Shownotes

Discover how the rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewables, especially solar and wind, is shaping the tech industry and global economy. Hosted by Anne Currie and Sara Bergman, this episode explores the exponential growth of renewable energy, the role of software in optimizing energy use, and the geopolitical and environmental implications of this transition. Main insights:

• The exponential rise of solar energy generation and its implications

• The importance of grid management and energy storage solutions in a renewable-powered world

• How different countries are adopting strategies like East-West data centers in China and time-of-use tariffs in India to optimize renewable energy consumption

• The role of software in enabling carbon-aware computing and energy efficiency

• Challenges and opportunities of integrating variable renewable sources into the energy mix

• The historical context of fossil fuels as first gear in industrial development and the move towards more complex, resilient energy systems

• Innovations like balcony solar panels and plug-in solar devices, and their potential for widespread adoption

• The geopolitical considerations, including nuclear debates in Sweden and France's energy independence

• How increasing renewable infrastructure can accelerate economic development, especially in Africa

Transcript

Anne Currie (00:02)

Hello and welcome to asynchronous and unreliable. Our new weekly podcast where we discuss the most interesting ideas and concepts in tech. I'm your host, Anne Currie co-author of Building Green Software, the Cloud Native Attitude and the author of the Science Fiction Panopticon series. And for our guest today, again, thank goodness we've got my friend and co-author on Building Green Software, hopefully regular podcaster. Sara Bergman. Do you want to introduce yourself, Sara? 

Sara (00:31)

Yes, hi. Thank you so much for the warm welcome. I'm very happy to be on the show again. Yeah, my name is Sara Bergman. I am a senior software engineer at Microsoft, where I work on efficiency and utilization of CPUs on cloud scale, is what we say. And I'm a co-author of the book, Building Green Software, now available in four languages, is it? 

Anne Currie (00:54)

Yeah, well, it's available in five languages. It's been translated into four languages. Because I think it's obviously, I say obviously it's written in English, but in fact, that's a complete Anglo-centric view of things 

Sara (01:00)

That's true. I'd be very impressed with both of you'd written it in Swedish. 

Anne Currie (01:09)

Yeah, but nothing gets translated into Swedish because everyone, all Swedes speak English pretty well. But yeah, Sarah other co-author is, natively from Taiwan. But actually, oddly enough, it has been translated into complex Chinese, so her parents can read it, which is nice. 

Sara (01:12)

No. Very nice. My parents, they have it and they leaf through it. They, I mean, they can read English. It's just they're not software engineers so yeah. 

+1

Anne Currie (01:37)

It's also been translated into Spanish and Korean and simplified Chinese. 

Sara (01:45)

Yeah, exactly. If you're listening to this and you feel like reading English, it's a bit much. Don't worry, it might be out in your language. 

Anne Currie (01:53)

Yeah, and it's available in audiobook form as well. Not read by any of us, read by actual professional reader. 

Sara (01:59)

Audio. No. Yeah, I mean, that's probably good because I would probably go on tangents. Do you normally read audio books or are you like a physical book kind of person? 

+1

Anne Currie (02:14)

I I can't do audio books really. It's a bit difficult because I kind of want to be able to freeze and think about it. And I like to go at my own pace when I'm reading. And I quite often lose it and have to go back and think about something else and have to go back. Yeah, no, it's got to be physical for me. How about you? 

+3

Sara (02:23)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm the same. I'm not good enough at multitasking, I think. I would then have to like sit and like listen very attentively. And I'm not good with that because I'm not good at sitting still. But I understand like a lot of people do it in like their commute and stuff, but I work from home, so I don't have that option either. 

+2

Anne Currie (02:39)

Yeah, I do listen to podcasts while I'm doing other things, but podcasts usually aren't as information dense. There are quite a few podcasts I just can't listen to because they're too information dense that I have to read the transcript. 

+1

Sara (03:01)

Yeah. 

Anne Currie (03:03)

So let's actually get on to the thing that we were going to talk about in the podcast today. Which is something we both find quite fascinating and it's, I don't think it's ever discussed anywhere near as much as it should be. And you suggested this, and I think it's absolutely the right thing, the right thing to talk about quite early in this podcast series. The podcast series is not entirely going to be about green software and energy transition. It's just that that is an area that we're both interested in. But the subject today is the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables and the effect that it's having on the tech industry and will have on the tech industry. Now, we've got listeners to this podcast as well as viewers. So I can't just wave my hands around to illustrate the point, but I'm about to anyway, which is global growth in solar power generation is literally exponential. So all those graphs that you looked at during COVID, and remember, from a negative situation, it's a reminder that exponential growth is not always a bad thing. It could be a good thing as well. And it's definitely happening in renewables, particularly solar. So I think that's the context that we're talking about when we're talking about the energy transition, I think. So, Sara, you suggested this topic today. So what's, I'm interested in your thoughts on it. 

