),

      I don't understand this reference

    2. It should be noted that in France, regulations do not allow this market-based approach when reporting company level CO2e emissions : “The assessment of the impact of electricity consumption in the GHG emissions report is carried out on the basis of the average emission factor of the electrical network (…) The use of any other factor is prohibited. There is therefore no discrimination by [electricity] supplier to be established when collecting the data.” (Regulatory method V5-BEGES decree).

      Companies are barred from using market based approaches for reporting?

      How does it work for Amazon then?

    1. In the end, there was an undisclosed settlement between Verizon and Mozilla, but ComputerWorld later reported that financial records showed a $338 million payment from Verizon in 2019. On top of revenue-sharing with Google, that payment drove up Mozilla's revenue, which in 2019 reflected "an 84 percent year-over-year increase" that was "easily the most the open source developer has booked in a single year, beating the existing record by more than a quarter of billion dollars," ComputerWorld reported. Perhaps that bonus payment made switching back to Google even more attractive at a time when Baker told the court she "felt strongly that Yahoo was not delivering the search experience we needed and had contracted for."

      Wow, it represented a 340 million USD bonus to switch from Yahoo to Google?

    1. Finally, over a longer time frame, novel technologies could drastically lower battery-related mineral demand for nickel and copper in particular, but the mineral intensity of next-generation battery chemistries remains uncertain and could even increase demand for some battery minerals. For example, solid-state battery chemistries could increase lithium demand by up to 28%.11

      Why are we not talking about copper and nickel, and talking so much about lithium and conbalt?

      Is it just the relative novelty?

    2. Figure 1. Comparison of ore extraction in IEA NZE scenario and sensitivity of substantially improved recycling and potential ore grade decline

      This implies that total mining would go DOWN under a transition, possibly by half.

      The ore grade decline is less of an impact than I expected too.

    3. Ore extraction is largest for EVs, growing 55 times from 2021, compared to 13 and 9 times for solar PV and wind power, respectively

      The share of mining going to cars is not really something we discuss in digital technology discussions enough

    4. This means that the high demand for minerals through the energy transition is of a (temporary) stock building nature, while fossil-related extraction is continuous and dissipative. In the longer term, the decommissioning of end-of-life renewable generation provides opportunities for reuse or recycling. This can mitigate demand of primary produced minerals for new renewable installations

      We can use the byproducts of critical mineral mining. Not so much with fossil fuels

    1. For the following types of tasks, users did NOT appreciate being sent to a new browser tab or window:
      • multistep pages
      • quickly checking a new page rather than a focussed read
      • overloading the browser tab bar
  8. Oct 2023
    1. For starters, if you are seeking to use a green financial instrument to finance your data construction project anywhere in the world, and have European investors, then the Taxonomy Climate Delegated Act (TCDA) will apply. This requires the operator to implement 106 of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre (Energy Efficiency) best practices as well as undertake various other activities

      Oh, this is new to me - if you want the cheap money, yo need to meet the ECOCDC

    1. While it is capable of providing constant power, hydrogen fuel cells are also being considered for providing backup power to data centers. This is greatly appealing to data center operators as a more environment-friendly replacement for traditional diesel generators. This change would see the use of fast-start fuel cells, such as proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells which could take the place of diesel generators.

      Proton exchange membranes are presumably the newer types of fuel cells, that are more flexible and need less heat, but are more pricey

    2. The key benefit and primary motivation for installing hydrogen fuel cells within a data center is to reduce carbon emissions. As stated, some fuel cells, such as SOFCs, can use natural gas. While it is less damaging to the environment than diesel, it still results in significant carbon emissions.

      Is this some of the missing context for the CCS next to datacentre patents from M$?

      If you can capture the CO2, and use the waste heat to separate the CO2 from the absorbing material, then it might improve the economics of the SOFC fuel cells, AND deal with the CO2 emissions problem.

    3. SOFCs and PEM fuel cells differ from one another in their construction, materials, and operation. In a high-level view, the primary differences are the electrolyte materials (where the hydrogen and oxygen react) and operating temperatures. SOFCs operate at high temperatures, requiring longer start-up times and as a result, only being suitable for continuous power supply. PEMs, by contrast, operate at lower temperatures and are capable of fast-start or continuous operation, but are a more expensive option.

      Oh wow, so there are two kinds of fuel cells, and the expensive one is the fast ramp up one

    4. The majority of fuel cells currently in use in data centers are solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), providing constant power. SOFCs can generate power through the conversion of fuels such as natural gas and biogas, into hydrogen, which is then reacted in the fuel cell to generate power. While using natural gas still results in carbon emissions, SOFCs are able to generate power with higher efficiency than combustion engines. SOFCs can also be fuelled directly with hydrogen, although this is not the norm due to hydrogen’s cost and availability.

      Wow, greater efficiency than gas turbines / engines?

    1. decade ago, these plants provided “low carbon” electricity in comparison to the grid at the time, but now in many cases, emit more carbon than local grids. Countries that already have decarbonized grids, France, Sweden, and Scotland, for example, will not benefit from a continuous system that uses natural gas to begin with.

      What would the green premium be for bio methane in this scenario? As in Methane from bio genie sources. Supply issues aside, obvs.

    2. One suggestion is for greater integration of energy systems, which would see data centers located adjacent to energy industries or having data centers integrated with hydrogen-generating plants and fuel cells. This solution sidesteps planning problems by locating data centers alongside low-carbon energy industries. A major issue with this (aside from the available land) is blurring the lines between the data center operators, utility providers, and energy companies.

      This flips the assumptions of what a datacentre looks like, if the power density keeps increasing, instead of a DC with on-site power, you might have a power with on-site DC

    3. From a mechanical perspective, designing a hydrogen storage system is significantly more complex than a diesel storage system. Hydrogen has more storage options available however, it presents higher risks than diesel such as greater flammability and explosivity, higher pressures, potential for low temperature, or chemical storage methods which are all hazardous. This therefore requires the mechanical design for such a system to comply with rigorous safety standards.

