
Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows - martincollignon
https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows
======
205guy
This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy.
Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is
they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of
instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was?
Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and
thus give better savings, but maybe it varied too much to reliably run the
loads they want.

Imagine when your fridge can do this: freeze extra cold when the sun is
shining (or wind is blowing), don't run the compressor when it's not, only run
the blower after you open the door to move that extra cold from the freezer,
allow a slightly larger temperature range, and of course run as necessary to
avoid spoilage. It's not a simple algorithm, it has to handle various
timeframes, such as solar being a daily cycle except there's less in winter
and can go for a week or more with very little (storm/overcast). Maybe it
could also use a bit of "learning" like the Nest thermostats to also optimize
predicted usage.

I know of one commercial product that sort of does this: the Zappi electric
car charger. If you have grid-tied solar, it measures the current being fed
back to the grid and adjusts the charging current to match. So if a cloud goes
over your house, or you turn on a big appliance, the charger reduces the power
to the car by the same amount. This maximizes the use of your own solar energy
and minimizes the use of grid energy.

[https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/](https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/)

~~~
WalterBright
> Imagine when your fridge can do this

I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet
connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run
when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power.

A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which
will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries.

Glad to see this finally gaining some traction!

~~~
konschubert
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes)
and smart meters.

Does this exist anywhere in the world?

~~~
beckingz
It works well if you can aggregate the distributed resources so they're large
enough to bid at the wholesale level.

~~~
mattygh
The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs
is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of
various sizes as well.

Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world
scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone,
because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense
for their device companies or someone else to figure it out with utility and
pay thousands of homeowners to agree to participate. Ohmconnect has a cool
service in California.

~~~
beckingz
Demand response programs are great because of their scale and ability to
provide incentives and command and control without directly interacting with
the markets.

The real big thing is aggregating the aggregations. Distributed Energy
Management Systems (DERMS) / Virtual Power Plant Management Systems are an
active research topic.

------
ben509
Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially
because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at
different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by
engineers.

One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic
e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them
bid on compute power. You could make the value virtual.

Or you could use real money. This is the premise behind EC2's spot instances.
So when power is abundant, your prices drop and the relevant jobs kick off.

Using real market prices makes sense especially if you're renting out
computing power, most customers will be happy to adjust workloads to save
money.

Even if it's entirely internal, it's good to have a facility to "optimize for
cost" and then report the savings. That's helpful to get the engineering
resources devoted towards it, because "I saved $X" is a great bullet point to
put in anyone's promotion packet or to base a bonus on.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In the UK households used to be able to get economy 7 electricity, which meant
cheap electricity at night (I'd guess for 7 hours?).

I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be
becoming available again.

I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was
going to do; but it seems not.

More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in
general.

~~~
mikepurvis
TOU pricing is pretty widespread at this point; I have it in a medium-sized
city in Canada, and intentionally run laundry (electric dryer) in the evening
when power is half the cost of daytime use. With EVs coming online and being
set up to charge at night, it would definitely be nice to have a minute by
minute spot pricing scheme, though, then you'd basically have a mechanism for
using the chargers and other intelligent devices on the consumption side as an
intelligent buffer.

It's goofy, but another one is situations where you have a lot of stored heat
energy, thinking like pools, hot tubs, hot water heaters, etc— all those
things could be activated in response to spot pricing with pretty simple
policies (I want a shower of at least X degrees at 7am, I want the hot tub at
at least Y degrees by 9pm, etc).

~~~
walshemj
I think when widespread overnight charging of EV's is a thing cheap evening
electricity will be phased out

~~~
mikepurvis
Even in that world, you'd still want a way to manage the load through the
night so that you don't have all the chargers clicking on at 11pm and then
when the cars are full have a few hours later, demand craters until morning.

With renewables the incentives for load management become even higher (per
this article). The real next step after second-by-second billing would be
setting up chargers with backfeeding capabilities/policies, so that you have
an arrangement with your employer to charge your car at work on cheap daytime
solar power, sell it back into the grid during the evening rush, then charge
up again on overnight base load. Most EV batteries are way overspecced for
what people need in daily use, so as long as you have a special "charge me to
full and stay there" mode you can switch into, there'd be no reason (other
than a bit of wear and tear) not to cycle your battery like this.

