
How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website? - tshannon
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html
======
philipkglass
The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied
energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules.

The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of
solar panel."

The source for that assertion is this article from 2017:

"Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot
System"

[https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3...](https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3Ach%3Abel-1002434%3Arecycling-02-00010.pdf/recycling-02-00010.pdf)

 _That_ article cites this article from 2006 as its source for energy
intensity of solar manufacturing:

"Embodied energy analysis of photovoltaic (PV) system based on macro- and
micro-level"

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.enpol.2005.06.018](https://sci-
hub.tw/10.1016/j.enpol.2005.06.018)

 _That_ publication finds that silicon purification and processing accounts
for the lion's share of embodied energy in solar PV.

But if you read section 6 of the paper, "Embodied energy of silicon
purification and processing", you see that _those_ authors are using material
production energy intensity numbers from _2004 and 1998._ They are also
assuming the use of electronic grade silicon for solar manufacturing, and a
silicon requirement of 12 grams per watt-peak of solar module. Cheaper and
less energy intensive solar grade silicon has entirely replaced electronic
grade silicon in PV since the early 2000s. Modern solar module silicon use is
about 3 grams per watt-peak, not 12; see Table 1 in
[https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/ee/c9ee0245...](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/ee/c9ee02452b).

What first appears to be a reasonably recent citation for PV embodied energy
is actually a chain of painfully outdated assumptions going all the way back
to the 1990s.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant
citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated
and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced
since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3
[http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final...](http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final_Report.pdf)

Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much smaller than the ones
oin those studies. This means that things like the frame, wires, connections
become more important for embodied energy.

~~~
philipkglass
That study is also badly outdated. Under section 5, Life Cycle Inventory Data,
it says "The authors have assembled this LCI data set to the best of their
knowledge and in their opinion it gives a reliable representation of the
crystalline silicon module production technology in Western-Europe in the year
2005/2006 and Balance-of-System components of the year 2006."

I would love to see a life cycle assessment using wholly up-to-date numbers. I
keep reading new studies on PV LCA, energy return on investment, and/or energy
payback time. People who write these sorts of papers don't seem to keep up
with what industry is actually doing. You can learn a lot from data sheets and
trade publications. E.g. from published glass thickness and module size and
efficiency, you can calculate the quantity of glass currently needed per watt-
peak. It's significantly lower than any of these studies using decade+
outdated numbers.

I think part of the problem is one of incentives. Academics writing about LCA
are often comparing some hoped-to-be-up-and-coming technology against the
mainstream. Like thin film PV, organic PV, or dye sensitized cells pitted
against crystalline silicon PV. In that case using old numbers for silicon PV
helps the newer technology look like it offers exciting improvements.

Another problem is that reviewers apparently don't care very much about these
temporal effects. They don't chase the citation chains to find the really
outdated measurements cited in recently submitted manuscripts.

Another problem is that the solar industry has grown large and competitive.
Cutting-edge numbers about energy consumption for silicon refinement are
probably retained as a competitive advantage by the biggest producers, for
example.

It's possible to set tighter upper bounds on resource intensity just from
teardowns of recently manufactured modules. I suppose that teardown based
analysis may itself be the sort of information you only get from specialty
publications like the Photovoltaics International magazine, which is expensive
and not indexed by DOI or part of ordinary academic libraries. (So it's not
even in sci-hub.)

It's $599 a year if you want to be able to read back issues of Photovoltaics
International from their archives:

[https://store.pv-tech.org/photovoltaics-international/](https://store.pv-
tech.org/photovoltaics-international/)

I am interested enough in photovoltaic technology that I have bought a couple
of $100+ specialty books from academic publishers, but $599 is a bit too steep
even for me.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
The obsolescence of life cycle analyses is a topic in itself, and the lack of
accessible data is a problem for anyone who tries to investigate high-tech
products.

For the solar powered website article, it's the order of magnitude that
matters. You say I overestimate the energy use of solar panel production, but
in our configuration it corresponds to just 1 liter of oil per year.