      Ok, so h2 unsurprisingly is wast more explodey, and hard to store safely and cheaply

    1. And if you look at the total consumption of semiconductors by the Chinese manufacturing industry, then China imports more semiconductors than they import oil.

      China spends more importing semiconductors than on importing oil? really?

      This is from Peter Wennink, CEO of ASML

    1. Google has argued that switching search engines is just a click away and that people use Google because it's the superior search engine. Google also argued at trial that Microsoft's failures with Bing are "a direct result of Microsoft’s missteps in Internet search."

      This is interesting - I wonder how 3rd parties like Mozilla or Vivaldi testify?

      If they say it's hard, they contradict their own marketing, and risk their main source of revenue.

      If they say it's easy, they risk undermining all their own comms around the importance of choice, and the necessity of more diverse ecosystems.

    1. Provide a transitional implementation for network operators and protocols that do not yet support standards-based Layer 2-3

      This suggests to me that there is a lot of proprietary layer 2-3 in IOT. Is this the case?

    1. Despite the unknowns, the technology definitely piques the interest of owners and operators of data center facilities, with analyst firm Omdia noting that more than 80 percent of survey respondents will most likely deploy grid-interactive UPSs within the next five years. As usual for this industry, the technology will require more deployments and for it to mature before it becomes the standard way data centers and other mission-critical facilities will be built.

      I wonder how much extra flex and capacity this would represent?

    2. While exact numbers are not disclosed, such as battery capacity and how much Microsoft is willing to make available for grid interactivity, the company claims that, over the next couple of years, this move will remove about two million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise be generated from Ireland’s National Grid.

      This is about an eighth of Microsoft's reported emissions in 2022, I think

    1. Let’s just pause to emphasise this point: no amount of R&D, innovation or technology will allow us to remove CO2 from the atmosphere without spending at least 191 kWh per tonne of CO2.

      Even if we acheive perfect efficiency we tax the global economy 10% to remove annual emissions

    1. Table 5.10a. Solar REC prices during the period March 2020 – March  2021 (US$/MWh)

      This are nearly 100x the cost of Hydro RECs in come cases

    1. It should be noted that the third normative approach considers the global need for electricity asoutlined by the International Energy Agency (IEA) for different scenarios and develops an interim1.5DS within which ICT should not expand its current share of electricity. This electricity budgetuses the IEA trajectories for a 2°C scenario (2DS) and a below 2°C scenario (B2DS) to derive a 1.5°Ctrajectory for world electricity usage through doubling the difference between them and subtractingit from the 2DS as described in [IEA ETP]. This is an interim approach as IEA has not yet establisheda 1.5DS. The budget is then used to determine the amount of electricity that could be used by thesector if keeping its share at the current level. As the IEA is planning to include a specific 1.5DS, thetrajectories will be reviewed when the new IEA scenarios are published.

      This is the only mention of a "fair share" of global electricity use by the ICT sector

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. The VIC system created maintains a list of available URLs or DNS entries for the service requiring computation, each of which live in a different datacenter in a different part of the world. When the service receives a request, it routes that request to the datacenter that best matches the required criteria

      LOL it's DNS again!

    2. A TCP/IP based system was built to investigate the feasibility of a VIC as per Fig. 1. This considers routing Microsoft Azure workloads to datacenters around the world to best satisfy the required criteria. Three criteria were applied: (1) reduce load on a particular electricity grid at peak times, (2) follow green energy and low emissions energy around the world with computation, thus reducing curtailment of renewables and facilitating more renewable energy and (3) take advantage of variable electricity market prices.

      Three criteria reworded:

      (1) reduce peak load on the particular electricity grid (2) reduce fossil generation in the compute (3) reduce cost of electricity use for the compute

    3. Furthermore, many markets grant Capacity Payments to eligible generators and interconnectors for being available to follow dispatch instructions, irrespective of actual generation. VICs would also be eligible to receive such payments but they should be directly to the VICO rather than any users. This allows users to bid without the influence of capacity payments and rewards the datacenters providing the VIC.

      Under this scenario, a grid operator would pay a datacentre to be prepared to switch off local physical load.

      The load would still be served through, albeit on a different grid or grid region where you didn't have the same strains on the electricity network.

    1. Potential to combine with steam turbines to generate more power

      I assumed gas turbines use water to heat up steam to generate the power. This suggests this is not the case.

    2. gas engines & gas turbines

      engines and turbines are different things

    1. Teleoperators are the world’s second-largest consumer of batteries. Elisa is also offering its Distributed Energy Storage solution to teleoperators in other countries so that they can improve the reliability of their own mobile networks and do their part in accelerating the green transition by investing in a distributed battery reserve and utilising it to provide balancing services in their electricity markets.

      What is a teleoperator?

  9. Sep 2023
    1. Net Zero Sales covers scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions on an intensity, full equity-share basisacross the value chain and seeks to reduce these:a. By 5% by 2025b. By 15-20% by 2030c. To net-zero by 2050
    2. Net Zero Emissions Commitment covers scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions on an intensity, partialequity-share basis across the value chain and seeks to reduce these:a. By 15% by 2025b. By 28% by 2030c. By 55% by 2040d. To net-zero by 2050.
    3. Net Zero Production covers scope 3 emissions on an absolute, full equity-share basis inthe upstream sector, excluding 3rd party crude, and seeks to reduce these:a. By 10-15% by 2025 [20%]b. By 20-30% by 2030 [30-40%]c. To net-zero by 2050
    4. Net Zero Operations covers scope 1 and 2 emissions on an absolute, operated-asset basisacross the value chain and seeks to reduce these:a. By 20% by 2025b. By 50% by 2030c. To net-zero by 2050