------
erentz
This is a really good argument for carbon taxation to appropriately increase
the cost of dirty energy. Send the correct price signal everywhere rather than
making your own software do the equivalent of looking out the window at the
weather and trying to decide if it’s a sunny or rainy or windy or clam day,
and thus if solar or wind generation is making the grid cleaner. Or if instead
those are likely offline and the grid is dirtier today.

Best thing. Then you incentivize a cleaner grid overall and you don’t even
have to worry eventually about this kind of thing.

~~~
Barrin92
In particular a revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend should be politically
as uncontroversial as it gets because it is also economically equitable. It's
totally perplexing to me why these relatively low-hanging fruit solutions are
not being pursued.

------
bizzleDawg
It seems that it must be a really difficult problem to work out the optimal
solution for having spare capacity to allow time/location shifting of
workloads to minimize carbon per unit of compute.

This Dell paper[0] suggests that 16% of the carbon over a typical server
lifecycle is from the manufacture, so you probably don't want a server sitting
there unused for 23 hours per day, since the overall carbon/compute ratio
would be worse overall.

The post doesn't mention this metric, but it would be really nice to see
something more detailed in time - especially with this overall efficiency of
the server/datacentre lifecycle in mind, rather than just energy consumed from
use.

[0]:
[https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon...](https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon-
footprint-poweredge-r640.pdf)

~~~
shadowgovt
Carbon consumed in building a server is sunk cost and would be paid
independent of whether the server does any kind of carbon-footprint-aware load
shifting.

Assuming the server is "sitting unused for 23 hours a day" is the wrong model
for what this work changed. You're assuming the server could be running at 50%
duty cycle vs. 100% duty cyle. It isn't; since we're talking the batch load,
there's a roughly fixed amount of low-priority work to be done and doubling
the amount of CPU active-duty time alotted to doing the work doesn't get the
work done faster (the details on that are complicated, but that's the right
model for what Google's describing here). One should model the duty cycle as
fixed relative to the processor (i.e. "This global datacenter architecture,
over the course of its life, will do a fixed N units of computronium work on
these batch tasks") and then ask whether that work should be done using coal
to power the electrons or wind.

~~~
gbear605
Suppose I'm building a new datacenter that I want to do some constant amount
of work each day. It doesn't matter the time of day. I can either power it
with solar power, in which case it will run for 1/Y of the day, or with coal
power, in which case it will run 100% of the day. If it only runs for 1/Y of
the day, then I will need to buy Y times as many computers in the solar
scenario than in the coal scenario.

If Y = 2 and only 16% of the carbon in a typical coal-powered computer's
lifetime is from the manufacture, then solar makes sense - solar is 2*16% =
32% of the carbon of coal. But if Y = 10 - so it's running 10% of the time,
meaning there need to be 10x as many computers built - and 16% of the carbon
is from the manufacture, then solar power is actually worse for the
environment than coal power: solar takes 60% more carbon than coal power.

Of course, this is a vastly simplified situation, but it points to the idea
that we need to at least consider the carbon cost of manufacturing.

~~~
shadowgovt
But again, that's the thing. There is only 1/Y work to do in the day; it's
batch work. The work in this case is constrained on the input side, not the
CPU resources side; building 1 or 2 or 1,000 nodes to do the work won't
decrease how expensive it is to do the work (in fact, building more computers
than you need will make it cost more!).

... so why does Google build more computers than they need? Keep in mind that
at Google scale, they're always and forever building "As many computers as we
can possibly afford to" under the assumption that there will always be work
for those machines to do. You and I may need to consider cost of
manufacturing; _Google_ doesn't. They always have the "Build datacenter
infrastructure" cranked to an 11 (more accurately, they are following an
N-year plan of construction that is extremely expensive to modify).

