[Starlink] Reducing Eenergy Consumption and Carbon Foot Print of Satellites Network

[Ulrich Speidel]

Ah yes. About 10 years ago, we tried to lower our carbon footprint a 
little by joining my local powerline company's pilot solar project. The 
deal: A small amount upfront, then a monthly fixed-price lease for a 
12.5 year contract, and we get a 5 kWp solar array, inverter, and 
battery. We own all the power it produces - they get the benefit of us 
helping them with their peak load shedding (we've got a lot of infill 
housing, making life harder for those poor feeder cables from the 
1960's). The whole system is supplied by a US company and controlled via 
an AWS server.

The first year was an odyssee: The system wouldn't supply us in the 
morning, instead charging the battery to the brim, just to do an 
emergency power dump into the grid during the afternoon, now draining 
the battery so we had to bring in power again at night. Why? The control 
software didn't turn the inverter on until power usage in the house 
exceeded 800W, so it could avoid inefficient conversion. Our base load 
was 500W. Well, eventually I convinced them that an inverter running at 
only 85% efficiency was still going to let me use more of my own 
electrons than one that was hardly running at all, and the problem was 
fixed by giving me a custom schedule. And I'd tried to be smart to trim 
my house down to minimal power use before we got the solar...

Fast forward May this year. Web UI starts showing strange system 
behaviour. Being a cranky customer, the support engineer at the lines 
company knows to take my complaints seriously and resets our system. 
Problem continues. He asks for patience. Then he indicates that an 
announcement is forthcoming. They've lost contact with the company in 
the US and nobody is processing support tickets there. Turns out the 
company went broke and fired all its staff. Our lines company have 200 
units in town like ours. They're now unsupported and, for safety 
reasons, need to be turned off. A long wait for a solution commences. 
They're working with the receiver and other customers to see what can be 
salvaged. To no avail.

So they've pulled out, to their credit quite graciously. We get to keep 
the panels (ours were swapped against new and slightly more powerful 
ones the other year under warranty), they take battery and inverter, 
never to be seen again, and pay us a few hundred bucks for early 
termination. I get to build my own system - yay!

What it shows is that building systems for a 10+ year lifespan isn't 
trivial when they rely on large software components that need to be 
maintained, patched, bloats and ages. I mean, who doesn't love a smart 
home? But a lot of today's smart homes will be tomorrow's homes with the 
technical equivalent of dementia.

On 29/11/2024 1:58 am, David Lang via Starlink wrote:
> David Fernández wrote:
>
>> Considering that most of the CO2 is emitted during a device fabrication
>> (e.g. 79% for laptops, according to Atos), making them last long and 
>> being
>> modular and repairable may be the best way to reduce the carbon 
>> footprint
>> (and the increasing amount of e-waste).
>
> We are at the stage now where a very significant limitation on the 
> lifetime of electronics is the supported lifetime of the software. For 
> most phones/tablets this is only 3 years (less if you don't buy them 
> as soon as they come out)
>
> David Lang
>
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-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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