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. “A reporting organization should not purchase renewable electricity and simply apply it to scope 3 emissions without involvement from its supplier or customer.” Renewable Electricity Procurement on Behalf of Others: A Corporate Reporting Guide (page 4), EPA, 2022.
    2. Microsoft’s 2021 Environmental Sustainability Report includes 11 of the 15 scope 3 categories (page 19), while Google reports business travel and employee commuting as one total and “other” scope 3 emissions in a second total (page 11). Apple(page 84) and Amazon (page 97) report lifecycle emissions from customer trips to physical stores under scope 3 which are not categories prescribed by the GHG
    3. Certigy, a European EAC registry, has enabled hourly certification across many EU countries

      This is a tool offered by Unicorn.com specifically for energy reporting

    4. Apple, which has a relatively long history of reporting its scope 3 emissions, states in its 2022 Environmental Progress Report that it is actively evolving its scope 3 accounting methodology. “In fiscal year 2017, we started calculating scope 3 emissions not listed above. In fiscal year 2021, these include electricity transmission and distribution losses [...] and life cycle emissions associated with renewable energy. We have not accounted for emissions resulting from employees working from home [...] we are still evolving our methodology.“ Environmental Progress Report (page 84), Apple, 2022
    5. This also explains why, even though Norway’s grid-levelemissions factor is 10 kg CO2/MWh17 (98% carbon-free), the residual
    6. emissions factor is 402 kg CO 2/MWh (7.4% renewable), reflectingthat most EACs produced within the Norwegian grid are claimedand retired outside of the country.
    7. Data demonstrate that many companies do indeed pursue thispractice. For example, Norway was responsible for 43% of allguarantees of origin (GOs) exports in Europe in 2022, many ofwhich were purchased by companies whose operations have noconnection to the Norwegian grid on which these EACs wereproduced.
    1. Wind and solar are, of course, intermittent, but battery costs too are plummeting, to the extent that they often underbid so-called peaking plants burning natural gas

      Where would I look to find public evidence of this?

    1. This article in effect requires local authorities to only use data centres that a fully compliant with the requirements of the specified directives.

      Minimum, mandatory standards for public procurement.

    2. Article 33 Delegated Acts 3. The Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 34 to supplement this Directive by establishing, after having consulted the relevant stakeholders, a common Union scheme for rating the sustainability of data centres located in its territory. The Commission shall adopt the first such delegated act by 31 December 2023. The common Union scheme shall establish the definition of data centre sustainability indicators and shall set out the key performance indicators and the methodology to measure them.

      There's a policy deadline to work - end of this year, so it's likelt there'll be a push to try to weaken it even more.

    3. 5. By 15 May 2025, the Commission shall assess the available data on the energy efficiency of data centres submitted to it pursuant to paragraphs 1 and 3 and shall submit a report to the European Parliament and to the Council, accompanied, where appropriate, by legislative proposals containing further measures to improve energy efficiency, including establishing minimum performance standards and an assessment on the feasibility of transition towards a net-zero emission data centres sector, in close consultation with the relevant stakeholders
    4. . The Commission shall establish a European database on data centres that includes information communicated by the obligated data centres in accordance with paragraph 1. The European database shall be publicly available on an aggregated level.

      It will be law to collect this data now, so we know orgs will have to have it in structured form.

      If it's gonna be in the public domain anyway, there's a good argument for paving a path to make it easy to look transparent, by making it easy to disclose this info in a well presented way human readable way

    5. We think that the threshold for reporting being 500kw is too low, as it will not pick up aggregated edge sites (organisations that have multiple facilties that individually are below the threshold but aggregated would be considerably higher), Mobile Phone basestation sites and Points of Presence (PoPs)

      So ths lobbying will have now effectively hidden 4G/5G infra, as well as a lot of edge

    6. This links back to the lower limit for reporting of 500kw, clearly the EC see no reason to collect data from 'distributed compute' such as individual server rooms (at this time)
    7. This is very interesting, we've seen some national government initatives in various countries relating to the collection of data centre energy data, in the UK we have the Climate Change Agreement for Data Centres which started in 2014 and according to the latest figures (4th Period) indicated that total UK energy use of the period for commercial data centres (colocation sites) was 12TWh. Back to the EED and the very interesting thing is the mention of 'interventions' will this mean the imposition of fines for poor energy performance?
    8. This introduces the requirement for a data centre register and the rating of data centres for sustainabilty, this could become an utter bag of worms, as sustainability is closely linked to the amount of renewable energy systems on an individual country grid, the 'grid mix' and could favour those countries and data centres that are directly linked to low carbon energy sources (Norway, Sweden, Finland (Hydro), France (Nuclear), Spain (Solar/Wind) & Denmark (Wind).

      This also means that though that countries ought to be less keen on selling their EACs though

    1. It’s pretty simple: don’t let carbon removal excuse ongoing or worsening emissions. That means no deal with fossil fuel majors. And if you really must sell carbon credits, here’s my idea: they can only apply to the earliest emissions first. Once we’ve dealt with the ~2,500 ish human-added CO2 gigatonnes in the atmosphere, THEN you can apply credits to new emissions. We go from oldest to newest, not from newest to oldest.

      What about the compounding of warning for these tonnes?

  10. Aug 2023
    1. This approach results in our Scope 2 market-based emissions being greater than zero, per the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Scope 2 Guidance, despite us achieving our 100% renewable energy match globally.

      I think is the first time Google has mentioned this in texr that's the same szie as their regular copy.

    2. Electricity purchased from renewable sources (%) is calculated on a calendar-year basis, dividing the volume of renewable electricity (in megawatt-hours) procured for our global operations (i.e., renewable energy procured through our PPA contracts, on-site renewable energy generation, and renewable energy in the electric grids where our facilities are located) by the total volume of electricity consumed by our global operations. This metric includes all renewable energy purchased, regardless of the market in which the renewable energy was consumed

      I read this to mean that they purchase energy for the same calendar year - so usage in 2022 ought to have corresponding environmental attribute certificates for 2022 as well.

      It may be the case that the date of retiring is 2023, because I know that some clodu providers purchase certificates, then sell ones they don't need on the market if they were able to adjust their energy usage to no longer need the same number of cerrtificates.