That's the breakdown between Google's way of thinking and the way of thinking
that you've presented: Google's cost of manufacture is fixed. Those computers
will be built, whether or not they're going to also then run green-streamlined
batch jobs. The limiting factor on the batch work is only so much work is
generated in a day, and the rate the work is completed is already good enough
that completing it in half the time yields no marginal value. So may as well
complete it using sun instead of coal.

~~~
bizzleDawg
> Google's cost of manufacture is fixed.

That may well be the way you (and most likely Google) currently look at it,
but the argument presented seems to be that everything other than where you
run some batch tasks is all fixed.

Assuming everything else is fixed does make the optimisation easier, though
surely nearly everything is up for debate if we're actually talking about
minimising the overall footprint of a compute task?

Using fossil fuels rather than allowing these fixed costs you mention to sit
idle - there is a point where your carbon/CPU cycle would actually go up by
not using fossil fuels some of the time (though I am assuming less carbon
emitted for a unit of power than manufacture cost).

I appreciate they are ever-expanding and predicting where non-movable
workloads are going to need to be run etc etc, and I'm not suggesting there
are easy answers.

~~~
shadowgovt
Is the question on the table whether, all other things being equal, this
change would decrease carbon output per unit work completed, or is the
question whether Google is greener after this change?

For the latter question, we have insufficient data. Google's datacenter
infrastructure is huge and complicated, and if one factors in all the
interdependencies and purchased carbon offsets, one needs way more data than
this announcement blurb gives out to answer that question. Maybe they have an
additional process to determine whether their most carbon-negative datacenters
can be switched off during peak coal-use and this work unblocked them from
enabling that feature? We don't know.

For the former question, yes.

------
boris
FWIW, for the build2 project we host our own CI servers on premesis and the
power supply is supplemented by a solar array. We have configured our daily
package rebuild window to coincide with the maximum solar output so that on a
sunny day it is all done using renewable energy.

------
mabbo
(Off-topic, but regarding this site)

Am I crazy or is this website capturing down-button clicks and ignoring them?
I typically use down and up to slowly scroll as I read an article. This page
is driving me nuts.

~~~
dkarp
bizarrely it's only the down button (not the up button)

~~~
icelancer
Yeah, was able to replicate this on Chrome 81.0.4044.113 on Windows. Weird.

~~~
xingyzt
PageDown still works.

------
sambroner
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective
this change was.

Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-
renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier
can prepare for changes to the expected base load.

Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?

~~~
Klathmon
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to
accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried
to move to when power is cheapest for many years now.

Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been
run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful
electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams).

Still, i'd love to see this concept made a lot easier for the average
consumer. Many people already have smart thermostats, why can't that talk to
my power generation company and allow me to over heat/cool when the impact is
lowest? Why can't my dish washer run automatically when it would impact the
world the least? Why can't my EV automatically charge when power is most
available?

I know most of those things are possible, but they sure as hell aren't easy,
and IMO they won't truly have an impact until they're on by default and don't
require the user to do much of anything.

These things seem like they are easily doable, but we just need the different
industries to work together to come up with ways to have all of this stuff
interoperate.

~~~
hnburnsy
Some power companies are integrating with your smart thermostat and may pre-
cool in some case. Example, APS in Arizona... \--- During an event, how will
my thermostat be adjusted?  At the start of an event, your thermostat
temperature will be automatically adjusted up a few degrees above the current
temperature.  Each event will typically last an average of 2 hours, and will
typically occur between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Events typically will not occur on
holidays.  In some cases, your thermostat temperature may be adjusted down a
few degrees prior to the event to pre-cool the home and ensure your comfort
during an event.  Once the event is over, your thermostat will return to its
normal set point and/or schedule.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
ComEd in Chicago can do this with Nest thermostats as well. At the time I had
a Nest thermostat, they actually paid people to enable this. And I basically
made back most of the cost of my Nest that way. (Before selling it off for a
less cloud-connected thermostat.)

------
martincollignon
COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy
to answer any questions!