~~~
kragen
You can get a reasonable estimate by taking the wholesale price of the thing
you're analyzing, dividing by an average price of electricity for industrial
use (like, around US$60/MWh, in the quaint non-SI units traditionally used in
the trade), and multiplying that by some fudge factor like 20% to account for
the fact that much of the cost of things is due to non-energy inputs like raw
materials, skilled labor, and interest. This gives a result correct to within
a factor of 3 for the vast majority of goods and services, while using LCA
numbers from a quarter century ago did not. In this case the result is 2.3 MJ
per watt (peak) of low-cost solar panels using €0.17/Wp from PVXchange and
SolarServer. That's almost an order of magnitude lower than the 22 MJ/W you
used in the article (assuming 16% efficiency; with 21% efficiency it's 16.7
MJ/W. I'm not sure which one your original number was for.) So I think you may
have gotten within an order of magnitude, but only just.

If the numbers you were using were correct, then just the energy input for the
solar panels would have cost more than the wholesale price for the modules.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
Calculating embodied energy based on costs is an option, but I have always
learned that it's the last resort, as it has many problems, too.

For example, How do you account for the fact that all production facilities
for solar panels have moved to China? If you look at the price evolution of
solar panels, there's a gradual decrease due to technological progress (less
energy use indeed). Then, from 2009 onwards, the decline in costs accelerates
sharply, the consequence of moving almost the entire PV manufacturing industry
from western countries to Asian countries, where labor and energy are cheaper
and where environmental restrictions are more loose.

[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-
is...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-
power.html)

~~~
philipkglass
The manufacturing shift to China can account for a one-time step decrease in
solar PV costs due to lower wages and a lower cost, dirtier industrial
ecosystem (e.g. high-CO2 grid power supplied mostly by coal plants having
minimal pollution controls).

But the costs of solar panels made in China in 2020 are much lower than those
of solar panels made in China in 2010. Chinese factory wages have not fallen
over the past 10 years, nor have Chinese pollution controls been further
relaxed. The trend of falling costs over the last 10 years of made-in-China
solar panels is due to improved techniques of production.

In 2010, Chinese producer Suntech was the largest PV manufacturer in the
world. It sold 1.6 GW of panels and realized revenue of $2.9 billion:

[https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/suntech-q4-earn...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/suntech-q4-earnings-
call)

Its panels were therefore selling for about $1.83 per watt in 2010.

Presently, Chinese high efficiency monocrystalline PERC panels are selling for
no more than $0.25 per watt:

[http://pvinsights.com/](http://pvinsights.com/)

This 85% drop in prices indicates that technological and manufacturing
progress in the solar sector continued at a rapid clip even after its center
of gravity shifted to China.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
Agreed that it's a one-time step decrease, and that the progress continues.
But, why 2020? The panels that have powered the server were bought between
2015 and 2019, and who knows how long they had been in storage before I bought
them.

You take the solar panel that just comes out of the factory as a reference,
but I could just as well argue that the reference should be the age of the
average solar panel installed in the world.

Also, let's wait and see how the move to China affects the quality and life
expectancy of solar panels. And what it means for other forms of pollution. I
focused on energy use but there are other environmental concerns with the
production of solar panels.

I will be happy to update the calculations in the future if more and better
data are available.

------
jedberg
I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they
just put a second server on the other side of the world.

The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New
Zealand.

If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one
of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all.

Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my computer wants
to auto-correct it. :(

~~~
kragen
That is an excellent idea. With three or four servers they could entirely
avoid batteries.

I think you mean anycast, not multicast, but a less exotic option would be to
use DNS failover, or even just round-robin DNS with no explicit failover:
[https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-m...](https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-
multiple-a-records-for-my-domain-do-web-browsers-ever-try-more-than-one)
[https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html](https://www.nber.org/sys-
admin/dns-failover.html)

~~~
driverdan
You wouldn't want to power directly from the panels without a battery. It
would cause high instability on cloudy days, possibly leading to file system
corruption.