  11. letsencrypt.org letsencrypt.org
    1. Will Let’s Encrypt issue Organization Validation (OV) or Extended Validation (EV) certificates? We have no plans to issue OV or EV certificates.

      This here is the gap

    1. If the signature over the nonce is valid, and the challenges check out, then the agent identified by the public key is authorized to do certificate management for example.com. We call the key pair the agent used an “authorized key pair” for example.com.

      OK, that's how signing the nonce with the private key helps.. Lets Encrypt already has access to the public key, and so once if has the nonce signed with the private key, it has a way to check the it that the server has both parts of the key pair without needing to see the private key

    1. WeencourageSouthPoletoembraceadifferentapproach,suchasthe“dollarfortonne”methoddescribedbyVCMI,wherebyacompanypricesitsinternalunabatedemissions,andspendstheleviedfundsonmitigationprojects(suchasthroughthepurchaseofcarboncredits).

      Who, or what is VCMI?

    1. Thismightnotbeadeterminingfactor,butitisoneofthefactorstoincludeaspartoftheadditionalitydetermination.Plantswithlowloadfactors(i.e.utilisationrate)shouldbeexcludedfromeligibility.

      Many of China's coal fired ppower plants are running at less than half capacity, now

    1. Reverse proxy implementation in nginx includes in-band (or passive) server health checks. If the response from a particular server fails with an error, nginx will mark this server as failed, and will try to avoid selecting this server for subsequent inbound requests for a while.

      Handy!

    1. Without having to take any risk themselves, they collect increasing profits that are indirectly paid for almost entirely by the European taxpayer. At the current interest rates, this costs the European treasuries 135 billion annually. Dutch banks receive about 11 billion of that sum, of which only 8 billion – 5.8 per cent of total payments – is being borne by Dutch taxpayers. The rest is being paid for by the taxpayers of other European countries, because the interest payments of all central banks within the Eurosystem are mutually settled via a fixed capital key.

      What is a fixed capital key?

    1. WattCarbon decarbonization projects are measured using official government grid data1, site level metered energy data, and open source avoided energy use methodologies2, which provides the highest degree of transparency and integrity for every project on our marketplace.

      This appears to use the open source OpenEEmeter, to figure out a baseline that any interventions would be measured against. This is written in python, so the code can be examined, but it's not obviosu to me how well this would work outside of California

    1. Players confront challenges mirroring those in the real world: they extinguish forest fires, obstruct illegal logging, replant native trees and clean up rivers.

      And destroy mining equipment in the video - amazed an ad agency would let that through

    1. It proved to be so effective that criminalisation spread across Latin America and is now deployed globally as part of a playbook of tactics to divide communities, and detract attention away from legitimate debate and protests about environmental and climate harms.

      Uh, yes, it seems.

    2. Experts say that what happened here helped to establish criminalisation as a go-to tool for polluting industries and governments seeking to discredit and silence activists. Guatemala was a textbook example of a draconian crackdown, becoming a laboratory of sorts, with arbitrary charges used against countless community leaders opposing environmentally destructive projects.

      So this essentially created a playbook for extractive industries to use the law to stifle resistance from local communities?

    1. As plaintiffs’ counsel Nate Bellinger, senior staff attorney at Our Children’s Trust, stated in his closing: “It’s worth remembering other times in our nation’s history when the political process didn’t work to protect people’s basic human rights. Segregation, women’s rights, equal and adequate public schooling, marriage—time and time again, the political will of powerful majorities was struck down by courts, based on the compelling evidence before them, courageously correcting the injustices thrust on the people. Today, the injustice squarely before this Court is the proven harms of these young people wrought by climate change caused by a fossil fuel-based energy system imposed and perpetuated through the law.”

      YES BRUV

    2. But as climate policy analyst Peter Erickson explained during his expert testimony on the plaintiffs’ side, Montana’s total annual CO2 emissions – 166 million tons (based on 2019 data) – are on par with annual emissions of entire countries like the Netherlands and Pakistan. “To call [Montana’s] emissions miniscule is then to call the emissions of over 100 countries of the world miniscule,” Erickson said. “Montana’s emissions matter”, he emphasized.

      Wow, the same as a country with hundreds of millions of people? That seems high

    1. You may have heard of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. It means having at least three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site.

      TIL

    1. The value of provenance information  Adding provenance information to media to combat misinformation is not a new idea, and early research seems to show that it could be promising: one project from a master’s student at the University of Oxford, for example, found evidence that users were less susceptible to misinformation when they had access to provenance information about content.

      How computationally expensive is this to tag content in this way?

    1. They also worked their media mogul pals, like Mike Bloomberg, who added their names to the "Friends of Mike" list that Bloomberg reporters were required to consult before writing negative coverage

      Wow, there’s a friends of Mike?

    1. Full text seach is a way to avoid these two issues. With SQLite, you enable full text search by creating what is called a "virtual table" using one of the FTS engines included with SQLite: FTS4 or FTS5. FTS5 support is the most recent and has more advanced searching features, including ranking and highlighting of results and is what is described here.

      This is the advantage of using FTS5 - it'you get the ranking and highlighting that you might otherwise assocaite with Postgres or other bigger databases that have search capabilities

    1. Let’s dissect this piece of Mojo code. First, you'll notice that we have new variable declarations let and var which may look odd at first glance since this is not familiar Python syntax. Mojo offers optional (except in some cases, more on that later) variable declarations to declare variables as immutable with let (i.e. cannot be modified after creation) or mutable with var (i.e. can be modified).

      this is the opposite of javascript. why not make use 'const'?

    1. P-States

      What is a P-State?

    2. In this example we have run sysbench --cpu-max-prime=25000 --threads=1 --time=10 --test=cpu --events=0 --rate=0 and put a CPU % limiting on the process and increased that in 10% increments. The blue curve has been done with the schedutil CPU frequency govenor which dynamically scales the CPU frequency. And the red curve has been done with the performance scaling govenor which scales the CPU frequency to a maximum as soon as even a minimum amount of load happens on a core.

      In addition to all the stuff above, there are also governors, who decide how a CPU's frequency is scaled in the face of new load being introduced.

