permacomputing

commit c8383d44bbb39cad1c39f3803c4673ef7597dc28
parent 68ed15856d9fcc93446f315b92c47c190e28fbf4
Author: Ville-Matias Heikkila <viznut@low.fi>
Date:   Fri, 17 Jun 2022 11:19:05 +0300

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+**Solar Protocol** is a project that connects solar-powered [[WWW]] servers
+from around the globe, redirecting traffic to a server that has solar power
+available (i.e. the part of the globe where the sun is shining).
+
+A problem with Solar Protocol is that it neglects the energy requirements of
+the [[Internet]] infrastructure that lies between the solar-powered servers.
+However, we can be fairly sure that routing a packet across the world takes
+much more energy than routing it across a country.
+
+If the power consumption of a server is small to begin with, its "greenness"
+may very well get negated by a bad routing decision. It may very well be
+"greener" to just route a user to nearby grid-powered data center than to a
+solar-powered server on the other side of the world.
+
+Taking the network into the equation is difficult because even academic
+estimations of the power consumption of Internet routing have varied by
+several orders of magnitude. Still, there seem to be no mentions of this
+issue on the Solar Protocol website. Given the prominence of SP in the
+media, it is highly unlikely that the people involved have not heard about
+this kind of critique.
+
+In 2015, it was estimated in a meta-analysis by Aslan&al. that moving a
+gigabyte across a national cable network took 0.06 kWh. This is the same
+figure as for running a 10-watt server for 6 hours. Even if the current
+figures are much lower, they cannot be ignored as irrelevant if the server
+network actually serves data instead of mostly remaining idle.
+
+From the permacomputing point of view, Solar Protocol has a lot of the right
+spirit and may work very well as an educational or artistic project.
+Unfortunately, the project remains problematic until as long as ignores the
+Internet infrastructure.
+
+See also:
+
+  * [Solar Protocol website](http://solarprotocol.net/)
+  * [Why do estimates for internet energy consumption vary so drastically?](https://www.wholegraindigital.com/blog/website-energy-consumption/)