~~~
kragen
The panel voltage is pretty stable until the illuminance gets really low
(unless you're drawing a lot of current). Diodes such as solar cells are
roughly constant-voltage devices. You can get a pretty long way avoiding
filesystem corruption by mounting things read-only, but (I've heard) some SSDs
aren't really read-only even when they're read-only, because of read disturb
and the attempt to compensate for it in the FTL. 10 seconds of 2 W at 3–6 V is
about two farads, so you might be able to get acceptable stability with a
supercapacitor in the 1–10 farad range instead of a battery.

~~~
lightedman
"The panel voltage is pretty stable until the illuminance gets really low"

I'd like to see what panels those are, because the ones I've built while
working as a PV manufacturing tech, both mono and poly (roughly 21%
efficiency,) will have greatly varying voltages with even the tiniest hint of
cloud cover over one cell, even with the junction box working to help separate
out sections of the panel to maintain better voltages. Typical 60 cell 30-32V
panel will drop to ~18-20 with just two cells on one 20-cell section of the
panel covered. Sure this is still enough for the paltry voltage this specific
server needs, but if they used smaller and more affordable panels like those
used for cell phone chargers or similar size (within about 18"x18" form
factor,) I can guarantee you those do not take to shading or even bad
orientation well at all. 45 degrees off direct-exposure and you could be
looking at that smaller panel producing a mere 2V or less.

~~~
kragen
Is that the MPPT voltage or the open-circuit voltage? I was thinking of a
near-open-circuit voltage (which is what you have if you're powering a 2-watt
webserver from a 50-watt solar panel), but MPPT will vary a lot more. Also,
covering 6% of your cells will drop your voltage a lot more than covering all
your cells 6%.

~~~
lightedman
Open circuit. This is one specific behavior we looked out for when testing
panels before shipping, after the EL test, lamination, and junction box
installation.

~~~
kragen
Huh, I guess I must be totally wrong, then. Thank you for the generous
correction!

~~~
lightedman
You're welcome. Even without MPPT inverters/chargers in the mix, you can take
a 1,000V (maximum US NEC allowed IIRC) string of panels (obviously in series)
fully black out one cell out of hundreds, and your entire system will do
nothing (assuming your panels do not have bypass junction boxes and are
straight-series.) That blacked out cell essentially acts like a full clog in a
pipe - nothing will pass because of that 'dead' cell, until you remove that
whole panel and replace it or bypass it.

We test by shading different cells at a known light level, and seeing how far
the panel as a whole deviates from our expected baseline. Usually what we'll
find is that a cell hadn't had its ribbon bars properly soldered while in the
tab/string machine, so the shading of the cell dramatically reduces
performance. You can't catch this kind of defect easily in an EL tester, as
usually you've got enough contact between ribbon and cell to get the entirety
of the cell to emit light, thus hiding defects from soldering. So we
implemented that shading test to root out bad cells/bad soldering jobs. Quite
proud of having thought of that testing methodology, because I've not seen any
other company test panels in that manner.

------
hannob
This may sound snarky, but...

I really wonder how helpful such projects are. Making the Internet greener is
undoubtedly an important goal, but I feel this is perpetuating a myth that
we're gonna fix the climate crisis with small-scale projects from below.

Practically this is doing nothing to provide any relevant fix for the problem.
What we should be doing is thinking about how we can fix the problem at scale,
e.g. pressuring large IT companies to get real about the green image they like
to peddle. (i.e. care more about news like this
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858)
)

~~~
stevenhuang
These small-scale projects directly inspires those linked in your article to
act. The more we talk about it and try to make a change--any change--the
greater the impetus to make greater changes.

Large-scale projects don't magically wink into existence in a vacuum, the
conversation needs to happen and the ball first needs to get rolling.

------
TheEnder8
This misses the elephant in the room. Every major tech company is already
pushing hard towards renewable and/or zero carbon. The problem isn't tech,
it's the other companies (chemical, oil, agriculture, etc).

