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Full Circle: Patriots Day 2013

Apr 16th, 2013
by dd.
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In Concord, Mass, where we live, Patriots Day dawns with Samuel Prescott crossing the Old North Bridge on horseback to announce that the British are coming. Since early in the morning minutemen from neighboring towns, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, Lincoln, and so on, have been walking towards Concord to join the Concord minutemen and British soldiers in a parade and ceremony. Even today the well-equipped and well-dressed British are in stark contrast to the small bands of minutemen in their 1770′s farm clothes.

It’s still amazing to think about. Groups of early Americans, minutemen, from different communities, individually choosing to leave home and family, standing together to fight against a professional army of unknown strength, battling tyranny and protecting their freedom. How must the Concord minutemen have felt as the saw the minutemen from the other communities, walking down the road to join them in the battle?

For many of us in Concord, the parade wraps up at a great time to make it to the Boston Marathon, especially when we have close friends or family running (my brother-in-law John had a fantastic run yesterday – congrats!). To be a part of the Marathon as a fan or participant, you understand that it is not about winning. It is a community event about human accomplishment, about a great city, and about coming together for a day to share and remember these things.

Of course, yesterday suddenly became bigger than Boston. We were all shocked by the unthinkable evil and the human devastation. We were despairing over the threat to our way of life by a foe of unknown capabilities.

But quickly, the America we’d celebrated earlier in the day began to show itself through the fog. People running towards the blast to help the wounded without thought for themselves. Emergency response and hospital personnel doing the amazing things that they do, tirelessly and without complaint. Bostonians helping out runners they’d never met, who hadn’t finished, and were separated from their belongings and families. Emails, tweets and calls from across the country: “Are you guys alright?” “We’re thinking of you” “We’re praying for Boston”.

Just as in 1775, the minutemen arrived, some from near by, and others from far away. And once again it started to feel possible to move forward, to take up the battle for what we, as Americans, stand for.

green-building

Personal Note

Our family had a fortunate day yesterday. My wife and I and two of our kids, along with a good number of my in-laws were down around the finish line for the early part of the afternoon. As I said, John had a great race, and we all headed our separate ways a little more than an hour before the explosions. My daughter was the closest, in Kenmore Square, and we were lucky to be able to quickly establish that she was all right.

May God bless everyone impacted here in Boston and beyond.

Posted in: history.

Running @ 50

Feb 12th, 2013
by dd.
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In December I hit two milestones: turning 50, and running 1,000 miles in a year for the first time in a decade. These weren’t totally unrelated – a few years earlier I’d seen 50 coming and decided I better pick up the exercise again. I’d been running regularly since I was in junior high, I knew I could do it even with a hard travel schedule, and I like the thinking time that runs provided, so it was a natural sport to re-engage with.

I wasn’t in bad shape, but somehow I felt like I was slowly losing altitude. A little heavier, a little creakier, a little slower. The problem was that every time I started to run more regularly, leg problems, mostly sore knees, would bring me to a halt within a couple of weeks.

Fortunately a series of partially related things got me over the hump.

Winter, “Born to Run”, and Flat Shoes

A couple of years ago I found I waimagess running relatively pain-free, despite the usual snow, slush and ice of a New England winter. I figured I was probably just running more gingerly or slowly in the elements, but I happened to read Christopher McDougall’s awesome book “Born to Run” at the same time. In addition to convincing me that it wasn’t absurd to try to keep running, it raised the question of whether the lack of pain was due to running differently in the muck than I would in the summer.

It seemed to me that I was landing more in the middle of foot in order to get a good grip, so when spring came I tried to keep with that foot strike. Like many runners I decided to try more “minimal” or “natural” running shoes, and was fortunate to be traveling to Boulder, CO 20157-2_1_490x300 regularly for the NEON board of directors, so could visit the Boulder Running Company. In addition to good advice, they will film your foot strike as you run on a treadmill, which is surprisingly revealing. Through a series of shoes I’m now running in Saucony Kinvara 3′s(in neon yellow!) and Saucony Xodus 3′s, both with a 4mm drop from heel to toe, and a moderate amount of support (I haven’t ever gone totally minimal yet).

