One of the changes which will need to be implemented as we go to zero carbon is greater concentration on local infrastructures – local work (which the pandemic has made more acceptable), local power grids... and even local cloud. EXPLOITING THE SOLAR SURPLUS Members of the Wireless Networks (WiNe) research lab at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) have designed a way to create a distributed community-based cloud, powered by solar. The prototype, described in a new paper called ‘Exploiting the Solar Energy Surplus for Edge Computing’ in the journal IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing *, takes the components of a typical residential photovoltaic facility, and combines them with the cloud. The capability to sell off excess solar capacity is well known, but in this new photovoltaic solution, owners could choose to either sell their excess electricity, or use it to power cloud computing capacity – which itself could be sold back to those who need it. The two authors of the paper are Professors Borja Martínez and Xavier Vilajosana, whose work centres primarily on wireless communications technologies and edge devices, with the goal of building better cyber-physical systems. In recent years, they have focused on research around the energy efficiency of electronics. “Our look at photovoltaic here was not on the large scale of big solar farms, but the small scale of individual houses with panels on their roofs,” says Vilajosana. “We were wondering how we could help people promote the adoption of these solar technologies.”
THERE’S A GROWING NUMBER OF COMPANIES WHICH ARE AGGREGATORS OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND COMPUTING
Vilajosana and his team figured that the best way of getting people to adopt solar energy on a wide scale was to financially incentivise it. In Europe, governments have mandated that excess energy in a home installation can be sold back to the utility company. Currently the price is regulated, but Vilajosana sees a time when the market will open and pricing becomes more democratised. “That means if you and I have roof solar panels, at 12 noon the price of our electricity will be zero, because everyone is generating energy at the same time.” CREATING COMPUTING COMMUNITIES The question then is what could be done with that extra energy during those times – like midday in Catalonia – when solar-generated electricity is at a maximum and there is no demand for the excess? One option is to store it in a battery, but that’s expensive, and you run into the problem of a stored energy backlog, reducing its value on the open market. They hit instead on the idea of creating computing communities. There’s a growing number of companies which are aggregators of supply-and-demand computing.
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