Cloud Computing and Energy Management

Assuming the importance of green energy, cloud providers need to work together with renewable energy organizations and government. Using cloud computing not only increase the company’s ROI, but also lowers the carbon emission. In Iceland the technology has already applied in the most businesses.

Assuming the importance of green energy, cloud providers need to work together with renewable energy organizations and government. Using cloud computing not only increase the company’s ROI, but also lowers the carbon emission. In Iceland the technology has already applied in the most businesses.

Data centers can easily be over the capacity even with available floor space, simply because the devices on the floor consume more power than the data center can supply, or generate more heat than it can cool. The performance of data centers should be monitoring better if the relationship of power, cooling and computing are monitored. However, moving the services to the cloud will just cause inherent cost and consumption savings associated with cloud computing. To sum up, the budget and green business promises for the cloud will be ensured through this technology.

Over the past year the cloud computing boomed into a $16.5 billion of the market. As cloud computing reduces cost and reduces energy consumption it becomes more popular among the companies and the revenue is projected to grow at an annual rate of 27%. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cloud applications are expected to triple to 1.35 million in the same period.

Lot of companies move to the cloud, however, some important information are kept on-premise. There are some ghosts servers often run at 15% to 20% utilization or less, but consume power and emit heat at levels approaching a fully utilized server. For instance, Yahoo as one of the largest companies that has embraced a cloud infrastructure. The company reported recently had 32 data centers running between 350,000 and 400,000 servers. While all those servers are consuming power and producing heat, the energy consumption could be even greater with a conventional (rather than cloud) infrastructure, given what Yahoo! is doing. For one thing, it is serving some 10 billion ads per day across its global infrastructure.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/07/energy-management-electricity-technology-cio-network-cloud-computing.html

Cloud Computing the Anchor of Energy Efficiency

The need for energy efficiency is more crucial issue than five years ago. It involves all system layers and aspects, including physical nodes, cooling of nodes, networking hardware, communication protocols and finally the servers and services themselves. The conceptual framework of cloud computing may therefore be a way forward to analyze, identify and implement overall energy savings in a system to attain truly ‘green’ computing services.

In contrast to hardware version, the software could be optimized easier on the proper energy level. In the case of any one service provider site, algorithms to multiplex and de-multiplex workload in order to save energy are needed, and they should incorporate the trade-off between performance and the reduction in service cost due to energy savings. In addition to scheduling and the mapping of workflows, the improvement

of energy-aware cloud applications themselves can also benefit from software optimization. In a business environment based on cloud computing, workflows that run over many sites will tend to be popular.

A user may consider a tradeoff between a more energy-efficient service and a more reliable or faster service, and compose the service in a way that fits its needs. Thus it should also be possible to develop accounting mechanisms that track and depend on the energy that has been used by a service.

http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2009/08/19/comjnl.bxp080.full.pdf

Energy Efficiency by Cloud Computing

Energy efficiency is increasingly important for future information and communication technologies (ICT), because the increased usage of ICT, together with increasing energy costs and the need to reduce green house gas emissions call for energy-efficient technologies that decrease the overall energy consumption of computation, storage and communication. In my opinion, in the sense of renewable the most important thing is not how to produce energy, but how to save it.

As every company tries to operate according to energy efficiency, cloud computing presents a compelling opportunity to reduce data center power bills, according to a leading expert on IT power issues. Brilliant examples are the cloud companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon can process the same workload with a lot less power than companies can in their in-house data centers. There is a big gap between the in-house data-centers and cloud platforms.

Cloud computing has power efficiency in four different areas such as diversity, economies of scale, flexibility and enabling structural change. First of all, spreading computing loads across many users and time zones can improve hardware utilization. Secondly, computation is cheaper in a large shop than small one, while the fixed costs can be spread over more servers and users. Thirdly, the management of virtual servers in cloud apps is easier and cheaper than managing physical servers. Finally, the cloud system enables broader efficiencies in a business that can save money over time.

