In Finland its completely Baltic from about October to April. So it is that they make the best of the Scandinavian Summer and the entire workforce downs tools for July and as much of August as they can get away with.
So it is that the pages of the Trumpet have been neglected whilst I observed the Scandinavian summer holiday habit. I've divided my time between the yearly Estonian holiday with Mrs. Ferry and the cost centres, then the Microsoft Partner Conference in Denver, CO.
Throughout the summer I was struck by the increasing awareness and press comment on energy issues and global warming. Even in the USA, Mr. Bush has finally taken an interest and called a conference in Washington to discuss how carbon emissions can be capped, although in a typical Bushism it conflicts with the UN's own climate change conference up the road in New York.
Of course the President's changing mood is as much about energy security as about reducing emissions. Western society is a global patio heater burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow, and much of the global energy supplies are not under U.S. control. Mr. Putin has maneuvered Russia into a powerful position where it can hold net energy importers to ransom , and recently annexed an oil rich area half the size of Europe under the North Pole. Meanwhile Mr.Bush is exploring Mars.
The political desire for energy independence was in evidence during my trip to Estonia this year. No doubt wary of the Russian clout wielded over Georgia and Ukraine last year when Russia turned off the gas taps when it was -10 outside, Estonia is at pains to reduce the dependence on Russian gas supplies. Currently it generates 2.5% of its requirement from Wind energy, but is lucky to have oil shale reserves which meet about 75% of its energy requirements. However, an ambitious project to erect a wind farm in the Baltic sea to the NorthWest of the beautiful isle of Hiiumaa will have a capacity of 1GW from 200 big windmills, and be connected to Baltic capitals Tallinn, Stockholm and Helsinki. That's about the capacity of your average nuclear power station, and should fill the gap nicely to ensure that Estonia does not share the Ukraine's chilly fate as an energy hostage of the Kremlin.
Several small countries long ago realized that a forward-looking energy policy is vital to national security, like Denmark (75% wind) and Finland (nuclear and biomass, lots of trees in Finland). Sadly Scotland's has thus far failed to take advantage of the staggering opportunity from renewable energy capacity and the remaining North Sea reserves - the UK is a net importer of energy, relying on an extension lead from the French (80% nuclear) power stations, and foreign gas and coal supplies.
But the trouble with wind is that it doesn't always blow....
This is a shame, as if these Wind Energy plants were spinning at maximum capacity all the time, they would be ideal to meet societies base load power requirements. Base load requirements refer to the always-on power requirements, ignoring the peaks of energy usage when everyone switches on the kettle in the morning. Computing and high-tech devices left switched on are making an ever increasing contribution to these requirements. According to Colin Pykett in Physics World devices in the home on standby (such as PCs, DVD players, Freeview set top boxes, even Microsoft Home Servers) typically contribute to a household standby power usage of around 100W. Multiply by the number of households in the UK, and you need 2GW of capacity just to keep the green LED switched on your flatscreen telly. That's another 2 coal-fired power stations!
As Web 2.0 makes its dramatic effect on society and business, consider also the growing requirements of the computing power in Internet datacentres. Society expects these resources to be available 24/7, which translates to huge requirements for the energy inefficient server rooms (I blogged on this back in March). The effect of rising energy costs now drives AMD and Intel to compete based on performance-per-watt and energy efficiency rather than absolute speed. AMD recently stole the moral high ground by announcing low power quad core chips which are backwards compatible with Opteron architectures but with 25% more performance-per-watt than the nearest Intel chip. Much of the energy requirement in the server room is waste - server power supplies are typically only 80% efficient, and with current hardware/software processors don't use much less energy when not fully utilised.
Microsoft's Bill Laing, GM of the Server division and a Scottish ex-pat, recently claimed that Windows Server 2008 (the artist formerly known as Longhorn) should knock a further 20% off power requirements. Firstly through Virtualisation technologies, processors will be more fully utilised. Server core installation means that superfluous processes are trimmed away for a given physical or virtual OS image, reducing processor load and power usage. Finally by better taking advantage of the AMD and Intel processor P-state features, the OS can dynamically flick the processor into a lower power usage state during short periods of lower utilisation.
Which brings us back to Hiiumaa, Estonia and wind farms. All the above adds up to a growing base load power needs to keep the economy ticking over. Airtricity, who operate many wind farms in Scotland, Ireland, US and mainland Europe, have an idea for how Wind Energy could address this, and overcome the vagaries of the weather. They have an ambitious plan to build a European Supergrid. The basic idea is that as it is always blowing somewhere in the weather systems of continental Europe, electricity can be transported to regions of demand to support Europe's base load power needs - and ultimately create an energy trading network providing 30% of the continents power.
Before any Electrical Power Engineers cry foul, there are some technological advances which make this viable. In the past it has been inefficient to transmit power over the long distances between countries. This is because the conventional High Voltage AC power lines become less efficient over long distances, and generally start to peg out after around 200km. Instead Airtricity plan to use High Voltage DC lines, which remain over 90% efficient after 1000km. That this can now be achieved economically is all down to Thyristor Valves. I believe these were used along with the Flux Capacitor in the construction of the Back to the Future time-travelling DeLorean, and if you are interested in the science, take a look at this white paper.
Come to think of it, could it be viable to take DC straight to the billions of devices which use it (like all PCs, servers and consumer electronic devices) rather than wastefully convert 240V AC to 5 or 12V DC in billions of inefficient power supplies? Many companies, including Rackable systems the DC powered server supplier, and Moixa energy Ltd, who brought the USB battery to market, and seem to think so.
