“The way things are going, in five years, the amount of renewable power wasted in California each year will be equivalent to the amount of power LA uses each year,” Barath Raghavan, co-author of the study, said in a media statement.
In Raghavan’s view, this state of affairs means that information batteries may have a role to play in countries’ greener future.
How they work
The main principle behind these devices is that when renewable energy is available in excess, it is used to speculatively perform computations in large, energy-intensive data centers. These data centers—from Google and Facebook to Hollywood movie rendering—consume 10 to 50 times the energy of a typical commercial building, according to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The stored computed results can then be used later when green energy is less plentiful.
“We had the…
Information batteries: the latest proposal to dethrone lithium-ion batteries