[https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-
numbers/](https://sustainability.fb.com/sustainability-in-numbers/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-
aws/sustainability/](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/)

[https://sustainability.google/environment/](https://sustainability.google/environment/)

[https://news.microsoft.com/climate/](https://news.microsoft.com/climate/)

~~~
mrpopo
The problem is, of course, tech. As explained in the article, websites have
become more energy-hungry over time. This is partly explained by the rebound
effect (Jevons paradox). More efficient hardware leads to faster page load
times. Unfortunately, the result was heavier pages loading roughly as fast, or
even slower, than old-school websites.

Unless facebook, AWS, google and Microsoft start encouraging more efficient
webiste designs (static websites, limited library usage, no more 1MB fonts,
etc.), the work done by the author is absolutely relevant. Limited hardware
capacity has always been the most reliable way to limit energy usage.

------
falcolas
About $100 in gear ($30 144wh battery, $20 controller, $50 50w solar panel) to
offset around $2 worth of electricity (9.53kwh * 0.17 euro/kwh) per year.

The battery should be replaced about every 5 years, the solar panels 25 years,
the controller every 10 years.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
A cost analysis remains to be done. But it's not as bad as it seems: we save
$600 per year on hosting services.

~~~
falcolas
Comparing a static site on a Raspberry Pi to a commercially hosted CMS is like
comparing an apple to a walnut grove.

------
ReactiveJelly
I see they're still using dithered PNGs instead of JPEGs for images.

The first time I saw it (I don't have the numbers handy now) I ran some
experiments and it seemed clear to me that a JPEG would work much better, and
if dithered PNGs were really a good option, more people would be doing them.
This was on photographs, where JPEGs are kind of a home-run and PNGs aren't
good no matter what you do to them.

This time they're doing diagrams, which would probably be best as regular PNGs
- The dithering requires you compress a pattern that's almost noise, and a
JPEG would add artifacts without being any smaller.

Here's some other thoughts:

\- WebP does exist, but of course you have to do some negotiation to avoid
blank images on browsers that won't decode it.

\- The site is behind CloudFlare anyway, so if it's a static site with no auth
you can probably just put the whole thing on CF / AWS / whatever and it won't
use more energy in the cloud than proxying for your own server already does.

\- CloudFlare probably has a button that re-compresses everything as WebP for
you.

\- Economies of scale always apply.

On scale: The transmission losses for the whole US grid is well under 10%. If
solar is such a great idea, build a solar farm and run 1,000,000 websites. Or
1,000 houses. It'll be more efficient than putting panels on individual houses
or servers. There is no power source that gets more efficient when you have a
bunch of individuals running it instead of a power company. Whether the power
company is trustworthy is a question of politics, not technology.

This always gets to me when I see EV chargers with VAWTs at a grocery store.
If VAWTS are so great, why isn't the grid building them? The grid already has
the big wind turbines which are presumably more efficient than a VAWT. So why
not buy power from the grid? Because it's a PR stunt.

In short, I wish they'd be more clear about it being a cool thing and not a
practical thing. Solar is practical. Wind is practical. At scale.

~~~
ctdonath
“At scale” has to include several standard deviations of insufficient
light/wind availability. When batteries deplete, you have no power. This gets
very expensive when you’re backing up for cases that won’t happen more than
one day per year (or decade).

------
ctdonath
To compare, I’m a solar powered user. All summer I work outside on a notebook
writing apps, powered by several combinations of solar panels and matching
batteries.

On the whole it works. Excess PV panel capacity charges battery, ensuring
enough backup to run during unfavorable angle, cloud cover, weather, shadows,
and night.

Most common issue is re-positioning panels every few hours to favorable angles
& avoiding shadows.

Greatest concern is prolonged cloud cover, depleting batteries after a couple
days of insufficient light. The cost of preparing backup against “multiple
standard deviations” is substantial, buying rarely used batteries (and extra
panels to charge them in reasonable time) - hundreds of $ of gear (2-4x base
cost) used maybe one day a month. Winter makes this outlier the norm,
magnified by its own outliers.

Also, one becomes very aware of app power consumption. Found one web page
(AgileCraft logout page) pulls 30 ways for no good reason.

I’m sure solar powered web server would face comparable issues. Depleted
batteries are a brick wall, waiting for not just light & time to recharge, but
to run the system ASAP.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Can you link to what panel/battery/supporting hardware/etc. you purchased +
used?

~~~
ctdonath
GoalZero.com : Boulder 100 Briefcase, Nomad 20, Nomad 13, & Nomad 7 panels;
Yeti 400, Yeti 100, Yeti 100AC, Yeti 50, & Guide 10+ batteries. Running a
MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhones, & iPad Pro.