The result is that over a couple of years, I’ve been able to dial-in a combination of stride and shoes that work for consistent running on the road and trails.

Trails and Nights

For track workouts on the junior high track team, Coach Pedersen would pile us in a van and drive us out to the woods. We’d do loops on single-track trails, wind sprints up hills, and just have a blast. High school cross-country was fun, but mostly on golf courses in southern Wisconsin, and it wasn’t the same.

As an adult, I’ve run on trails every once in a while, but when I started running regularly again, I decided to make an effort to get out on the trails frequently. 806c0ae5-ca38-4ca4-8462-b51a1ca35240 It’s as good as I remember, and I suspect that the irregularity of the trails has helped me get stronger, and also avoid the repetitive strides and pounding that come on pavement. There’s also no traffic, and its far more peaceful if you’re trying to work on a problem in your head while you run.

This year I added a new twist by getting a new headlamp and running on trails at night. I stick to trails that I know, and find those runs much different, but as rewarding as the trail runs during the day. I think my favorite these days is trail runs, at night and on the snow.

Time to Fly

The last piece of the puzzle has been totally random. Even though I could run 5 or 6 days a week pain-free, I was having trouble mixing in longer runs over 5 miles or so. My legs would just feel pounded as the run went on, and I’d pay for it for the next 2 or 3 days.

I’d seen a picture of Hoka One One sneakers in Trial Runner magazine, and they looked crazy. But back in Boulder on a trip, the guys urged me to give them a try, and I was intrigued. I decided to give myself 4 more months to get comfortable in my longer runs, but I couldn’t break through. So after doing my homework on the web, I picked up a pair of Stinson B Evo’s on my next trip to Boulder. mafatadetail-shoes

The bottom line is that these shoes are a blast. You can bomb through the woods, cruise on double track and pavement, and the huge landing pad and all of the foam do the trick with regards to wear and tear on the legs. Remarkably, I feel like my natural stride in the Hokas and the Saucony’s are almost identical, despite their huge number of physical differences.

Hoka’s motto is “time to fly”, which I thought was hilarious when I first saw the shoes. But at least once per run it feels like you’re flying, especially in the woods.

Onward

I’ve started the New Year strong, and the miles keep on flowing by. I haven’t set any particular goals, and I’m not feeling real compelled to — I’m just happy to be getting out.

Posted in: sports.
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More on the Failure of Airports

Jan 27th, 2013
by dd.
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Seth Godin had a great post today, “Eleven Things Companies Can Learn from Airports”, on some of the ways and reasons that airports are a horrible customer experience.

I would add number 12: the organizations involved in the airport all have a fundamentally different measure of performance than you do as a customer. They care solely about bandwidth, and you care about latency. Their goal is to get as many people through the airport at lowest cost as possible. If you can add another stage to the process but get more people through, that’s fine.

Your goal is to get through the airport in as little time as possible. This is made worse by the huge variability. Will the main garage be full, and I’ll get sent to a remote lot to wait for a bus? Will there be a line to check-in? At TSA? How far away will my gate be? How long will it take my baggage to come out?

The difference of attitude was right out in the open at SFO a number of years ago. There was a message for a few months on the rental car shuttles: “Due to airport construction, please return your car at least 2 hours prior to your flight.” Translated this means: “We do not recognize your time as having any value, and this message serves to absolve us of any excessive delays you may encounter.”

Posted in: business.
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Creating the Manufacturing University: More Thoughts

Jan 15th, 2013
by dd.
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I was glad to see Rob Atkinson at ITIF highlight the relationship between our declining role in worldwide manufacturing and our education system in his post Creating the Manufacturing University.