~~~
floatrock
Great collab with Google! They've been probably the most serious corporate wrt
getting all-renewable offsets for their operations... this is helping them
reach the next milestone where the renewable offsets are time-matched. Great
example of being serious about this stuff rather than just greenwashing.

It sounds like this project is for their own operations. Have you guys thought
about how to offer this closer to a turnkey cloudops SASS / API? What kinds of
abstractions would you present to developers building non-time-critical
compute loads?

Could be a great differentiator for GCP vs. AWS (I have heard of some
companies choosing GCP over AWS due to Google's green energy cloud). And for
you guys, the only thing better than Google being a customer is all of
Google's customers being your customers.

~~~
floatrock
Also, how can we avoid the potential for unintended consequences where this
tech makes Google "greener" while GCP users become less green?

If a data center has (roughly, to a first-order approximation) fixed compute
capacity at any point in time, and we assume that any capacity not being used
by Google themselves is made available to GCP, then wouldn't Google reserving
the "green" hours for themselves drive the remaining "dirty" hours onto the
GCP spot markets?

Is there a cloud market design that addresses this tension between maximizing
utilization and having desirable or 'premium' compute hours?

------
shadowgovt
While the green angle on this story is definitely good to highlight, I wonder
if they're seeing any cost savings too?

Solar and wind on the grid increase supply, which should drive down price per
KwH (of course, the equation isn't _quite_ that simple, since demand in most
of the world near human population centers is also highest during the day).

~~~
chickenpotpie
The pessimist in me says that they're only doing this in case a carbon tax
passes, they'll be able to keep their pricing competitive.

~~~
barney54
I think this has very little to do with a carbon tax and everything about
external and internal marketing. They are committed to using renewable power.

~~~
imtringued
They bought enough carbon credits to offset their emissions but it still left
a bitter taste because data centers run 24 hours a day.

------
globular-toast
I've had an idea for the longest time that we should get rid of all the
processes we've put in place to deliver everything "on-demand" and instead
work with nature to get what we can.

What I mean by this is that instead of deciding "I want to drive 200 miles to
the beach" and buying a tank of petrol, you would instead wait for favourable
wind/solar conditions in order to "save up" the energy you need such that you
can afford to drive to the beach. If you are unfortunate one year you might
only end up with half of what you need, but you'll still be able to do
something.

This goes for things like food too. Stop demanding the same food year round.
Instead work with the seasons and eat what is available locally at that time
of year.

This would be such a huge boost to happiness. You can't see light if it's
light all the time. We just don't know how great our lives are because we
simply expect it to all be available at all the time. Expectations are simply
assimilated and become invisible very quickly. Not only that but it turns out
that meeting these expectations comes at a huge price. Let's instead take what
nature gives us, but no more.

------
fhennig
Interesting! Although there aren't any metrics on how much load is actually
balanced this way. The only plot doesn't have y-axis labels.

------
eitland
I frequently criticize Google harshly for everything from search becoming more
and more useless to pushing Chrome way to hard.

Seems some people at Google still hasn't got the memo yet that the "not evil"
days are now a thing of the past. This looks amazing and more like something I
would expect from old Google.

------
meling
Not sure I’m very impressed by the plot they show here. The results during the
day looks ok, but then they only translate two nightly peaks (low carbon) into
one slightly larger... couldn’t even more of the work be done at night... also
it is strange that there is a dip in both ends of the plot (maybe they just
plot one 24h period, ignoring the previous day’s load and the next day’s
load... I think it would be more appropriate to consider previous/day as well,
as a 24h snapshot over a multiday view)

A more interesting measure would be the actual reduction in CO2 emissions.

------
seanwilson
Does anyone know of a good estimate for how much energy and emissions a
typical Google search requires?