Source: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/17/cloud-computing-as-an-energy-saving-tool/

RFID_Supply Chain_Energy Sector

The implementation of RFID technology increases the visibility of information at the various level of supply chain in the energy industry, allowing the members to gain as much information about the status of electrical devices as possible. The RFID integrated with the company's information system enables better process optimalization and enhances the efficiency of supply chain. However, there are lot of concerns which humbles the implementation of  this technology. Some technological limitations and standards as follows read rate, reliability, lack of unified standards, high cost associated to the technology and security issues, slower down the skyrocketing effects of RFID technology.

RFID may facilitate the development of emerging supply chain configuration by acting as an enabler of a build-to-order supply chain management strategy. So the RFID may facilitate supply chain collaboration practices and may constitute a link to more collaborative approaches such as CPFR which means collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment. There are high voltage institutional customers such as railway networks, factories or airports and then there are general retail customers which require high distribution network of electricity.

 In fact, today, the world energy production is driven by demand with the global energy consumption that has been rising over the past three years at an annual average rate of 4.2% and is expecting to rise in the years to come, with Asia and Australasia (excluding Japan) which are expected to consume almost as much energy as North America by 2009. In Canada, the energy sector accounts for nearly 6% of GDP, which represents 1.9% of the labor force (327,000 jobs) and has been a major engine of growth in recent years). Beside crude oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, Canada is a major producer of electricity in the world (the fifth largest producer of energy in the world), which accounts for 9% of its total energy output. In this sector, the country benefits from low-price electricity as

hydroelectric generation is the most important source of electricity supply, accounting for 60% of the total electricity output. Owing to the abundance of energy, the size of its territory, the rigor of its climate and the high level of industrialization of its economy, Canada ranks among the most intensive consumers of energy. Nevertheless, Canada’s energy output exceeds domestic needs from far, and the surpluses are exported in the US which is its major client .

Since 1997, following a restructuring of the North American market initiated by a deregulation opening the markets to competition, utility industry has undergone significant changes, with the entrance of important competitors specializing in the production and trading of electricity and other forms of energy. This phenomenon has pushed industry members to rethink some of their strategies and revise their business practices. In this context, while supply chain applications at a strategic level (e.g. strategy definition, supplier relationship management, contractual logistic management) have been considered as a rich area of opportunity for cost reduction , this article focuses more on the operational aspects of supply chain management. For instance, activities such as power grid maintenance and mobile field service have also been identified as having important effect on cost savings and level of service improvement. It is along this continuum of electronic platforms (e.g. ERP, electronic marketplaces) and IOS adoption, that utilities are now looking toward emerging technologies such as RFID to drive transaction cost reductions.

Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3974726/Understanding-the-Impact-of-Emerging-Technologies-on-Process-Optimization-case-of-RFID-Technology

Amplified Backscattering via Energy Harvesting (ABEH)

A  power amplifier (PA) and an energy storage device (such as a capacitor or a battery), in the hardware architecture of conventional passive RFID tags, increase the read range by allowing amplification of the backscatter signal.

This new tag architecture, called Amplified Backscattering via Energy Harvesting (ABEH), we could consider as passive, since the energy storage device is charged by harvesting energy from the RF-signal transmitted by the reader and received by the tag during idle periods.

After all, the harvested and stored energy is then used by the tags to amplify the backscatter

signal one time for another. This architecture is significantly different from active RFID tags where the battery, charged at the time of installation, is used to supply a complete onboard transceiver so that no backscatter modulation is set.

Source: http://web.njit.edu/~simeone/icc101.pdf

RFID May Reduce Electricity Theft

The electricity theft is a huge issue all over the world. The electricity companies try to combat it. The RFID technology could help them avoid the cheating. Mikoh Corporation is working with the government agencies of the US to secure residential electricity meters. The meter application involves RFID tag with encrypted data. The Mikoh realized that the meter would be useful for the US utility market where are billions of dollars per year in lost revenue due to the theft. Mikoh approached the Invensys with this claim. Their solid meter prototype has an automatic meter reading (ATM) reader.

The ATM allows the utilities to get more information from the meter from a central station or a truck.
Mikoh is developing its miniature, low-cost, 13.56 MHz reader that will plug into a circuit board in the meter and communicate with the AMR module. Seals involved with the passive RFID tags will be placed on the meter. According to the above mentioned facts the utility will be able to read data from the seals at regular intervals to detect when a meter has been tampered with.

source: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/56/1/38/