While lethargic jobs growth and loss of manufacturing overseas will always attract attention, they belie a seemingly great paradox: there are, today, over a half million open, US manufacturing jobs that companies can’t find qualified workers to fill. But when you read stories with quotes from hiring managers, its not such a mystery: there’s a big gap between the potential workers our education system is producing and the requirements of today’s US manufacturers.

Part of this gap is coming from the changing nature of US manufacturing. We should hope that our economy never gets to the point where we are a leader in cheap labor. Instead, the stories of companies who have chosen to manufacture here tell the tale of smart machines coupled with smart, agile workers. You manufacture here when you want a tight coupling of designers to people building the product, high quality, agility to adapt to customer demand, and a cost that’s reasonable.

Filling these jobs doesn’t require just any motivated individual, but one with some STEM training, and ability to work in a team and thrive in a highly dynamic environment. This segues back into our education system, and Rob’s proposal for a series of US Manufacturing Universities, based on federal grants, and with a focus on innovation and churning out US manufacturing PhD’s.

This proposal was a total surprise to me, as I was expecting him to go in a different direction. The open jobs aren’t for half a million PhD candidates. They’re looking for folks like I described above: some might have a 4-year college degree, others an associate degree, and others might have augmented their high school education with some job-specific training. And when I think of the programs we need to replicate and support through policy and funding, I think of Dan Swinney’s amazing work at Austin Polytech (High School) in Chicago, the job-ready training provided by on-line universities and community colleges across the country, and the upgrades to our K-12 system that are required to fill these programs and many more like them.

But I’ve learned over time not to discount Rob’s perspective too easily, and I think I’m seeing where he’s trying to go. At some point a good fraction of our population in this country (I’ll call them the “professional class”) disconnected from our manufacturing system. I suspect that it first started with a product disconnect a few decades ago (“These Detroit cars are crap”), and once we emotionally got over that, it wasn’t so traumatic to see the work go elsewhere as well. We got comfortable buying cars, appliances, TVs and stereos with unusual names, and don’t blink an eye today when our most iconic, American-design products have zero percent of content made in the US.

But to regain momentum in manufacturing, we need a full ecosystem, from shop workers up to world-class research and design, and that requires getting our professional class to re-engage. We need our entire education system, from K-12 through university presidents and high profile STEM professors, making manufacturing a priority, and working with the private sector to push forward on a common path.

Having understood this I’d go a step farther, and suggest that not only are we missing a generation of manufacturing researchers, but we’re also missing a generation (or two) of manufacturing-savvy business executives. We need to reintroduce operations management into our MBA programs and stop treating manufacturing like a cost center. If we have to spend a little time on Black-Scholes, I think that will be OK.

Relaunching a whole bottom-to-top manufacturing ecosystem sounds like a pretty audacious goal, but we have key elements in place already: motivated job-seekers, market pull from industry (including a new wave of US product startups) and market pressure in education. Hopefully these can combine with some well-placed, thoughtful nudges from government and grow the flicker of renewed US manufacturing.

Posted in: policy.
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Let’s Get Serious About Energy

Dec 24th, 2012
by dd.
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Were you outraged at the Department of Energy over the long-term lack of electricity to millions of Americans following hurricane Sandy? Are you waiting for Secretary Chu’s explanation of why 40% of the 2012 corn crop is going to ethanol, raising food prices during an economic slump? Do you follow DOE’s positions on the Keystone XL pipeline or the renewal of the Wind Production Tax Credit?

I can confidently say the answer is ‘No’, since no one I know believes the DOE plays a serious role in US energy strategy and execution.

Serious Issues, No Leadership

The most startling part of the Bipartisan Policy Center‘s call for national energy policy (“The Executive Branch and National Energy Policy: Time for Renewal”) is not the observation that DOE is not leading US energy strategy, which is clear. The startling part is the extent to which every other part of the federal government has their hand in energy strategy.