    3. Suprisingly we see that on an unloaded system the energy actually increases! The assumption made here is that the cost per instruction goes down. This is an effect that can also be seen in SPECPower benchmarks where the sweet-spot for a system is typically somewhere around the higher third quarter of the peak performance.

      This is weird - basically the energy per instruction is lower under load, because systems are more efficient when they are at around 3/4 peak performance, a bit like a car engine can be more efficient at a specific RPM compared to others

    1. The legislative proposal risks rendering obsolete such ambitious and holistic industry-led initiatives that provide a tool for more informed consumer decisions, encourage improvements by manufacturers and demonstrate European leadership on sustainability questions. The Regulation should instead enable such schemes (which go beyond environmental claims, and consider aspects like durability, recyclability, etc.) to continue being used.

      OK, so this paper is essentially arguing "please use our industry approved way to rate kit, and do not regulate us"

    1. These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It's called the "shitty technology adoption curve":

      "Work your way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else." Yeesh

    1. Funneled into the colocation space, this rising demand has almost completely saturated Tier I data center markets like Ashburn, Dallas, and Silicon Valley. As a result, hyperscale workloads are driving growth in Tier II and Tier III markets, occupying existing capacity and spurring new developments.

      I hadn't realised this was such a trend - I was aware the older centralised approaches might not work as well as they used to, but it hadn't occured to me that the hyperscalers were behind the push in the other areas too

    1. New technologies can change who holds power and threaten how things work. Decisions about technology become wrapped up in fights to preserve or change political culture. When thinking about technological changes, we can’t just approach it as a project of modernisation – we need to have a view on the culture we want to create.

      What a quote

    1. As it stands, Intel will walk away with the lion's share of the funding for its Magdeburg megafab, where it plans to produce angstrom-class parts beginning in 2027. After months of negotiations over rising operating and materials costs associated with building in the region – the facility is now expected to cost €30 billion to complete – the x86 titan received commitments from German officials in June for €10 billion in support.

      10bn is about the same as the 9 euro ticket would have cost for all of 2023

    1. Storage –Increasing solar penetration causes the number of high-load hours (within 5% of peak) to decline from seven hours in the Base scenario to just two hours in the Accelerated scenario.

      More solar on roofs means the number of high loads hours is 3 times smaller

  12. Jul 2023
    1. Decarbonize Alibaba (Scopes 1 and 2): By 2030, we will achieve carbon neutrality in our own operations.Green the value chain (Scope 3): By 2030, we will collaborate with our upstream and downstream value chain partners to cut emission intensity by 50% from the base year of 2020. Alibaba Cloud will achieve Scope 3 carbon neutrality during the same period.Enable a low-carbon circular digital ecosystem (Scope 3+): Beyond our own operations and direct value chains, we pledge to leverage our digital platforms to encourage even broader participation by stakeholders that can be reached by our efforts. By 2035, we will facilitate 1.5 gigatons of GHG emission reduction over 15 years across Alibaba's digital ecosystem.

      These are the three high level commitments.

      Carbon neutrality, which is as close to Net Zero as I can find, but they include "Scope 3+".

      This isn't a term in the GHG Protocol lexicon that I know of.

    1. In 2021, Alibaba set ambitious targets of achieving carbon neutrality in our own operations and halving the energy intensity across our value chain by 2030 and driving emission reduction of 1.5 gigatons over 15 years in our platform ecosystem

      There's a 2030 end goal target

    1. Not that an E2E rule precludes algorithmic feeds: remember, E2E is the idea that you see what you ask to see. If a user opts into a feed that promotes content that they haven't subscribed to at the expense of the things they explicitly asked to see, that's their choice. But it's not a choice that social media services reliably offer, which is how they are able to extract ransom payments from publishers.

      I don't understand how you could audit this, unless you had to force a default of chronological presentation of posts etc.

    2. This is nonsense: when users are given the choice to block surveillance, they overwhelmingly do. Apple's iOS devices offer users a one-click opt-out from app-based surveillance. Ninety-six percent of iOS users have opted out (presumably the other four percent were confused — or on Meta's payroll).

      Note: find this link

    1. First and foremost, where will a largely desert country source the water for electrolysis? Secondly, will Namibia export only hydrogen, ammonia, or some of the industrial products made with the green inputs? It would be advantageous for Namibia to develop a heavy-chemicals and iron-smelting industry. But from Germany’s point of view, that might well defeat the object, which is precisely to provide affordable green energy with which to keep industrial jobs in Europe.

      This is an interesting point - shipping the gas vs shipping the higher value products enabled by the gas

    1. The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy – the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime – from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind. For that to work, though, they’ll need investment, access to raw materials and the equipment to process them.

      How high?

    2. They’ve come a long way since then, with Catcher and related projects receiving nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

      Waaaaaaaaat

    1. The arrangement will see Contact provide Microsoft with all the renewable energy attributes generated by Contact’s new 51.4MW Te Huka Unit 3 geothermal power station.

      But not all the power?

    1. Tonne-for-tonne offsetting has historically relied upon the cheapest possible carbon credits that do little to benefit the climate and represent no real pollution cost for companies. Polluters should move to money-for-tonne contributions instead, based on an internal carbon price (WWF recommends $50-250), which would encourage the purchase of higher quality carbon credits with co-benefits. The internal carbon price in turn could be proportional to companies’ revenues or profits. 

      Buying carbon credits with co-benefits, not offsets

    1. Finally, the Act still requires facilities to use 50 percent renewable energy by 2024, and 100 percent by 2027. An amendment is expected to clarify that this demand can be met by using certificates brought from Nordic suppliers; instead of relying on German green power.

      From Nordic greenpower? Thats BS

    1. In Neubauer, for example, legal advocate Roda Verheyen has been part of other strategic climate cases, such as the high-profile case of a Peruvian homeowner, Lluiya, suing RWE for compensation for climate harms

      Cripes. Were they successful?

