I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
3 conversations came together for me last week.
Firstly at an excellent MED sponsored capital markets conference on Tuesday we heard that Asia, Australia and many other countries are having huge water issues. Places that have abundant water and can grow crops that use water (like trees) will have an increasingly valuable natural resource.
Next I heard that Google are investing in green energy.
Lastly Andy’s speech at the Digital Summit on Wednesday: Green digital generation the future, Lark tells Summit. A key point was an increasing projection of the amount of power required to run these big data centers. Andy said something like that for data center operators the cost of power will be much more than the cost of the hardware and other components.
So the reason Google in investing in green energy is that they have worked out that they need it. And will need it badly soon. It’s standard vertical integration.
So you look at what we have in New Zealand. Abundant water and the ability to make energy with it.
Maybe it really is time to think big again and design big hydro schemes that can catch and manage water for primary production and produce energy.
That and big glass pipes connecting us to the world and New Zealand just might be a compelling place - even for people like Google.
Also I would imagine that one of the issues with having your 767 flying bedroom is finding a handy location 12 hours from Moffat field so you can use it. Suddenly we have a few things in our favour.
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Hmm, I have read the link to what Andy said and I cannot work out some of the metrics, I guess mainly because there are none.
1. Sure giant data centres of the type that Microsoft and Google have built recently in Washington state and Texas need huge amounts of power but the main reason they chose those locations was not ability of power but availability of cheap power.
2. The broadband issue in NZ has two issues which the government has been thumping for years; penetration of broadband (number of people using it) and speed of access. However if you don’t have a computer or even dial-up access chances are statistically and in practice this is not an issue to you. I don’t know of anyone or have seen reports which say 30% of the population would buy computers and internet connections if broadband was available to them. Maybe it’s going to be made available free via WINS to these people.
3. If we run fibre locally and internationally power isn’t an issue. My fibre connection at work runs off one of those little power packs that charges your mobile phone. And if I rang up the supplier and said we want to move from 10 megabits to 100 megabits or a 1 gigabit there is no more power requirement, it is travelling over a glass pipe.
According to the Computerworld reference Andy said “Increasing bandwidth will create an infinite demand on power and the risk is we will run out of power”.
How does that work? It certainly will not happen over the next 5 years. He may not have said what was reported but I see no metrics to support this view.
4. The energy/green debate - I know this is a very popular topic with lots of people now and it probably makes good sense for manufacturers like Dell who Andy works for to beat this energy drum but if he really made the statements report he is drawing a long bow with those statements. In saying this NZ certainly needs more power. As for renewable energy only one, hydro is reliable. Solar and wind cannot be stored. Look at some of the wind farms in Europe that struggle to generates power over 30% of the time. The only answer is nuclear. I suggest one where the beehive is now.
5. Don’t even get me going on the Indian support issue. I had to phone HP on Friday, ended up at their call centre in India. They have one CD for hold music, the theme from the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is fairly representative of their service.
6. NZ’s ability is not just people, its people with smart ideas - IP, that’s what we are good at. There are places other than the Indian sub continent to do this work - Cambridge in the UK for one.
As I said I did not hear Andy talk, and maybe the report was not totally accurate or representative of what he said (Ulrika you could do with a spell checker for one thing) but I would like to see more hard facts than just opinions.
solar and wind can’t be stored - but in combination with hydro you can have the same net effect - just shut down some of the hydro when the wind blows, let the dam fill a little, when it’s calm empty it out. IMHO we shouldn’t be building more dams we should be adding more turbines to the existing ones so that we can get more capacity out of the whole system
With electricity demand increasing year-by-year, we seem to be fiddling while Rome burns. Energy-saving lightbulbs mark the limit of our efforts to reduce load, while active encouragement of solar water heating alternatives languish as do improvements in building insulation standards and regulations.
The deployment of wind farms is a help, but wind is a volatile resource. New storage technology like hydro seems to be stymied by the lack of suitable sites that don’t attract objections through the Resource Management Act. Nuclear (fission) generation is problematic in a tectonically active country, as illustrated in Japan in July. Coal-fired generation is out for political reasons, even though we are up to our armpits in the stuff.
We seem to be ignoring the middle ground between volatile and storage technologies. Tidal and wave generation offers great opportunities in a nation with so much coastline and many harbours and estuaries. The contribution from tidal is forecastable well in advance, and both tidal and wave generation offer a distributed solution that gets them closer to load centres like Auckland and Northland that are in desperate need.
Minor point… Wind/solar energy can be stored - wire it up to a pump, and shift water UP to a storage body for later use with the attached hydro plant. V > p.g.h > V
or
Use it to spin up a (large) flywheel. V > 1/2m.v^2 > V
Sure there are efficiency loses, but it can be stored…
Re Wild Land’s comment: the government has set up an $8 million fund for wave and tidal energy projects, but the conditions it imposes have been criticised by proponents: see http://www.stuff.co.nz/4288711a13.html
Can also use giant flow batterys to store wind power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_Hill_Wind_Farm,_Tasmania
greenhost
Greenhost http://www.greenesthost.com/ have setup a green data centre, purpose built to be energy efficient and powered by Solar, I met the founders and investors in this in San Fran a couple of month ago, very genuine passionate people who care about the issues and have the commercial knowledge to make this economically sustainable along the way.
You’re joking right? The last thing we need is “big hydro schemes”; NZ has already dammed plenty of its wild and scenic rivers. Do we keep damming until we have interfered with every natural ecosystem?
We need to get smarter about it. We are still intensive energy users - we need to adopt more efficient lifestyles and explore alternative energy sources (especially wind, wave and solar). Additionally, NZ has barely touched distributed generation - micro hydro is way more attractive than think big monstrosities like the Clyde Dam.
Hi Jonathan, look I don’t know, but my point is that global environmental issues are providing some interesting opportunities. So beyond us just reducing our need on energy we can look at combining a few of these issues there may be substantial opportunities. Like harnessing our abundant water in some places, advanced water management, putting data centers near abundant water, and connecting those data centers to the world. Hopefully we’ve moved on from simplistic dismissal of big ideas because they are culturally taboo. Let’s discuss. Many people are now saying nuke power is the answer. I’d like to see those arguments laid out as well but you almost can’t even mention that in NZ.
Jonathan said…
The last thing we need is “big hydro schemesâ€; NZ has already dammed plenty of its wild and scenic rivers. Do we keep damming until we have interfered with every natural ecosystem?
Why not? This mass hysteria about global warming that has been hyped up by greenie nutbars and environmentalists around the world is anti-civilization, anti-industry, anti-happiness, anti-capitalist, anti-success, anti-everything and anti-life. We must Exploit the Earth or Die.