The Green Frog from Silicon Valley

Energy efficiency world gathers in Santa Barbara for summit and sheds light on opportunities to make a global impact

Santa Barbara has become over the years a place of reference for technology leaders, Government agencies, industry actors and utilities to meet and tackle big energy problems. One of the highlights of this year Summit on Energy Efficiency was a panel on the Department of Energy’s SunShot initiative: achieving $1 per Watt of installed solar power. At stake is for the US to regain a predominant place in the sector. The US produced 43% of solar cells in 1995, 21% in 2000 and only 6% in 2010.

Some argue in investor circles that the battle has already been lost to China, which has taken over as the largest producer of solar panels. Solar is a $70Bn market and is still dominated by residential deployment with 70% of the 16 Giga Watts of solar cells deployed last year around the world. Despite major solar farm projects like SunPower’s 1.4 GW plant in Malaysia, Germany remains the leader in deployed capacity thanks to a consistent energy policy and an effective network of installers.

Juniper goes optical at OFC and video is driving network architecture

Every year the fiber infrastructure community meets at OFC, and the 2011 edition in Los Angeles confirms the trend: a new wave of applications is driving the next generation systems. Unmaginable several years ago. Google and Facebook representatives are active in the scientific community and pushing for higher bandwidth.

Video is the main bandwidth driver and router vendors are working for instance on "cashing" video content closer to users for the likes of Netflix and YouTube. "Networks cannot scale if videos are downloaded each time accross the country. Popular video content has to be stored locally and updated regularly" commented Ori Gerstel, Principal Engineer at Cisco.

Considered a "cousin" market, mobility represents also a new area of growth for wireline networks that provide backhaul from the 3G/4G base stations. The growth of wireless networks and fiber infrastructure is seen more tightly intertwined. Overall, every body is jumping on the bandwagon of fiber as it offers unparalleled bandwidth capacity and power efficiency. 

Smart data centers: moving enterprise services to the cloud

Distributed computing has been coined with several names in the last ten years in search for a sustainable business model: utility computing, grid computing, and now cloud computing. The fundamental idea is that a set of computing resources at different locations can act as a single computer and share information accross multiple users. This has led to tremendous activity in the last two years as data centers provide an increasing number of offerings, primarily software as a service (SaaS).

Moving compute and storage resources to the cloud can also reduce the carbon footprint according to a report that Microsoft released earlier this month. The premise is that large data centers like Amazon can offer compute power and storage space at a higher efficiency than businesses thanks to economy of scale. The study led by Accenture and WSP Environment and Energy looked at the impact of IT products and Microsoft software services throughout the span of their implementations.