------
kome
Better link to the same article:
[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-
is...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-
powered-website.html)

(it's on the solar powered website itself)

------
alex_young
Even with the additional upfront expense, lithium batteries would make this
setup much more efficient due to the larger allowed cycles and would also
reduce the environmental impact due to the low impact nature of lithium
extraction.

~~~
ip26
Lead acid batteries are eminently recyclable. Something like 99% of the lead
in a new car battery is from old recycled car batteries.

~~~
alex_young
That's interesting, I couldn't find any reference to that statistic. I've seen
estimates in the range of 60-80% recycled content for new lead batteries in
the US, but that data seems pretty shaky.

I have seen statistics around a recycling rate of 99% or higher in the US, but
also that much of that is done in Mexico or other places with very weak
environmental and occupational regulations.

In any case, lead poisoning is a very serious problem which is exacerbated by
lead recycling and production.

~~~
generalpass
Take a look at the domestic manufacturers, such as East Penn, and you find
that they have their own recycling plants and they charge their customers
money when they don't receive a scrap battery on purchase of a new one. They
also own most of the distributors of their batteries which run trucks to their
customers.

The lead acid battery industry is incredibly competitive and prices
unbelievably low due to this vertical integration and mechanized production.
Pretty much the only way to beat the U.S. car battery prices is to subsidize
(Korea) or pollute like hell (Mexico).

The U.S. is a net importer of lead, largely because all of the SLA batteries
coming in from Asia end up in the waste stream as scrap, so there isn't very
high demand for virgin (smelted lead concentrate) when all that scrap is
sitting around.

------
agentultra
I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed
on a p2p network?

I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a
market there is for it though.

The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power,
efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of
serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications. As well as
the network and content being resilient to local changes in climate events
(flash floods, fires, etc). And possibly bringing access to more areas where
network connectivity is slow, expensive and unreliable.

~~~
bmgxyz
There was a project I stumbled upon over a year ago that implemented a P2P
Web, but I can't seem to dig it up now. There was a client that mediated the
connection between your machine and the network, and you'd just browse the web
normally by pointing your browser at localhost:someport. It was kind of neat,
since everyone who visited a resource could act as the server for somebody
else, but it looked to me like it was pretty much only used by Chinese
dissidents. Good for them, I say, but not so useful for someone casually
looking for a better version of the existing Web. I think until technologies
like this are better than the Web for ordinary use, not just hiding from
authorities for whatever reason, they'll only find use in those areas.

Of course, there's always IPFS, but that project comes with its own issues
(e.g. modifying content).

~~~
fwip
Check out Beaker Browser!

~~~
bmgxyz
That looks neat. I'll put it on my list of things to play with eventually.

------
cjnicholls
Previous Thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619)

~~~
dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847),

and from 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143)

------
m_coder
>>More likely is that we eventually switch to a more poetic small-scale
compressed air energy storage system (CAES).

Please do this!! I want to see that article on CAES actually worked out in
real life not just theory with no howto steps .

~~~
alacombe
City-wide application are discussed regularly here...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442938)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782760)

Also online.. [https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-
future-o...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of-
the-compressed-air-economy.html)

Down the line, problems are efficiency and all the downside of working with
gases.

~~~
m_coder
Yes, I did read those articles and it has me very interested. What I would be
more interested in is some sort of applied DIY situation. Something I could
cobble together myself and it would have the potential to get the efficiency
that is discussed in lowtech mag. It seems to me that with the sorts of
articles they write, I would be able to follow along on a small scale if I
wanted. In particular, how do you make a compressor going one way and a
generator going the other?

~~~
alacombe
It could be argued that DIY and pressure vessels don't work well together :-)

------
maelito
> However, we’re comparing apples to oranges. We have calculated our emissions
> based on the embodied energy of our installation. When the carbon intensity
> of the Spanish power grid is measured, the embodied energy of the renewable
> power infrastructure is taken to be zero. If we calculated our carbon
> intensity in the same way, of course it would be zero, too.

