Storing Green Energy in Data for Future Use

We could be over the hump with renewables if the sun shone 24/7, and the wind was continuous and steady. But the problem is they are not, and we can’t always adjust our demand to the whims of nature. A scientist at USC Viterbi has been indulging in lateral thinking. What about storing green energy in data for future use, asks assistant professor in computer science there Barath Raghavan.

This Is Not Sci-Fi Fiction We Could Do It Now

Solutions to the whims of nature revolved around better, bigger and more batteries until now. However, Barath Raghavan’s fertile mind has been traveling in a different direction. What if, he says we could rearrange demand instead, like the computer game Tetris?

Until now we have been unable to do so with on-demand applications like big data centers, he continues. These consume as much energy as large office and apartments blocks. And as a result utilities have to dump surplus energy produced in the current moment.

‘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 Los Angeles uses each year,’ Barath Raghavan fears.

Storing Green Energy in Data Centers for Future Use

The young USC Viterbi School of Engineering scientist knows where he would start. He imagines ‘information batteries’ at data centers shifting computations to future moments when grid supply exceeds demand.

For instance, he explains YouTube data centers transcode more than 700,000 hours of videos to different resolutions every day. Now if their data center was responsive to moments when there was surplus energy, they could do those computations then.

Sure his suggestion for storing green energy in data for future use sounds obvious, but that’s the case with most flashes of human inspiration. Our brains find new ways to fit familiar pieces together. Just like that hard-to-put-down Tetris puzzle, that still occupies our busy minds in idle moments.