  13. Jun 2023
    1. This a summary of the conference, and the key takeaways for me are:

      • lack of local adoption: **climate alerts and news in general is often in English, and indexes assume a European norm, so for a hotter place it's hard to tell when things are much worse than normal. A as result they're not used so much,
      • climate killing the least vulnerable water bornes diseases are increased by flooding, and the leading cause of child deaths ends up being amplified
      • downscaled climate models are helpful not not widely available there is a lack of infra to use them
    2. Dr Lisa van Aardenne, the chief scientist of the University of Cape Town’s climate system analysis group, discussed the use and utility of thermal stress indices. She pointed out that, by the definitions of the universal thermal climate index, much of Africa is under heat stress most days of the year.  Van Aardenne noted that these indices have been developed from a European perspective and do not align with the reality on the ground in Africa. She added: “I’m very concerned that these indices are not fit for purpose here.”

      So for Africa, the figures are so bad that they always look like they're in an emergency? I'm guessing the impact would be that people are more likely to ignore them

    3. Prof Kris Ebi from the University of Washington started off the third day of the conference with a presentation on heatwaves and early action plans. She pointed to the 2021 Pacific north-west “heat dome” event, which resulted in around 800 excess deaths and was later found to be a 1-in-10,000 year event. The rarity of that event means, in effect, “these people died because of climate change,” Ebi said. She added: “Every heat-related death is preventable.”

      I hadn't realised the attribution was so clear like this. Wow.

    4. Dr Sokhna Thiam, from the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya, added that water-borne enteric diseases are among the “primary expected health impacts” of climate change.

      Basically climate changes makes the leading cause of child deaths much worse

    1. Together, the plants will enable more than 120 gigawatt-hours of U.S. battery production annually and displace more than 455 million gallons of gasoline per year, LPO reported.

      The target according to Jigar Shah is 800 GWh each year, so this is about 15% of that target all by itself

    1. Calhoon of ClimateWells acknowledges the worry that oil operators will simply drill new wells in other places, canceling out any emissions reduction benefit from plugging older ones. In the carbon credit market, this notion is called “leakage,” meaning that the emissions are not prevented but essentially moved.

      Given that you need to drill new wells for some shale in the US every couple of years or so, this is a fair statement.

    1. We don’t provide banking services to or invest in organisations that use excessive power to systemically promote public behaviour that is harmful to individuals, groups or to the whole of society in order to maximise their own profits. This may include, for example, arms manufacturers and tobacco companies.

      Does this include fossil fuels?

    1. For now, we haven’t included emissions relating to loans and investments in our Scope 3 carbon footprint breakdown as these are worked out separately with the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). We were the first UK digital bank to join PCAF, which asks members to calculate emissions from loans and investments by following industry best practice

      so this something like induced carbon emissions from the activity enabled by the investment?

    1. As a policy, end-to-end has a lot going for it. First, it is easy to administer. If you want to find out if a company is reliably delivering posts from willing senders to willing receivers, you can easily verify it by creating accounts and performing experiments. Compare this to more complicated policies, like "platforms must not permit harassment on their services." To administer that policy, you need to agree on a definition of harassment, agree on whether a specific user's conduct rises to the level of harassment, then investigate whether the platform took reasonable steps to prevent it.

      I wonde how this works in a world of climate misinformation and disinformation

    1. It adds that there is “no shortage of physical capacity”, with Chinese coal plants running an average of 52% of hours in the year (4,600 out of 8,760 hours). CREA continues: “Thus, simply adding more coal capacity across the whole of China may not fundamentally address the power shortages in China.”

      OK, the CREA report is the one to refer to when talking about such low capacity factors. For context 52% is comparable to some offshore wind generation.

      https://www.equinor.com/news/archive/20210323-hywind-scotland-uk-best-performing-offshore-wind-farm

    2. The country is also slowly shifting from an “equal share” dispatch system to an “economic dispatch”, which is more responsive to consumer demand. (CREA notes that the “equal share” system is another barrier to greater flexibility.)

      Is there really no merit curve based dispatch order in China? Mind blown.

    3. “Given the rapid growth of clean energy and expected slower electricity demand growth, the massive additions of coal-fired capacity don’t necessarily mean that China’s coal use or CO2 emissions from the power sector will increase.” 

      So basically, generation is not the same as capacity. As an example, China might have cross the 50% mark for capacity in terms of renwables, but the actual generation is much lower, as renwables have lower capacity factors. Coal in china is a similarly low capacity factor so even if it's built, that's not the same as it being used

    4. China’s power market remains primarily coal-fueled. Coal made up 61% of electricity generation in 2022, while wind and solar power – despite making up a growing proportion of power capacity – accounted for only 14% of generation.

      Even with all the massive growth in solar, renewables make up only about a 6th of the grid generation

    1. The average price for a solar panel delivered in the United States was 38 cents per watt as of June 7, which is double the global average, according to BloombergNEF and PV InfoLink. The U.S. price has been about the same, going up or down just a penny or two, since last fall.

      Wow, so much more?!

    1. This move was heavily pushed for by the three-party coalition’s smallest member, the Free Democrats who are in charge of the transport ministry. This means if a target in one sector such as industry, transport, or buildings is missed, another sector can compensate for it.

      Everything I read about the FDP basically seems like they're absolute wreckers when it comes to climate Actiom, just so rich people can keep driving their petrol powered porches.

  14. May 2023
    1. To that end, we’re excited to announce the launch of the VMware Zero Carbon Committed cloud partner initiative. We envision catalyzing and accelerating the transition to zero carbon clouds through VMware Cloud Partner data centers powered by renewable energy sources by 2030. This initiative is a collaboration with our VMware Cloud Verified providers that operate infrastructure-, energy- and carbon-efficient data centers based on VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies and have commitments to using renewable energy power. Exemplifying VMware’s ongoing commitment to product sustainability innovation, this initiative aims to: Catalyze the transition to a zero carbon internet through our partnerships with public cloud providers. Help customers reach their sustainability and decarbonization goals by connecting them with cloud providers that have aligned goals. Accelerate sustainable computing with VMware’s SDDC technology.

