Folding Forum

beer wrote:Hi
I am not sure I am putting this in the right section of message board. Sorry if it has eneded in the wrong place. And osrry for my bad english since it is not my native language.

Since folding@home consume large amount of eletrcity that is produced by Oil and coal that is producing CO2 that again can curse some form of cancer and other problems it feels like I am swining a double edge sword.

Therefore I will hear what you people are during about how you electricity is produced.

My working place has a small biogass reactor that produce nearly all our electricity and heat and I am in proces of switcing to a company that clamins that all the power they sell is produced by win mills (vindstoed.dk).

What else can one do to get green energy for folding and what are you during?

We have an energy from waste plant where i live that produces 6% of our electricity needs, the rest is imported tidal or nuclear energy from France. We only use oil when the link to France is down and we need to produce our own.

Personally i am thinking of looking at a solar panel install in a couple of years time

We've had long discussions on this before. Hopefully a mod will merge this with the existing topic so you can read all of the previous anawers.

For me, the green options were limited. So initially, I worked to reduce my electricity in other ways at least the same amount as used to fold. CFLs, more insulation, water heater blanket, even turning off lights at work to offset the power used at home. That way folding was only a single edged sword.

Practical actions taken by 7im; both at home and at work.

On a personal level, spending on electricity FAH, cover it with having left the smoking!

In any case, I live in a place where we produce as 90% of energy by renewable means; Costa Rica. We are a company that produces hydroelectric, wind, solar and thermal plants. And several projects are currently under construction.

Most of my electricity is from hydroelectric, so not a big CO2 footprint here. Not sure that CO2 reduction can have any material effect on the environment, in the amounts we are willing to do it, in any case... The ONLY way we can make a material reduction is to significantly reduce the population. For that, I've done my part by not having any children.

Still, I spend lots of $$ for new CFL and LED lights, 98% efficient gas furnace, etc. My Folding helps heat the office in the winter, and there's no air conditioning to overcome...

I think a good idea would be to 'retire' old folding machines, AKA ones that have a low GFLOPS/watt ratio. I had a 1.9 GHz Athlon XP running folding, but I gave it up because the points weren't worth the power draw....

It's an interesting concept. 7im's advice is on to it - do whatever you can to drop your consumption elsewhere. That means become more energy efficient and consuming less. A nasty secret about energy efficiency is the Jevons paradox, that when something (i.e. lighting) becomes more efficient, humans end up consuming over and above the efficiency gains, so the actual result is a net increase in consumption.

The other dirty secret is that a lot of 'green' tech is still relatively expensive carbon-wise, largely due to the higher consumption of resources such as rare earth minerals during the manufacturing offsetting any improvements in operational consumption.

That said, I live in an area where there is significant wind opportunities. It's actually normally a case of too much wind here. For years I have toyed with using a small wind turbine to power a DC power network but the cost is still too high.

With increasing numbers of utilities moving towards dynamic pricing, it would be great for there to be a tool that integrates F@H with power prices, shutting it down when prices (a proxy for demand) get too high. I believe you can do it with windows task scheduler, but a scheduler built into F@H is going to become increasingly beneficial.

I've seen several different discussions on Folding@home's energy consumption. One example is on the F@h article on Wikipedia, where a section was created in 2008 about the energy consumption and environmental impact of this project. It wasn't really appropriate for Wikipedia due to its inherit original research, synthesis of a conclusion, and general lack of supportive references, so I eventually was convinced to remove it. Here are two forms of it: here and here. There's also a paragraph in the last page of F@h's Executive Summary paper, which is available here but I think that information is a bit dated I'm afraid.

F@h aims to cure diseases. What's the electrical draw of hospitals for cancer/Alzheimer's/Parkinson's/virus patients? What's the electrical draw of MRI machines or other imaging technologies that are used to look for tumors? How about the consumption of the places that make chemotherapy drugs? Let's look at the other side of things for a bit.

F@h's overall energy consumption (and environmental impact if you want to take things one step further) I believe is an extremely difficult thing to accurately estimate. There are many, many factors involved.

The vast majority of my electricity is coal produced; some is gas turbine generated. Wind power generated in Utah all goes to California; wind power for Utah consumption (have to pay extra) is generated in Idaho; go figure.

The problem we have in the United States, as I see it, is the most cost effecient fuel for electricity production is coal; so to me, to counterbalance our research contributions, we need to minimize our electricity consumption in other areas. For our family, this means LED and florecent lights, short showers, lots of house insulation, attic fan pulling cool air out of basement through the house (minimizes A/C use), lower watt cpu (right now, 75 versus original 88 in desktop; 25 watt laptop), got rid of a 170 watt CRT TV and have an 42" plasma that uses 85 watts.

Fine tuning an OC (or underclock) for best PPD/W is one way to go green, too. Paragon's AMD Phenom X6 PPD Efficiency Achieved through Undervolt topic sets a nice example.

Napoleon wrote:Fine tuning an OC (or underclock) for best PPD/W is one way to go green, too.

And one of the most challenging too!

Agreed. As Paragon mentioned, finding a stable undervolt takes a lot of stability testing. But same goes for an extreme overclock as well. So, if you're bumping the voltages to wring every last PPD out of your folding rig(s), checking where you're going with PPD/W is worth considering. I keep a Kill-a-Watt handy whenever I dabble with overclocking, I've found it a great way to keep the OC within reason.