This would be fine if energy was a quiet, stable backwater of national interest. But in President Obama’s first term alone we’ve had the Fukushima nuclear disaster, radical changes in Mideast politics, the Deepwater Horizon spill, dramatic changes in fossil fuel extraction and viable North American sources, a hugely expensive and minimally successful political push for electric vehicles, an unexpected drop in US GHG emissions to 1992 levels, and a hurricane who’s destruction and human impact were massively compounded by a prolonged lack of electricity to millions.

Energy is a serious issue for the well-being of our citizens, economy and national security. While we have huge challenges, we fortunately have huge opportunities as well. We can no longer afford a DOE that believes “all of the above” is an actual strategy, and compensates by ceding actual strategy and execution to “all of the above” federal agencies.

Here is my roadmap for getting serious about energy.

Part 1: Be Clear on the Goal

Part of what’s confounding about our inability to drive a coherent national energy strategy is that the goal is not a mystery. We can argue about their relative emphasis, but the components of the target are clear:

Cheap, clean, reliable and secure energy.

Interestingly, not only are these targets easy to list, for the most part they can be quantified, and we can see if we’re making progress. It is time for a factual, human-readable, annually produced “State of US Energy” report that shows whether we are making progress in each of these areas.

Step 2: Create a Home for US Energy Strategy

It would be natural for DOE to be the home for US energy strategy (ala the Department of Education), while the [Bipartisan Policy Center][BipartNov2012] makes a strong case for a National Energy Council (ala the National Security Council).

While there’s probably good arguments for each of these approaches, I actually don’t care. At this point the need for a stable home is more important than the specific address, and the President needs to identify where it is, and make sure it has the authority and leadership it needs.

Step 3: Make DOE Mission-Driven

Regardless of where US Energy Strategy lives, DOE still has an important role to play, and changes are necessary for them to effectively fulfill their role.

Much has been written at the Breakthrough Institute, ITIF and elsewhere about the ongoing need for energy innovation. While the Energy Innovation Tracker shows us that energy innovation spending at DOE is not insubstantial, it, not surprisingly, suffers from the “all of the above” strategy currently employed at the agency. DOE’s huge number of point projects lack an overarching strategy and system for making decisions.

In contrast, DOD approaches energy with a mission-driven mindset, setting priorities and challenging DOD researchers and private industry to meet those challenges. A perusal of the DOD Energy Blog provides a glimpse into the effect of a mission-driven mindset. Instead of trying to pick winning technologies and companies, the DOD challenges public and private research, with the rewards of big contracts to those who can deliver.

Under Arun Majumdar’s leadership ARPA-E began to emulate this method of driving innovation, but ARPA-E represents only a few percent of DOE’s innovation budget, and even less of its overall budget. Given the clear goals outlined above, DOE should be able to adopt this style of decision making more broadly through the organization.

Step 4: New DOE Leadership

Secretary Chu is clearly a brilliant man and a world-class expert on the science of energy. But mission-driven organizations understand that there are different leadership roles to play, and a qualified CEO is almost never qualified to be a Chief Scientist, and vice versa.

DOE needs a new Secretary who is up to the task of turning DOE into a mission-driven organization capable of establishing and carrying out an immense, innovation-driven program to drive the US towards cheap, clean, reliable and secure energy.

It’s Not Easy, But It’s Not Rocket Science

Our national energy goals, challenges and opportunities are not hazy, vague concepts that are difficult to quantify. We know that rising energy prices hurt businesses and our most vulnerable citizens. We know that our current energy system has damaging impacts on human and planetary health. We know that Americans and the economy suffer when energy supply is unreliable. And we know that having critical parts of our energy infrastructure and supply in the hands of anti-American or unstable political systems threaten our way of life.

The goals are clear, and moving towards them requires focus, investment and innovation. Fortunately when America gets serious, we have shown ourselves to be unequaled in meeting these types of challenges. The four steps outlined in this document provide a blueprint for starting down that path.