      What does the partnering process look like?

    1. Without public access to the emissions data SBTi sees, its climate targets are “effectively inscrutable,” she and other scientists told the organization in October

      Fair!

    2. Under SBTi’s net-zero plans, companies can counterbalance up to 10% their emissions with “permanent removal” of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These efforts, it expects, will have negated 20 to 40 billion tons of emissions by 2050.

      Parmanent removal would imply not tree planting or mangroves, and generally very few nature based solutions

    3. SBTi has recently stopped approving plans for this looser target

      Well, this is at least science based, amirite?

    1. We can solve this problem by defining separate types for different kinds of IDs with a “NewType”:

      This is really neat. I didn't know you could add a type to something like an int, that followed it around so you could see when the 'wrong' kind of int was used

    1. The first successful trust was Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which amassed a 90% share of all US oil. Other "capitalists" got in on the game, forming the Cotton Seed Oil Trust (75% market share), the Sugar Trust (85%). Then came the Whiskey Trust and the Beef Trust. America was becoming a planned economy, run by a handful of unelected "industrialists" with lifetime appointments and the power to choose their successors.

      Mind blown. I had no idea there were so many trusts setup in the states like this

    1. The authors then divided that figure by three, proposing that the total costs should be shared equally by the governments that allowed companies to pollute, the consumers who bought fossil fuels and the corporations that produced them.

      This at least seems somewhat fair, and doesn't lay all responsibility at the feet of the producing companies.

    1. The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

      I'm guessing this might addresses some of the enforcement and incentive problem.

    1. There are snakes, and the turnover is horrible. People are like, ​‘The heck with this. I’ll go work at an Amazon distribution center.’

      Wow, what a quote

    1. OpenCost and Kubecost are helpful for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing Kubernetes costs granularly. Both monitor Kubernetes costs in K8s environments, but neither goes beyond that. For costs outside of Kubernetes, or to consolidate costs of containerized and non-containerized resources in one place, you’ll likely need another service, adding complexity and expense. Alternatively, you can use a Kubernetes cost optimization platform that does both. CloudZero provides granular Kubernetes cost analysis across major cloud providers, including single-cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid clouds — down to individual customers (unit economics).

      Ok, this is the pitch for cloud zero and why they wrote this piece in the first place.

    2. With Kubecost, you can estimate costs using a model calculation or connect your hypervisor to get exact figures.

      So presumably, Kubecost provides more precise measurements compared to opencost

    1. The Guardian recently revealed that Turkmenistan was the worst in the world for methane “super emitting” leaks. Separate research suggests a switch from the flaring of methane to venting may be behind some of these vast outpourings.Flaring is used to burn unwanted gas, putting CO2 into the atmosphere, but is easy to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon in recent years. Venting simply releases the invisible methane into the air unburned, which, until recent developments in satellite technology, had been hard to detect. Methane traps 80 times more heat than CO2 over 20 years, making venting far worse for the climate.

      This sort of implies that if you ban flaring, then unscrupulous companies will just vent it instead, causing much worse emissions, because detecting venting has been hard before, and enforcing a bans against rich and power entitites is will not be easy

    1. With CPU TDPs skyrocketing, these typical datacenter racks are now more power-constrained than space constrained. Stacking a rack full of high-density blade servers with high-power Xeons would blow out this power budget many times over, requiring specialized datacenter infrastructure with higher cooling capabilities. We also see this with Nvidia’s AI servers. Their DGX SuperPOD design is not able to fully populate each server rack due to the huge power consumption. Nvidia AI servers are often as much as 5U to 6U, with the A100 DGX servers being ~6.5 kW and the H100 10.2kW.

      Wow, this would imply that a rack full of A100s would be between 40 to 50kw, and 75kw to 85kw for the H100s

    2. Ampere also places a large emphasis on clock speed consistency. Intel and AMD CPUs vary their core clock speed significantly based on how many cores or threads are in use and what type of code is being executed. This helps their CPUs maximize performance within a given power and thermal budget, which is a huge advantage in many workloads.

      So you can think sort of think of the clock speed like the throttle in a car, or perhaps engine speed like RPM.

    3. They believe the future of computing will rely heavily on microservices, containerization, and serverless execution models. These concepts are generally about scaling performance out via a large amount small jobs and processes and not overly focusing on single-threaded CPU performance. Both AMD and Intel are releasing CPUs with similar strategies over the next year

      The trade off is pretty explicit here

    1. The continued funding of fossil fuel projects remains a grey area

      Oh.

    2. Simultaneously, another evolution is also taking place at the World Bank. From July, all projects that go to the board for funding will have to demonstrate that they are in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

      This would imply no more fossil fuels, as the science spells this out now, surely?

    1. One example algorithm aims at switching on/off Pico-BSs in a heterogeneous network (see Fig. 1) [5]. There is one Macro-BSs that is always active and provides coverage in the area, while several Pico-BSs can be intelligently activated/deactivated depending on the current traffic volume. E.g., one could imagine that Pico-BSs are needed during the daytime in the city center where a lot of people work, but during the nighttime, some of them can be put into sleep mode as most people came back to their homes in the suburbs. The process is driven by the so-called Reinforcement Learning (RL), i.e., learning through interaction. The aim of the agent is to learn which set of active Pico-BSs would provide the best EE under a given spatial distribution of users.

      Decomposing network into macro (for coverage) and pico (for scaleable thorughput) nodes

  15. Apr 2023
    1. Another key argument for community energy is that involving ordinary people in energy generation and distribution boosts local acceptance for renewables. Not-in-my-backyard protesters have slowed the expansion of new wind farms across Europe in recent years. But where the wind farms are "owned by local community stakeholders, such as farmers, landowners, individuals, [and] municipalities," they "often enjoy higher levels of trust than commercial developers, which are usually not embedded locally," concludes a 2020 study by the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Norway.

      in addition to the profits, this maes them more likely to be accepted. Having REs put up is still a burden for communities, and this is key for acceptance if you want to maintain the speed of deployment that is needed

    2. Nevertheless, proponents of community renewables argue that they are integral to the goal of achieving carbon neutrality and should continue to receive state support. They point out that community renewables boost local economic activity through investment, jobs and tax revenue. One German study showed that a seven-turbine community wind park of 21 megawatts generated $71 million in regional income over a 20-year operating period, while the same-sized park in the hands of commercial developers produced only $8.6 million for the local economy. The difference lay in the profit, tax revenue and job creation that stayed in local hands.

