My solar-powered and self-hosted website
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From that perspective, you've got a finite amount of energy that's being consumed at any point of time and by that logic, you'd be better served to use the solar energy for something else in your household that would've needed the grid, because a cloud provider will almost certainly only need a fraction of the electricity you'd need to keep the static files served.
So, by doing that you've effectively reduced your absolute energy footprint.
But these projects aren't about reducing your energy footprint. They're about having a local webserver that's running on solar energy. Or in the authors words: At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web
it's 1000x more helpful to just like only run your big appliances when your grid is using more renewables.
Economies of scale make cloud more efficient for basic sites like this. It is like using street lights vs. every house putting out a few candles.
In addition we love the grid! We want it to get greener. Put the effort into making the grid energy zero carbon, low pollution while still highly available.
Furthermore using that solar to say charge your work laptop and then hosting the site in CF would net use less energy.
Serving websites is an area where capitalism’s promise of achieving efficiency of resource utilization through economic incentives probably actually works, via shared hardware.
This is a hobby and aesthetic thing, which is valid and interesting.
If anyone has some good data about carbon emissions of self-hosted vs shared hardware I’d love to see it.
Buying used also only works when not that many people are doing it. On an individual level, it is a good thing to do, but it isn't a solution. It does help foster an environment of maintaining and supporting hardware for longer, which is a better solution.
I could envision a scenario where solar self-hosters replace hardware at a rate so much lower than than hosting companies that it outweighs the additional hardware it requires, but I don't think it is the current reality.
The second-hand computer and second-hand panels have already been produced for someone else, their cost is sunk. But their value can continue with this project, or end with the hardware and panels going to a dumping ground.
If you buy a used RPi, it gives money to someone who buys new computers, and encourages them to buy more. It stimulates demand for the production of hardware, just like buying new stimulates the production of new hardware, even though the hardware you bought had already been built.
Yes, it is to a much lesser extent than buying new, but it certainly isn’t zero. And again, it only works on a small individual level.
It is a good thing to do, but it does not zero out the cost of producing (or running) the hardware.
The carbon is hard to account for in manufacturing. Solar, for example, is pretty close to being produced entirely with electric consumption and very little required CO2 output (except perhaps in the transport of silicon and other raw materials). The big energy draw for solar and battery is a kiln stage in both. Solar has to melt down the silicon which requires a high temperature furnace and batteries are basically "cooking" the raw materials onto their foil.
The math for solar is something like 1 to 4 years of generation before it pays back the manufacturing power debt. Batteries tend to be much shorter as they take less energy in their manufacturing process (with some hopeful techniques in the future significantly reducing that number).
Now, none of this is to contradict you, just putting the numbers out there. I completely agree that a server farm is likely to be far more efficient for hosting a website than home built solar powered pi. The CO2 emissions will be hard to beat, particularly if your cloud host resides in the PNW where power is nearly entirely renewable already.
BTW same is true for solar panels. Second-hand solar panels, with remaining efficiency of 70%-90% of the original rating, are really cheap. It's a perfect thing to reuse for a "greener hosting" hobby project.
Most of the environmental impact happens at the building of hardware, so putting even more websites in datacenter only increases environmental impact. All Capitalism has done here is completely forget that impact by telling you it's ok to do always more.
What we collectively need to do is not find a better tech, it's reduce the total amount of tech we use, and that starts with questioning our actual uses. We don't need 24/7 available websites, 90% availability is more than enough. In fact, more sites should only target 90% availability, and if we were serious about tackling this we'd look towards 1. using old computers to the death because they still can and 2. doing more offline-first. Putting your website in a datacenter is exactly what the Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) warns about. Its environmental impact keeps exploding year after year and it's not with that mindset that we'll make a dent in it.
(Remember, the environment is not a resource, so Capitalism doesn't care about it)
I think a more likely way of changing usage patterns is by actually pricing carbon cost into energy production and manufacturing via taxes. The costs of things are only so low because we are borrowing from the future. I don't think a mindset shift will happen under capitalism without the monetary cost of things increasing. And I don't think capitalism will change unless by collapsing, at which point we're too late anyway, and would come with much human suffering. I don't believe that capitalism is fundamentally broken, but I do believe that unchecked capitalism is. Regulation and taxes are required to manage its negative tendencies.
If we want to take it into consideration, we have to take the matter in our own hands, away from the State, away from capitalistic interests.
Yeah, it's only a 50W solar panel. The solar power could be upgraded to a 400W no problem and the issue you have will no longer exist.
Often people smart with a small system to get things figured out how they want it before adding more capacity. Seems reasonable, no?
Networking equipment shouldn't be much power, speaking from personal experience.
It can be on a small UPS, even one from Costco to run it all off battery, and then solar to refill.
It's be neat to have a digital ocean or equivalent that allows locating in data centers by energy source.
Of course this got posted on a sunny, cool and breezy morning in Boston. Sneaky!
No, it won't be the most efficient, but it's yours.
Archive of the website: http://web.archive.org/web/20200707101320/https://jewjewjew....
Code-wise, the only difference between the builds is the CSS setting the link color.
Would be so cool, if networking could also be kinda "self-hosted" and "free", like mesh-networks, or satellites, or smth.
I this this is cool, I know a couple folks who got homelabs on reddit who mainly use solar power due to the cost and want to go green.
Granted I doubt you could "farm" bamboo like trees or other plant. Given how fast section species of bamboo can grow, which is a big benefit in this hypothetical, you would probably need a ton of water and no matter how nutrient rich the soil is you'd probably deplete the soil after a few harvests.
Shame considering how fast growing and dense bamboo is.
Now, Low Tech Magazine also has instructions to convert a stationary exercise bike into a human powered generator, which you could build to add power during the winter :-)
I don’t think your cost comparison is fair between the rpi and hosting. I host my website on a £1/mo shared vps and for my energy costs that equivalent to running a low power server at home, ignoring all the other benefits of it being off-site.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
They do a lot of other sustainable web development[0] practices like letting you read offline, having incredibly small page sizes (always shown in the lower left corner), and dithering all their images[1] (which imo creates a cool effect)
[0] https://sustainablewebdesign.org/
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...
Hosting that is vastly more powerful than a RPI in the first place. And there are much cheaper VPS that costs only a dozen dollars a year, too, and can do a lot more than this rpi. No matter how you look at it this is not saving any money.
This should be "Lithium Ion Phosphate...", right?
How many have realized how much stuff can be hosted at home with availability levels not really far from most common datacenters?
The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
I doubt there’s a cement kiln, cattle farm or oil refinery within city limits.
City living brings efficiencies from operating at scale - fewer miles by car, block of apartments instead of single family homes.
> When I started this solar-powered website project, I wasn't trying to revolutionize sustainable computing or drastically cut my electricity bill. I was driven by curiosity, a desire to have fun, and a hope that my journey might inspire others to explore local-first or solar-powered hosting.
> The cost savings? Looking at our last electricity bill, we pay an average of $0.325 per kWh in Boston. This means the savings amount to $2.85 USD per year (8.76 kWh * $0.325/kWh = $2.85). Not exactly something to write home about.