Posted in: energy.
Tagged: ·

Kindle Fire HD Notes and Tip

Nov 26th, 2012
by dd.
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We got our daughter a Kindle Fire HD for her 12th birthday. So far its a fantastic fit for her needs: enough available games to keep her happy, access to Netflix and her videos and music. The latter two are a little clumsy (certainly not iTunes-caliber), but so far the differences don’t seem like a big deal to her. At the end of the day you always end up manually ending space on these devices, and iTunes doesn’t help that process much.

The one really confusing thing is how to get your own videos onto it. We have Handbrake’d a lot of our DVD’s for the iPad, and my daughter wanted these on her Fire. There are lots of hints for older Kindle Fires, but none of them proved useful. Here’s what you need to do (sorry, Mac only; some of this may be useful on Windows):

  1. Install a copy of Android File Transfer on your Mac.

  2. Hook up your Kindle via USB and open Android File Transfer.

  3. Drag any iPad compatible to the Movies folder on the Kindle. So far any .mp4 and .m4v files have worked fine.

  4. Launch the Personal Videos app (you might have to search for it to find it). The videos will not show up in the standard Videos app, only in the Personal Videos app.

The screen on the HD looks fantastic!

Note that this only works for files which are not encumbered by digital rights management (DRM) of some system or vendor. If you bought a song or movie on iTunes or other you’ll have to do some additional work to get a version that the Fire will recognize.

Posted in: tech.
Tagged: ·

Thanks, Dr. Pielke!

Nov 18th, 2012
by dd.
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This week Roger Pielke Sr. retired his weblog. I just wanted to thank him for the effort he had put into it. I suspect he informed and influenced far more people than he knows.

I’ve done professional work in both sustainability and energy, and have been personally compelled to stay on top of climate science. Having a career of experience with data, complex systems and computer models, it’s been obvious to me for awhile that a) the climate is a very complex system, and we don’t fully understand it, b) the data we have about our climate covers a very small window of time, and while the quality of our data continues to improve, simple questions like “what’s the average temperature” are non-trivial and prone to unexpectedly high error bars, and c) predicting the climate future relies on very complex computer models, that have not yet shown that we should trust all of their output.

With this personal perspective and a polarized environment where both sides routinely make absolute claims about non-absolute results, Dr. Pielke was a source of perspective and a guide through important, recent papers and results. I valued his open-mindedness and intellectual honesty; he was never afraid to hear opposing views or give them visibility.

Dr. Pielke recorded his core beliefs here – they’re worth a read. One thing of note is his opinion that our strong focus on GHG emissions is keeping us from giving other human impacts on the environment their due – something which deserves attention.

Thanks again, Dr. Pielke, for the past work on your blog!

Finally, we are fortunate to still have Roger’s son, Roger Jr. blogging regularly. I am a Breakthrough Fellow with Roger Jr. and alway learn from him whenever I get to read him on the web or interact with him in person.

Posted in: science.
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Rebuilding After Sandy: Can We Do Better On Energy?

Nov 8th, 2012
by dd.
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Over at Huffington Post my friend Bernard David asks an important question: As we rebuild after Sandy, what are we going to do different than before? Are we going to just rebuild what was there previously, or consciously decide to make changes that will reduce the impact of future natural disasters?

While the debate will continue about the degree to which Sandy was or wasn’t influenced by human-induced climate change, for the purpose of this discussion I join Roger Pielke, Jr and others in arguing that it doesn’t matter. There have always been storms as strong and stronger than Sandy hitting our eastern seaboard, and there will be more in the future. In addition to coastal storms, we will surely face earthquakes, blizzards, and other types of natural disasters. And as Roger says, “There are more people and more wealth in harm’s way”.

The important question how we respond to that reality.

Things We Can Change

Clearly we need to examine the design of our building and transportation infrastructure, looking at potential changes in zoning, design standards, building codes, and insurance. Each of these has policy components at various levels of government. These policy questions also raise important questions of personal freedoms and responsibility: Do we allow people and organizations to make risky decisions about what they build where? And to what extent does the rest of society pay to help mitigate those risks?

