Exploiting the Solar Energy Surplus for Edge Computing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel approach to reduce cloud computing carbon emissions by utilizing surplus solar energy for private edge computing, demonstrating economic viability and technical feasibility.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for leveraging surplus solar energy for private edge computing, comparing revenue from leasing resources versus selling energy.

Findings

Model is economically viable

Technical feasibility demonstrated

Potential for reducing cloud sector emissions

Abstract

In the context of the global energy ecosystem transformation, we introduce a new approach to reduce the carbon emissions of the cloud-computing sector and, at the same time, foster the deployment of small-scale private photovoltaic plants. We consider the opportunity cost of moving some cloud services to private, distributed, solar-powered computing facilities. To this end, we compare the potential revenue of leasing computing resources to a cloud pool with the revenue obtained by selling the surplus energy to the grid. We first estimate the consumption of virtualized cloud computing instances, establishing a metric of computational efficiency per nominal photovoltaic power installed. Based on this metric and characterizing the site's annual solar production, we estimate the total return and payback. The results show that the model is economically viable and technically feasible. We finally depict the still many questions open, such as security, and the fundamental barriers to address, mainly related with a cloud model ruled by a few big players.