I don't get it. The carbon intensity of the national grid should result from a
life-cycle analysis, so all emissions should be included in the figure. As far
as I know, apples and apples are compared, and the home-made version is worse.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
The carbon intensity of the national grid is calculated as follows: carbon
emissions of burning coal and gas in power plants (say 600 g/kWh) + carbon
emissions of wind turbines, solar panels and the like (0 g/kWh). Embodied
energy is not taken into account.

~~~
maelito
Is it particular to spain ?

~~~
lowtechmagazine
No, it's not just Spain. I only looked at European power grids, but their
carbon intensity is all calculated in the same way.

~~~
maelito
I'm pretty sure these numbers are LCAs :
[https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...](https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=FR)

Hydro, nuclear, wind turbines would all be 0g/kWh if it was only about fuel.

------
kragen
It's an interesting exercise. In some ways it's similar to what we were doing
at Satellogic: a Satellogic satellite is solar-powered, runs on batteries, and
contains computers running Linux. (All of that is public; I'm not revealing
anything unpublished here.)

They seem to be running on a Raspberry Pi that uses two watts, so they can run
Linux. But a website wouldn't have to run Linux. Contiki includes a webserver
and can run on an STM32F103. (I'm not sure if the Contiki webserver fits on an
STM32F103, though; Contiki is pretty customizable.) They say they have 865,000
yearly visitors, but unfortunately don't explain how many hits that is; if we
assume it's 1000 hits per visitor, that's 865 million hits a year, which is 27
hits a second, in the ballpark of what you could do on a 486. So it ought to
be within the capacity of a 72MHz 32-bit STM32F103, which uses 50 mA going
full tilt — 165 mW if you're running on 3.3 volts. That's better than an order
of magnitude less power.

This is probably an interesting experiment to do for resiliency purposes, but
I don't think it makes a lot of sense for reducing resource usage in this
case. If we assume "Kris De Decker" is the name of a human body that dedicates
most of its time to writing this magazine, well, that body dissipates about
100 watts. You could run the magazine on 102 watts by using a 2-watt
webserver, or 100.17 watts by using a 165 milliwatt webserver. But if they eat
beef once a week, well, beef wastes about 96% of its energy input, converting
it to cow poop instead of food; that's 4.8 watts of beef produced from 119
watts of soybeans and corn. By replacing one of those beef meals per year with
a vegetarian meal — eating beef 51 times a year instead of 52 — they could
reduce their energy consumption by more than the entire web server power
budget.

Or, to look at it another way, eating beef once a year uses as much power as
the web server: 72 MJ/year, 2.3 W.

(I'm ignoring the embodied-energy calculation because the article shows that
it's small compared to the ongoing power use.)

Average marketed energy consumption in the rich world is about 10 kilowatts
per person, although typically that figure doesn't include things like corn
and beef. Interestingly, in another article
[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-
grid-i...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-in-your-
apartment.html) the author explains that their laptop uses 20 watts of power,
and their external monitor uses 16.5 watts, together 18 times the power used
by the web server. If they could manage to do their writing with a USB
keyboard plugged into an Android cellphone with an OTG cable, they could
probably reduce that to 3 watts, a reduction of 11 times the web server's
entire power (although maybe they only write 8 hours a day, so maybe it's only
4 times.) If they could use an incrementally updated e-ink screen, an option I
explored in some detail in Dercuano, they could use another order of magnitude
less still.

I feel like _sustainability_ is a bigger question than resource use, though. I
can't sustain the laptop I'm writing this on because it contains parts I don't
know how to fix, even if I could supply it all the energy it needs with like a
bicycle generator or something. In fact, nobody in my country knows how to
build a laptop like this; a lot of the knowhow only exists in China, and other
parts only exist in Korea. Exploiting its CPU backdoors requires knowledge
that is presumably only available in certain companies in the US. These seem
like much bigger sustainability concerns to me than the really quite minimal
power usage of the machine, which is a tiny fraction of the power usage of,
for example, a candle (≈80 watts).

~~~
saltcured
Also, sustainability of a web server doesn't mean that much if you don't
consider the net impact in the world. It seems to me that you could have a web
server require substantially more power and still be a net benefit if it
actually influences many users to consume less in their daily lives.

What is the marginal cost of the web traffic it creates and replaces? Would
tuning the software and data payloads be more impactful than worrying about
the server wattage?

