Description

Bill St. Arnaud:

"A zero carbon computing infrastructure could be made up of two components – large scale infrastructure powered solely by renewable energy such as GreenQCloud and highly distributed computing and memory at the edge as described in the previous section.

Considerable research has already gone into these highly distributed computing architectures that need not be replicated here. The only significant difference is that in this situation is that storage, memory and computing is not persistent. For example see Green Hadoop

5.0 Consumer Devices Most consumer ICT devices, except perhaps for TVs and printers have internal battery storage. These devices could easily be charged with special charging systems that only renewable energy from rooftop solar panels such as Power over Ethernet (PoE) or multiplex power systems. TVs and printers would require some external storage device. Multiplex power systems provide both 400 HZ and 60 (or 50 Hz) power over the same copper wiring. They are currently used in aircraft and military systems. The 400 Hz power is only visible to special plug in adaptors and is for the most part invisible to regular AC devices because of reactive filtering from transformers and motors.

For consumer devices the biggest challenge is not technology, but getting standards bodies to agree that all consumer devices should use charging adaptors that work only with PoE or Multiplex AC. Universities and other public institutions could set up charging stations with multiple outlets that are powered solely by roof top solar panels and supplemented by autonomous eVehicle mobile storage, with powered delivered from garage or parking lot over AC multiplex systems or PoE.

Surplus grid power from renewable sources, made available because of mandatory requirements to carry renewable power could also be used. However, complex signaling and contract negotiation between grid operator, utility and customer to make this happen." (http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2013/02/high-level-architecture-for-building.html)