+4

Sara (04:27)

No, I like it. There is, I don't know if this is terribly Scandinavian slash northern world perspective, but we call it like a hockey stick graph. No, what I really find so fascinating about this topic is that energy is something we all, it's a commodity that we're in many ways so intimately familiar with. We use it and take it for granted. No, I should say not everywhere in the world. I think. 

+2

Anne Currie (04:34)

Yes, yeah. 

Sara (04:53)

In our parts of the world, we take it for granted. And for generations we have, that's not true for all of the world. And it's also a political thing, right? So I, yeah. The many of us, especially those who listen to podcasts have access to electricity and sort of take it for granted. And it's changing so fast in our lifetime. And in such a hopeful direction, where we have geographies all across the world who, of their political views on most things, are jumping on this bandwagon because it's often cheaper. Also cleaner, like better, like less polluting and less deadly. So I just find that fascinating. That's why I wanted to have a chat, because I know you're also a geek. 

+4

Anne Currie (05:23)

Yeah, so it's interesting. I think we have in some ways an interesting perspective on the energy transition because we wrote a book about the energy transition and how the tech industry needs to get on board and start getting used to running data centers on renewable power. It was only, so we published Building Green Software two years ago broadly now, didn't we? But we started writing it more like closer to three years ago, just a bit less than three years ago. And when we were writing the book, we're very positive, we were very bullish about the energy transition. But to a certain extent at the time, I realized looking back, that was a little bit optimistic on our, you know, we believed in it, that there was a big dose of belief. But things have changed massively since we wrote that book. It's gone from: Yes, we hope and we intellectually think that it should do because all everything's aligned for that to be successful. So, just look at those graphs. Yeah. 

+4

Sara (06:44)

Yeah, it's just happening. We're going to have to link some of our world in data graphs because it's really powerful to see them for yourself, think, especially the wind and solar graphs are incredible. 

Anne Currie (06:48)

We will. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll see if I can work out how to flash up some pictures. 

Sara (07:01)

Yeah, otherwise if you have show notes, I guess you can link them. Can leave it for an extra click. Speaking of multitasking, I would not be able to. Yeah, they could pause, guess. I leave it up to you, listeners, how you would like to interact with graphs. 

+2

Anne Currie (07:04)

Yeah, but I mean, interestingly, normally when you see a hockey shape graph like that, you were trying to stop it. It's like, but yeah. 

+1

Sara (07:24)

Yes. Not exactly. No, and I think it's interesting. And I think it's especially solar globally that's really taking off and that's fueled by technological advances. It just like, I remember when you learn about like different types of energy in school. And it was like, yeah, solar is this thing. 

+3

Anne Currie (07:36)

Mm. 

Sara (07:48)

But it's expensive, it's not really efficient. Like you have to switch out the cells and it's not, but they really thought it was coming and then it did. And now I live in an area where there are lots of, I don't live in a house, but there are lots of houses around me and a lot of them have solar on the roof and it's not considered this weird like thing. Like, you're one of those people. It's just like, yeah, that's an economical investment that totally makes sense as a homeowner. 

+3

Anne Currie (08:14)

Yeah, I've got solar panels and a battery and heat pumps. I love them. I totally, obsessively look at my app to see how much power I'm generating and I consider it a loss. Well, under normal circumstances, I think, you're a loser every time any power goes back into the grid because I get paid like 15p an hour, which is much less than the cost of taking power out of the grid. I always think, I should use it for something. I always consider it to be a character flaw if I can't think of something to do with the power. I think, yeah, you're not being imaginative enough. But at the moment, know, with the war situation, with the third Gulf War, I feel like, maybe I shouldn't be putting more power into the grid, know, it's like part of my living. 