------
mempko
Everyone wanting to really understand what is going on with the new green
economy and these platitudes should watch Michael Moore's nee documentary he
just released free on YouTube called Planet of the Humans.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE)

~~~
floatrock
This documentary is without nuance and without pragmatism. And it criticizes
without proposing a path forward -- it's a bunch of cheap pot-shots, and it
demands perfection instead of proposing progress.

Yes, there are valid criticisms. Wind turbines are made of unrecyclable
fiberglass. It takes energy to build them (truck rolls to the site, concrete
for the foundations), and it's important to make sure the energy return on
energy invested is net positive. We use fossil fuels to produce these
renewables technologies. That's all true, but not insurmountable.

They say battery storage makes up only a tiny percent of the needed capacity
to overcome renewable intermittency. Sure, but it also omits how solar has
dropped two orders of magnitude in price over the last few decades as we've
built more of it and gotten better at making them (the "learning curve").

It follows a group of Vermont hikers hiking to a wind turbine site and then
being NIMBY about it, but none of them talk about where their energy SHOULD
come from.

Look, it raises a lot of critical questions. But it also seems to expect a
single magic pill that just doesn't exist. 2/3's of the way through they talk
about the misrepresentations in biomass and point out how many organizations
seem to be both for it and against it. "Which side are they really on?" says
the classic accusatory documentary voiceover with scary music. Well, it's
complicated! Clearly you don't want to burn all the forests all at once. And
yeah, if you burn pressure-treated wood, those chemicals go into the local
community. At the same time, wood does grow back. The nuance that's missing in
this documentary is questions like "how many acres of rotationally-harvested
woodlands are required to power a 1MW biomass plant sustainably in perpetuity?
And can such projects exist in practice?"

Biomass isn't a panacea solution, and the HN startup mindset of "can I scale
up a technology to dominate everything" doesn't apply because biomass has
limits to it's scalability. It's just one of many tools, and the problem about
this documentary is it can't envision a future where many tools are used
together. When a Sierra Club exec is questioned about biomass, they kept the
part where she says their "position is nuanced", but then they cut to
something else without explaining that nuance. That's lazy documentary
filming.

The complicated thing about energy is there is no silver bullet. This
documentary finds the bad in each technology without considering how all the
pieces _could_ fit together. It presents the bad sides of each technology as
if that should disqualify the tech instead of asking how can we improve each
over time. There aren't easy answers to these questions, but this documentary
just wallows in how bad everything is without asking the hard questions about
how things can be made to work or what the alternative of doing nothing is.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Yes, there are valid criticisms. Wind turbines are made of unrecyclable
> fiberglass. It takes energy to build them (truck rolls to the site, concrete
> for the foundations), and it's important to make sure the energy return on
> energy invested is net positive. We use fossil fuels to produce these
> renewables technologies. That's all true, but not insurmountable.

These turbine blades can be broken down into pellet insulation or used as
feedstock for cement kilns. It's a supply chain and economic incentive issue,
not an unsolved technology issue.

I can't speak to Moore's beliefs, but his documentaries (IMHO) are designed to
inflame, not to have an intelligent discussion about complex problems that
require complex solutions. They are "clickbait" disguised as objective
information.

------
cryptonector
Our data centers now run slower when it's cloudy and there's no wind.

------
PopeDotNinja
Imagine climate modeling super computers that are carbon neutral.

------
qu-everything
Just a marketing device. Carbon neutral since 2007? Let me laugh in CO2,
"green energies" are nowhere near carbon neutral. See planet of the humans by
Moore.

------
elwell
I like the animated illustration; very pleasant.

------
duncan_bayne
That headline reads more like a bug report than a press release.

"Here's a barge full of coal. Maybe you can fix it with that."

------
driver8_
This is beautiful.

------
kerberos84
what a pity to know that they will be mining more of our personal data when we
are chilling with the sunshine.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
They're doing exactly the same amount of work, just time-shifted.

------
btbuildem
So Skynet will now prefer very sunny weather with strong consistent winds?

------
hajderr
Hope they crash some day too so you can stop tracking people :). How long does
it take until this get -votes

------
thebigshane
Good idea, but I can't help but see this as marketing spin over the
alternative title of the same story

"Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind
is not blowing"

