I thought it would be a good idea to use the first blog entry to explain something about what we are going to achieve with Green Cloud.

The GreenCloud idea started off just over 12 months ago. Cloud computing has become the goto solution to solving peoples computing requirements.

That demand, however, is putting a lot of pressure on the electricity grids around the world. I’ve always found this image a great source of context as to just what we are talking about -:

Taken from this BBC Report

At the inaugural Green Software Foundation Summit event in London (June 2022) a presentation given by one of the delegates stating there would be a considerable of power increase - not decrease for data centers in the forseeable future.This isn’t to say that the Data Center designers and engineers are being frivolous - the problem is a tough one!

So we can see, cloud computing isn’t going anywhere soon. Its a growing industry and it isn’t without its own problems.

The problem of power usage is where GreenCloud can come to the rescue. Its incredibly easy to see how it works when you consider -:

The cost of electricity is increasing alarmingly Home owners are using Solar and Battery storage to mitigate these costs Computers are not getting slower Internet connections are only getting faster We put the compute power where the energy is created

Lets explore some of these in more detail.

The cost of electricity in the UK has risen sharply in the last 12 months. The move away from carbon intensive energy sources has created instability in the grid. The work required to effectively manage supply and demand has become a lot harder. During winter storms the UK’s investment into offshore wind starts to make sense, statistics from the grid show that we can produce a LOT of energy from the wind.

The problem is the ‘calm after the storm’.

The days after the storm show that we often revert back to carbon intensive solutions to power our grid. Following Twitter accounts like “@NationalGridESO” - are enlightnening on these sorts of situations. There are situations where we have too much energy in the grid! These should be the moments that we are storing the energy and offsetting it for the future. Novel ideas such as Gravitricity ( @gravitricity ) or ( @gh2org ) - and offsetting it for later use!

Looking back with hindsight to the days of cheap electricity that seem to be gone!

Home owners are looking to mitigate these increasing energy costs with Solar and Battery storage. These systems are expensive to install but these costs are broadly reducing through the increase in solar panel production. People who make this investment want to see a return. There are two main ways that you can get this in the UK -:

1. Feed In Tariff - the price you get paid for the energy you put back into the grid.

2. Generation - the now finished tariff for just generating electricity.

There are few actual services that you can subscribe to that can add to these income streams. GreenCloud is one. We pay our members for letting us use their computers that are powered by these renewable sources.

Moores law was created to chart the rise of the density of resistors on the silicon chip. It has more or less held true - but its fair to say that the last few years its been a little patchy as we’ve moved into the Nanometer fabrication model. With this increase in computational power at the disposal of the man on the street - the capabilities that computers have are starting to out strip the requirements of the people who are buying them. A modern iphone is more powerful than the mainframe that I used to run programs on at Staffordshire University for my HND ! This growing discrepancy between the computational power that we have at our disposal and what we actually need opens up new models of computing that can be realistically be achieved. GreenCloud fits into this. We envisage a future where people will set aside their computers to be able to be part of GreenCloud as and when they want.

To be able to earn a source of passive income from such practice and crucially in most cases not even know that this was happening is a game changer for personal computing going into the future.

We are only just getting going!