For all of it error — and there many– the electrical grid in the United States is a miracle worker: If you flip the switch, the lights stay on, barely breaking down. But when renewables like solar and wind replaced fossil fuels, the magic worked. become a little more difficult because there is not always sunlight and wind. Navigating this disruption, as it is known among energy enthusiasts, requires a fundamental rethink of how consumers use and even help store energy. For example, electric vehicle drivers may one day be able to use their cars as a extensive battery network that grid operators can tap into as renewables wane.
Another option might be to use information like a battery — of some kind. A pair of researchers have suggested that companies pre-compute certain data when the grid is powered by solar or wind power, and then store it for later use. Although the team named the concept “information battery”, it did not refer to “battery” to refer to a physical device. It’s a digital strategy, more of a timing thing than a real battery, that aims to get data-hungry companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Netflix to use clean electricity when it’s plentiful. so utilities can avoid burning fossil fuels when they are not available.
This use of energy is somewhat flexible, says computer scientist Jennifer Switzer of the University of California San Diego. Switzer, one of the researchers who proposed the idea in a paper published earlier this month. “But with computers, if you have some way of predicting, with even a small degree of accuracy, what you will need in the future, then you can compute the results before you actually need them and store those that result. Instead of storing energy for later use, you are storing data.”
This is a new idea, so it hasn’t been implemented in the real world yet, but it has a lot of potential use cases. Tech companies have to deal with all kinds of data: Google builds search results, and YouTube converts videos into different qualities for you to choose from. Facebook has to refer friends and Amazon has to recommend products. Much of this processing is done on-demand. But these researchers suggest that some of that could be done asynchronously, as green energy is flowing into the grid.
Think of the information battery concept like the Postal Service: The agency knows roughly how many letters it expects to deliver on a given day, but not what specific mailers will need to deliver. go to your home. So the Post Office has to use energy to do some pre-maintenance tasks (like powering sorting centers) to do less predictable things (like delivering a letter to the Post Office). a specific address). Similarly, if technology companies can handle common data tasks when renewables are available, then the possibility of disruption of those energy sources will no longer be a concern when calculating. upon request later. “The core concept here is that information has an embodied energy within it,” says computer scientist Barath Raghavan of the University of Southern California, Barath Raghavan, who co-authored the paper with Switzer. “Information batteries will do well in places where there is a high degree of predictability. You get that in the case of video encoding, editing, graphics. ”
For example, as soon as you type a search into Google, the system has to process the request. Some of that work cannot be done in advance because your exact requirements are unpredictable. (Google can’t read your mind — at least not yet.) But the search engine’s foundation is also based on a lot of rote math, pointless work done in massive data centers that use lots of energy. Those kind of calculations are done well before you hit “I feel lucky”. Or consider the computing power required to deliver streaming video. When it comes to video files, Switzer says, “if you know there’s going to be a lot of Netflix traffic at a certain time of day, you can do that in advance and get some shows ready.” and popular movies, even if not all of that is actually required. “