~~~
jorams
I don't see your point. That alternative title is exactly as accurate, so it
seems like a good idea to pick the version that sounds a bit better and is
easier to understand.

~~~
thebigshane
Of course its a better idea to pick the version that sounds better. That's
what I said; I know both are accurate.

My point is that by tying performance to environmental factors, you get a
boost when things are great but then can have troubles when things are not
great. Anyone familiar with solar panels already knows this, but if the
correlation is obscured, it could be surprising. The article didn't mention a
specific performance gain, but if we say you get an X% performance gain when
the sun is out, it also means you get a similar X% performance loss when the
sun is not out. Users of the system will get used to the improvement, which
becomes the new standard, and then a particularly dreary season comes in with
weeks of cloud cover, and suddenly there is concern about the degradation of
service.

(Like I said, it's still a good idea, it's efficient use of resources, but the
PR is funny, that's all.)

~~~
beckingz
Encouraging and incentivizing compute/electricity demand to be time flexible
provides the opportunity for cost savings and emissions reductions.

The greater the flexibility, the greater the savings when demand can be
smoothed out to better allocate resources and allow easier forecasting.

If compute jobs that are run on demand can be deferred a few hours and run
during a time period, that allows resources to better utilized. Like charging
an EV overnight, but better.

------
rcMgD2BwE72F
I hope this doesn't add to much cost to their cloud customers' bills.

They've worked so hard to sell their AI solutions to the fossil fuel industry,
lately, so they can help them extract and burn more oil and gas[0].

[0] [https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google-
amazon-a...](https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google-amazon-ai-
oil-gas)

~~~
jdm2212
Why would AI solutions help the fossil fuel industry burn more oil and gas?
The fossil fuel industry sells oil and gas to others to burn, it doesn't light
the stuff up itself for fun.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
Almost all the oil we extract must be burned. There's far too little need for
oil as a non-energy source, and there's a very good reason why the price of
WTI is so low these days. The industry simply cannot find enough customers to
burn it.

How can Google, while helping others extract as much oil as possible, can
still pretend it may not end up being burned?

It's like a a drug dealer saying "I'm definitely not helping anyone _taking_
drugs. I'm only _selling_ it, they stay them somewhere if they please. Don't
blame me".

~~~
jdm2212
You can make this argument more general (and IMO, even more ridiculous):

Fossil fuels are global commodities. Anyone who reduces their oil consumption
is reducing demand for those global commodities, which makes them cheaper.
Making them cheaper makes renewable energy less competitive, which discourages
investment, which means as a society we keep using fossil fuels for longer,
which means in the end we produce _more_ carbon.

Ergo, anyone who tries to reduce their fossil fuel consumption by not flying,
not driving, or turning off the A/C, is actually _more_ responsible for
destroying the planet.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
You're making the argument that reducing your demand for something does not
reduce the demand for that thing, because demanding less of something makes
others demand it more.

------
supernova87a
While the story is very positive and encouraging --

Unfortunately an unintended side consequence of these kinds of efforts (unless
you're very conscientious about maintaining the correct incentives, generally
through pricing) is sometimes that the gains in energy efficiency and savings
are clawed back by an _increase_ in overall energy consumption because it's
gotten effectively cheaper to operate for the same number of compute cycles.

Just like with energy efficient LED light bulbs, although the overall energy
use goes down, often it doesn't go down as much as it could have ideally,
because people start lighting places that _didn 't_ have light before, because
it's gotten so much more affordable to do so!

Or like when you add highway lane capacity, traffic gets worse...

Or in this case, the Google video engineers come up with new useless filters
and resolutions to occupy the newly freed-up compute capacity.

Just something to be aware of. The people who do this have to monitor and put
in place controls so that the outcome is what they intended. Otherwise people
are more clever than you think.

~~~
Nasrudith
If it is still an improvement in both end usage and utility isn't that letting
the perfect be the enemy of the good?

LEDS have to be one of the worst possible example for claims of induced demand
as a bad thing given that the efficency gains outstripped proliferation of
additional always on devices and a cellphone per person.

While Induced Demand may exist it too has its saturating limits of diminished
returns.

