Blue Eyes Designs

So I’m reading along in last month’s Wired (what can I say, I’m a little behind…) and read these articles:

My Big Biofuels Bet
and
The Information Factories

The first is an in-depth look at ethanol technologies. The article discusses its use not only as a motorfuel, but also for producing other forms of energy. In the interest of full disclosure, the article was written by a venture capitalist invested in the technology. But one of the things that I appreciated most about the article, not the fact that he recognizes it as a viable option, but the fact that he raises it not as a destination toward energy independence, but as a stepping stone – something I’ve been saying for what feels like years.

The second article is about the rise of distributed computing as the M.O. of the large service providers such as Google. Among the many topics of this article is the demand that these giant processing centers make in energy. Both to run the machines and to cool the building from the heat they produce.

Now, if you’ve hung around me a lot, you’ve probably heard my rant about how our energy (i.e. power-in-the-wall) infrastructure SUCKS. We produce power at great cost at high voltages in a few locations only to pump it to transformers that downgrade the voltage and re-release all that energy as heat. Not to mention the difficulty of keeping a “grid” that large stable and safe from sabotage. (Anyone remember the big blackout in the Northeast a few years ago?)

Damn my liberal arts education, this all of course, started weaving together in my mind…

So we’re developing these new technologies to create greener power with significantly smaller footprints than the massive plants currently in operation. We have huge server farms going into remote locations along the fiber backbones of the internet that are starved for power. What if, instead of running lines out to these places, we take them off the grid for real? How great would it be to produce power in DC as the machines desire it, right where they want it, and reduce the waste extensively. Or even (since almost everything is designed to take in AC and then convert it) produce it in AC, but still right there where you need it most. So you take this fast growing landscape addition and making it cleaner from the get-go.

Companies like Google certainly have the capital to spend a bit more on their brick-and-mortor, and it would be yet another way for them to set a good example for the rest of world. Most importantly, it provides a real-world proving ground for these developing technologies without having to completely redo the existing system.

I just hope somebody’s listening.