What is the marginal cost of other user activities which it influences? Not
just the website operator, but the user behaviors happening as a result of
their relationship with the service? Do they stop using other less efficient
services or just increase their overall footprint? Could it reduce their
consumption of energy and material goods? Change their diet or travel
habits...?

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "The solar powered website bucks against these trends. To drop energy
use far below that of the average website, we opted for a back-to-basics web
design, using a static website instead of a database driven content management
system. "

For a website that proud itself on being against trends, I would had more
appreciation if they went against the trend to use 3rd party sites and be
totally on their own. My NoScript reports for them these as 3rd party scripts:
google-analytics.com, google.com, googlesyndication.com, gstatic.com,
jquery.com, s3.amazonaws.com, statcounter.com, typepad.com

This reminds me of that joke with electric cars that recharge their battery
using a diesel generator.

~~~
lowtechmagazine
That's because you're not on the solar powered website. Hackernews is linking
to the old site. [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-
is...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-
powered-website.html)

------
markovbot
>The owner of this website (www.lowtechmagazine.com) has banned your IP
address ([redacted])

Anyone else seeing this? Looks like they allow me to access it via
[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-
is...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-
powered-website.html), but if they actually banned my IP specifically I don't
really want to violate their wishes, I just wonder why I'm banned :/

~~~
frabert
Seeing as how their website is run from a low-power device, maybe your IP
(range?) was submitting too many requests and they decided to ban it.

------
seanwilson
Does anyone know of any good sources of information about which web hosts are
the most sustainable?

I had a quick look and didn't find an obvious resource online to study. I
messaged a couple of popular web hosts and each said they don't have any
specific policies on sustainability or any energy usage stats to share.

~~~
mikro2nd
This would be a useful thing to lobby hosting companies on. All it would take
would be to convince a dozen or two of the largest, most visible hosting
companies to put sustainability/power efficiency/consumption stats front and
centre on the website and the rest of the horde would be more-or-less obliged
to follow suit.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You'd need a legislated standard, I fear. There are so many ways you could lie
statistically and still appear to be giving good info.

------
hinkley
There are a handful of reasons I’ve been farting around with SBCs, but one of
them is an informational website for an outdoor attraction with no good spot
to string power.

Not quite how this article meant solar-powered, but still some useful food for
thought.

------
WizardAustralis
If that is not good enough for some folks, there is also the print version of
the site. A big 700+ page thing that really need to get my chops into. Been on
my bookshelf for about 6 months just calling me to delve into its full glory.

------
clarry
> Solar PV power has high embodied energy compared to alternatives such as
> wind, water, or _human power_.

Did they calculate the energy required to construct a human that is capable of
powering this server?

------
agumonkey
side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of
sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)

~~~
jandrese
You can run a fair bit of web traffic off of something like a Raspberry Pi,
and you don't need a ton of battery to keep that running overnight. Heavy
database driven websites probably won't be an option, but the bottleneck for
static sites would likely be the Ethernet interface.

In fact that's pretty much exactly what they did. 168Wh battery pack is a
small Deep Cycle SLA. A 50w Solar Panel and associated charge controllers and
the like is like $80 at Harbor Freight. The whole thing is quite achievable on
a budget.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
I tried running an rpi on a lead acid battery and a 40w panel. It seemed to be
running fine for the first 2 weeks but then I think it had a few days where it
drained the battery to 0 which ruined it and then it was turning off every
night. I'm not sure what to do with the setup now since it seems like lead
acid is not the way to go but all of the DIY solar charge controllers use lead
acid.

~~~
jandrese
Did you use a deep cycle battery? Letting a standard lead acid battery go to 0
is a surefire way to kill it.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
It was just a standard one but the deep cycle ones are super expensive and it
doesn't seem worth it for a rpi that costs about $1 a year to run.

------
bmgxyz
It may be worth repeating what the article already states: this project is
based in Barcelona, where there is considerable sunlight. Other locations may
be unsuitable for this sort of thing. I do like the idea, though, and its
implementation is impressive.

------
generalpass
I wonder if hosting images elsewhere helps out with reducing load?

