Let’s take it one step further.

If energy costs are really high then you want to use as  little of it as possible. So how about grabbing compute cycles from a grid that’s in the peak power zone for Solar? It’s cheap to send a few hundred gigs of data to be crunched, but its expensive to work on it. If you could do that, then you could have your capacity for computing literally follow the Sun. Someone has to work out the math on what’s cheaper – moving electricity, or moving the cycles, but my bets on the cycles because I think a mile of fiber costs less than a mile of High-voltage lines.

DC A wants to send a data crunching job offsite. It’s going to check the International Grid Exchange (I just made this up) for cheap capacity somewhere. DC B’s rate is 5.28$/teraflop hour because it’s in Iceland (which has cheap bandwidth and geothermal energy – oh and its cold). DC A’s rate for the same service is $8.22/teraflop hour, so DC A exports that task to DC B, and when it’s done DC A gets the resulting data set – or a trickle of data comes back over the tasks compute time.

Now we have a market where the most efficient winner gets the utilization. True utility computing, true scaling on demand, no market hype or hand waving.

You could even buy Grid ‘Futures’; You want to make sure you get the capacity, or you could prospect and buy chunks of time for resale later on. Basically turning computing into a true commodity.

I hope that’s one way to make computing a lot more efficient.

Unfortunately this has been obvious for quite some time to a majority of individuals who watch oil prices. Talk of peak oil makes peoples conspiracy theorist radar go ‘blip’, even though in any closed system with a finite set of resources you’re bound to run into a point where demand outstrips supply. At that point, the scarcity of your resource means higher prices, and higher prices means that people with low incomes have to either spend more money on those resources, or forego them altogether. That’s a problem for the 800 million people in the world who have their food delievered to them via famine relief. Not only is the cost of food production getting higher, but the cost of delivering that food half way across the planet being exacerbated, and it’s not Ok.

Groups responsible for famine releif are already asking for additional funding to help deal with the problem, but unless we can figure out a way to cheaply supply the impoverished with food, Christmas won’t be the only time you see starving children on Television. We have to find new ways to store and deliver energy, build highly efficient transportation systems, and consume less of those products.

Here’s a list of interrelated problems:

Oil is the primary ingredient in growing food – Its not sustainable and it destroys the soil

GM Foods are being heralded as answers – they’re not : Monocultures are bad

Transportation systems are grossly inefficient – We need a fast cheap rail system

We eat too much meat – Cows are fed using grain, but it costs more to grow a cow then you get out of eating a cow.

We drive too much – Ban the Hummer, embrace Electric, or better yet – ride a bike

The Suburbs Suck – Denser, walkable living arrangements are better for community and the environment.

Who’s smart enough to figure those out?