      Circulating the money led to much more economic activity being captured, compared to seeing the profits leave the region

    3. In Denmark, Europe’s other community energy powerhouse, community initiatives took off in the early 1980s. Danish communities invested in onshore wind turbines and district heating systems. By 2016, 67 percent of onshore wind energy in Denmark was generated by citizen-owned parks. This production, together with bioenergy and offshore wind generation, grew the country’s share of clean electricity to more than 50 percent of consumption by 2019.

      You can argue that community energy moved faster than industry, because communities were more prepared to put sharedholder returns aside in favour of community / environmental goals. Whether that can hold now is a different matter.

    4. In Germany, citizen energy stretches back to the 1980s and '90s when environmentally minded groups began striking out into renewable energy. Communal energy projects in Germany took off dramatically when the EU broke up the private-sector energy system monopoly in 1998, and the German government set up a price-support scheme that favored renewables in 2000. In the first decades of Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition, grassroots energy projects and private individuals produced the bulk of clean energy, while the utilities held out, believing conventional energy would prevail, as it always had.

      Reading between the lines, this implies that citizen enegy has been very reliant on generous feed in tariffs.

      Only at significant sizes does the cost per megawatt come down to something that might replace utility fossil fuels, presumably.

    1. Nvidia is the largest customer of CoWoS for their A100 and H100 class datacenter AI GPUs. Google, through Broadcom, is the 2nd largest customer for TPUv4 and TPUv5. AMD also utilizes CoWoS in some capacity, but their volume in 2023 is relatively small. Lastly, Amazon’s Trainium through AlChip, as well as Microsoft’s new AI chips, also use CoWoS.The demands of AI training on memory performance are pushing designs to use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which has to be connected using advanced packaging technologies such as CoWoS. Any one of these companies and, more likely all of them are increasing spending heavily and require more CoWoS capacity. To be clear, Amazon’s Tranium, despite big orders through Alchip, isn’t that great, and Microsoft’s 1st gen AI chip won’t be able to replace Nvidia either.

      What is CoWoS?

    2. TSMC also talked about a fab cancellation and how an expansion is now no longer financially feasible. We will be sharing some of our data about TSMC’s utilization rates and how TSMC’s pricing is coming down. We dive deep into TSMC’s 3nm and 5nm ramps as there are some quite heroic assumptions that TSMC is making regarding those in the back half of the year.

      Wow, even TSMC is cancelling Fabs?

    1. Qualifying EVs also can’t contain inputs from ​“foreign entities of concern,” a concept that the Treasury Department has yet to explicitly define, but which is expected to include many Chinese firms. (If you haven’t heard, China dominates the EV supply chain.)

      So basically, no cheap small Chinese card would get access to subsidies, meaning they'd need to be even cheaper, to make headway

    1. This is a very weird imaginative failure. America operated public banks. It had broken up too big to fail banks. These weren't the deeds of a fallen civilization whose techniques were lost to the mists of time. There are literally people alive today who were around when America operated nationwide public banks – a practice that only ended in 1966!

      I had no idea the US had an nationwide public bank so recently 🤯

    1. Wooden towers are promising when it comes to material costs and availability; the company uses Scandinavian spruce from sustainably managed forests, for which regrowth exceeds logging. According to its calculations, a typical turbine tower requires between 300 and 1,200 cubic meters of wood, equivalent to 1.5 to 5 minutes of growth in Swedish forests.

      I've never seen growth framed in terms like that, and it's really confusing!

    1. Alphabet Inc. calculates the total electricity procured from renewable sources by totaling the amount ofrenewable electricity generation from the grids Alphabet Inc. uses, the amount of on-site renewableenergy generation and the amount sourced through contractual instruments (PPAs) globally

      Less than a quarter of Google's renewable purchasing is on the same grid that it's own datacentre usage takes place?

    1. Unlike the Nazis, whose plan involved liquefying coal, the current German government is promoting a cleaner technique that entails extracting hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon dioxide to create fuel. At the heart of both methods is what’s known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a process developed in the 1920s by two German chemists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch.

      Bloody hell - this isn't that far off from saying "you know who else liked e-fuels? The Nazis."

  16. Mar 2023
    1. At 0.5gCO2e per person per day, the absolute reduction potentialis negligible and highlights the need for more research to support thedecarbonisation of digital media. While video streaming constitutesthe majority of data traffic in the Internet, and the energy consump-tion of user devices is substantial (in particular TVs), an attributionalapproach overestimates the potential reductions of interventions

      This is comparable to a the carbon footprint of having a single coffee

    1. This is why I believe it’s much more useful, and less confusing, to just talk about Layer 1 government-issued money and Layer 2 bank-issued chips.

      Layer 1 and Layer 2, like caching layers?

    1. A country’s residual mix represents the shares of electricity generation attributes available for disclosure, after the use of explicit tracking systems, such as GO, havebeen accounted for.Without a residual mix, renewable electricity sold with GOs would be double counted because the same electricity would be disclosed to consumers buying “regular” electricity

      This is how green the power is, once the certificates that can be transferred have been transferred. So, when a country has lots of green energy but sells off it's "greenness", this is what the actual carbon intensity should be. Norway is the perennial example.

    1. Reporting via the CSRD will incorporate the increasing demand for digitization. Companies will be required to prepare their reporting in XHTML format in accordance with the European Single Electronic Format Regulation. They are also required to tag sustainability information within the report according to a digital categorization system, which should be developed with the ESRS.

      So, it'll be scrapable, and presumably online