While I, in no way, mean to minimize the suffering, health impacts and economic woes that resulted from damage to buildings and transportation, I would argue that the failure of our energy infrastructure lies at the heart of the dramatic breadth and depth of Sandy’s impact. We need to seriously question why so many people were without power, and why that power was (or still is, in many cases) out for so long.

In order to appreciate how different things could have turned out, imagine the ideal energy scenario where no one had lost power from Sandy. The number of people impacted by the storm drops dramatically, and our ability to clean up and recover from the other impacts is massively improved. This scenario isn’t total fantasy: Andy Revkin highlights successes amidst the chaos at NYU and Co-op City using natural gas co-generators which produced both heat and electricity for these facilities.

We need to use the tragedy of Sandy as motivation for a major program to disaster-proof our energy infrastructure. A logical approach would have local and national components.

Local Energy Resilience Program

Every city has its own energy reality. The in-place infrastructure, the mix of sources, the possible threats, and the possibilities for backup and alternative energy are all unique. As a result, each city needs to do its own assessment and improvement plan. That’s not to say that cities and regions don’t share challenges and can’t learn from each other, but in the end the possibilities and responsibilities have to be locally owned.

Each city needs to understand the vulnerabilities of its current infrastructure, and plot a strategy for addressing these vulnerabilities through smarter processes, use of technologies and contingency plans. To start, every municipality should have real, public targets and goals: If disaster X happens, how many lose power, and how soon is it back on. Same for disaster Y, disaster Z, etc.

These targets then become the basis for an improvement plan. How much better can we make things a year form now? Three years from now? Twenty years from now? Some elements of these plans will be public works projects, but others will be process improvements, new elements of contracts with private utility companies, etc.

It is important that these targets be public, and that they be publicly evaluated after each disaster. If a NYC public goal had stated that power would be restored in lower Manhattan after a direct hit from a tropical storm in up to two weeks, would the public stand for that? Might this have caused improvements to be put into place before Sandy?

Finally, there is an economic element of this effort that goes beyond insurance. Increasingly companies understand their reliance on energy irregardless of their product or service, and a reliable supply of clean energy at a reasonable cost is a serious component of business location decisions. For example, talk to anyone who plans data centers, and you’ll understand that energy resilience is not an abstract concept.

National Energy Resilience Program

While the detailed plans lie at a local level, the federal government has two important roles to play: addressing extra-municipal infrastructure, and ongoing research and advanced technology development.

While cites need to take the lead on their own resiliency plans, some issues are outside the realm of any specific locality, so need federal attention. For example, the interstate power grid is a critical resource, so naturally any issues there cascade down to the local level.

Like the local resiliency programs, the core activity is to understand failure modes, set public targets for downtime in different scenarios, and lay out a roadmap for improving those targets. In this case the targets are a vital input to the local resiliency plans. For example, if the target downtime for long-distance grid power is 6 hours, a city should be factoring this into its own targets, and how to improve them over time with backup power and other techniques.

In addition to extra-municipal resiliency, the federal government has a significant opportunity to provide new, improved options to localities by supporting research and advanced technology development in support of resiliency. For example, is NYU’s natural gas-powered backup system a model for other organizations? How can that system be made more cost-effective and reliable? Are there even better ideas?

While many of DOE’s charters involve vague goals, this has the potential to be a focused, mission-driven activity of the same nature as DOD’s increasingly successful energy investments. In any large organization, projects with clear, measurable goals will always make more headway in the long-run compared to projects with vague, high-level goals.

A Closing Thought

While I’ve discussed the need to address energy resiliency from a local and federal government perspective, Sandy should be a wakeup call for every organization and household. NYU didn’t rely on solely on NYC for its energy supply, and some are going a step farther: The New Republic calls for moving the entire grid to an Internet-style, distributed energy system.

Fortunately the planning blueprint I’ve laid out earlier applies equally well down to the individual household level. Evaluate your vulnerabilities, set targets, and layout a roadmap for improving them.

If individuals and private organizations of all types put their own plans into place, that will naturally put pressure on cities and the federal government to have clear, public targets and plans for improvement.

Posted in: energy.
Tagged: · ·

The Challenge of Efficiency Investments

Nov 2nd, 2012
by dd.
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One question I often get is why companies don’t make efficiency update to their datacenters more regularly. Part of the answer is the complexity and associated fear of modifying an operating IT infrastructure, which is especially challenging in 24×7 environments. However, there’s another set of issues.

Here’s a typical scenario:

  • A company buys energy efficient capital equipment now, which has a certain tax/accounting treatment
  • The resulting savings come down the road in the form of reduced operating expenses, which have a different tax/accounting treatment

There are three natural problems with this inside companies:

  1. The most basic issue is that the company needs to be in a position to be able to spend money today in order to save it in future years. Company cash flow challenges and investor pressure frequently lead to arguments against doing this, so it often comes down to a leadership decision.

  2. The second issue is the split incentive, where the investment in efficiency is spent in group A’s budget, and the savings come to group B’s budget. Clearly, Group A needs an additional incentive to do this project, either a mandate from above, or an accounting kickback of some kind. This is even trickier when Groups A and B aren’t part of the same company, as is often the case in today’s complex real estate ownership and management structures.

  3. Given the differences in accounting between capital and expenses, organizations frequently manage these through separate and distinct budget mechanisms. For example, a corporate group typically gets an annual budget for capital and separate one for expenses, and you can’t move money back and forth between them. Getting exceptions to this often involves the finance leadership of the organization, so is not something that is casually pursued. This is not just a corporate problem, but also frequently found in governments and projects that they fund. For example, a university IT leader complained to me a few years back about how the federal grants they were operating under prohibited making efficiency tradeoffs because of the different categories of funds and restrictions on how they could be used.

Each of these cases can be overcome by someone who sits high up in the organization deciding to make an exception, or changing a policy to simplify certain classes of efficiency investments. But that requires a combination of motivated and enlightened leadership coupled with empowered change agents in the organization, and personally I haven’t seen that combination occur in many places. And as mentioned above, this is especially tricky when multiple organizations are involved (e.g. the government and a university) and there is no shared, common leadership.

In the case of datacenters, we see companies in very different situations. In the case of a Google or Facebook, the datacenter and the company’s business are tightly coupled. In contrast many organizations see IT as an auxiliary service within their company that supports their main business, but is separate. This typically manifests itself in a CIO and IT organization reporting to the CEO, separate of the “business functions”. It’s not hard to imagine that the former organizations would be able to bridge common efficiency funding challenges more easily than the latter organizations.

Posted in: energy.
Tagged: · ·

Data Center Energy, Revisited

Oct 1st, 2012
by dd.
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Knowing my longstanding interest in computing and sustainability, a number of people sent me the NYT article, Power, Pollution and the Internet on the inefficiencies of data centers (or as the link to the article says, “data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html”).

Here are my thoughts on some of the points raised by the article, and a closing thought on the messenger itself.

Do data centers use lots of energy? Absolutely. The number in the article says that data centers sustain around 30 billion watts, which I won’t argue with. But while that is a lot of energy, it’s only around 0.2% of the sustained, worldwide energy use (~ 17 trillion watts) or 1.3% of the worldwide electricity use. On the other hand, datacenter energy use is growing rapidly (at one point it was doubling every 5 years or so), so even though its small it does deserve ongoing attention.

Are data centers becoming more efficient? Yes. I don’t have data, but by the traditional measure of units of work divided by units of energy, data centers have gained more efficiency in the last 10 years than any other industry. Part of it is due to the ongoing improvements in silicon (captured elegantly by Moore’s Law), but there have been major improvements in datacenter design, cooling, power distribution, system utilization (through virtualization and other technologies), and other optimizations. There has been lots of healthy exchange among data center professionals which has raised awareness and spread knowledge of best practices.

Wait a minute, I thought data center people were all secretive. Some are, and for very good reason: data centers can represent a huge amount of value in a very small amount of space, so people are nervous about protecting those locations from a wide variety of physical, electrical and digital threats. However, I found the overall industry to be very open, with lots of useful information changing hands between companies about best practices, etc. The Open Computing Project and Green Grid are examples of publicly visible activities, and there is a lot more going on among professionals of different companies behind the scenes. This is an area where the NYT author had to work hard to ignore reality in order to support the point he wanted to make.

Is backup power a problem? Definitely, but mainly because there is no reliable alternative to diesel generators for long-term (more than a few minutes) backup electricity. Hospitals use the same thing (a future NYT expose?) and for the same reasons. This also leads to the next question….

Do all of these applications and databases really need this much backup power and instant-on capability? First, there is a practical issue that its hard to go through a datacenter and decide what you can turn off. My family reunion pictures may be on the same disk as the photos that show up on nytimes.com, so that I may be happy if they power the disk down periodically, but the general manager of the Times online business would be really upset. This kind of interconnectedness and complexity make it difficult to really turn things off. Second, there is a great opportunity for gathering work into as few of systems as possible, and turning off the rest until they are needed. Virtualization tools are advancing quickly, and some of the better run facilities are doing this to some extent already, so I think you’ll see much more if it in coming years. Third, this is really a question of perceived value and who gets to make the choices. Every operating data center is being paid for by someone who has decides each month with their wallet that this degree of insurance is worth it.

But couldn’t these people save money with better designs and operating models? They can, and they surely will over time. Moreover, given the growth of data centers it is vital that they continue to become more efficient. As I said, this industry has made huge strides already, but there’s a growing culture of awareness, measurement and improvement. Its useful to remember that most of this equipment has a useful life of 4-6 years, so its natural to expect some time lag before best practices role out everywhere. (Note that compared to most other things that people spend serious money on, this is actually a pretty short useful lifetime. So it is a partial explanation of why IT can get efficient faster than others.)

The information technology industry says it is making the world more sustainable. Is that reality or hype? I think there are two layers to this question. First, I have made the argument for years that it is impossible to envision a future society with simultaneously higher standard of living and greater sustainability, that does not have broader use of information technology than we have today. Technology continues to help us improve the processes we have, dematerialize goods and services, and rethink our economy. However, information technology is a tool, not a service in and of itself. The technology doesn’t make us more sustainable, its only certain applications of the technology that does, and those application are done by the IT industry’s customers, not the industry itself (note that I said “certain applications” – most uses of IT are not net sustainability gains). So even at Sun I was very wary of taking credit for the application of IT, and argued against that viewpoint in works like the SMART 2020 report.

Didn’t you have one last comment? As a Chief Sustainability Officer I developed the habit of taking sustainability critiques and applying them to their authors. For example, I used to wonder what basis Gartner had for critiquing our sustainability plans, when they didn’t have any themselves.

In this case that analysis is almost absurdly funny. Let’s review the main themes of the article with respect to The New York Times Company. Sustainability: the Times’ primary business model today is to cut down trees, grind them up to make newsprint and drive them to stores and homes in the middle of the night using a large fleet of vehicles. It is broadly agreed on the Internet that the Sunday Times results in 60,000 to 75,000 trees being cut down each week. The company could move to full digital delivery, but doesn’t have a business model to support that, so keeps chopping down trees. Utilization: only a tiny fraction of what the Times delivers to customers is read. A major fraction of the trees they chop down are used to print ads that their readers don’t actually want. Transparency: the Times itself has no sustainability report, no report of electricity usage, and no environmental impact statement. The only thing on their social responsibility webpage is marketing fluff.

I see that this is the first in a series for the Times – I’ll be looking forward to reading it and digging up more info on them also.

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