+4

Sara (08:44)

It's your contribution. No, but I think that's really cool. And it has to be said that we live in two of the cloudiest places in the world. We don't really have much sun for half of the year. So the impact this can have or is having in other parts where they're more sunny and have more like their days and nights are kind of equal throughout the year. This is even more of a differentiator, which I think is really cool. I think wind is another thing, which it's very common here. I live in Sweden and Denmark, of course, Germany to some extent, England as well, I believe has quite a lot of it. Yeah, England as well. And there's something that's also happened, I feel, during my lifetime, because I remember as a child, we were traveling quite a lot by car in Sweden and 

+4

Anne Currie (09:32)

Loads of wind. Yeah, loads of wind. 

Sara (09:43)

It was quite rare to see them. They were too quite close to my house. And I remember seeing them. Then it was like, this is this is the future. You know, I felt so futuristic. And I know a lot of people don't like them in Norway, where I used to live. There's huge debates because they are very fond of their landscape as they should be. They have gorgeous nature. But I don't think future generations will necessarily see wind power as something ugly. I think a lot of people will see it as a sign of change, of technological progress in a good way. So yeah, that's something I also think about a lot. 

+4

Anne Currie (10:19)

Yeah, I live on the coast just near London and all the way along there, there's a lot of offshore wind and it makes sense to be generating offshore wind there because it's within, that power is within very easy reach of London where of course it will get used very quickly. I like it when I see it, like you, I think we're doing our bit, we're generating the power, the power is... Power is life, isn't it? It's electricity is life. 

+1

Sara (10:46)

Yeah, exactly. And I think what's interesting about these two, because now we've been very positive, but what's also interesting about them is they are not always on. That's the catch, because there is a catch. Because, they are cleaner, they're far less deadly than traditional fossil fuels. But yeah, you can always burn more fossil fuels where you can't force the sun to shine or the wind to blow. 

+2

Anne Currie (10:58)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, fossil fuels are easy. They're their first gear for human society, aren't they? You have to, you know, we've used them to get to where we are. Everybody goes, fossil fuels are evil, all the... Like, we would not be where we were, where we are. We wouldn't have solar panels or wind farms if we hadn't got the society and the industry that came out of fossil fuels. It's just a matter of now moving to second gear rather than kind of saying it was always evil that we used first gear to get to second gear. No, that's just how things work. 

+4

Sara (11:47)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's we knew less. Like we have we've been aware of climate change for quite some time, of course, and we've known the cost of it. But still, if we go back all the way to the Industrial Revolution, they didn't know how bad it was for people's health. And that's why there's been massive progress in that area as well. We have so many things today that did not exist just in terms of air cleaning. Still, air pollution is a big problem and a big reason to move away from those fossil fuels as well. But that should just be motivation to further accelerate the adoption of low carbon sources. 

+4

Anne Currie (12:22)

Yeah, I one of the many reasons why I like, obviously it's cheap, it's clean, it's all that kind of stuff. But I like the fact that it's second gear, that it's a bit more complicated to use it well than fossil fuels. Because as you say, the variable, know, the sun isn't always shining, you have to do clever stuff, know, the wind isn't always blowing, you have to be more resilient, you have to be able to spot what's going on and understand your context and change your behavior and that kind of One of the things I like about them is that it is a little bit more difficult. It's more powerful, but it's more difficult. Therefore, it challenges humans to be a little bit more thoughtful and clever and aware of their environment. 

+3

Sara (13:03)

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we now also have to combine sources. If you consider a world where you only have fossil fuels, you can build a very centralized system that works, that do the same thing all the time. But say your main, like your workhorse of your energy system is solar or wind. You're likely going to have to back that up. And hopefully that's with something like hydro or nuclear. And I know nuclear is very polarizing in some contexts, but the math does speak for itself. It's not renewable, right? So there is a fundamental issue with that aspect, of course. But in terms of carbon emissions, very low. In terms of harm to human life, also incredibly low. It's like less than wind, significantly less than hydro and like massively better than coal and oil. But still I understand why some people don't like it. Or batteries, like you mentioned at home. And that takes some engineering thinking, which is not a, not a bad thing. I think a lot of good things happen when we try to do something engineer wise, we often come up with other things, along the way. 

+4

Anne Currie (14:06)

Yeah. Yeah, Happy accidents, not nuclear accidents. 

Sara (14:24)

Positive side effects that were not intended. 

Anne Currie (14:28)

Yeah, mean, the trouble with nuclear has always been that nuclear accidents are very film worthy. So you tend to get a lot of good TV shows around about nuclear accidents. And then everybody puts nuclear accidents front and centre of mind. I don't know if you watched the HBO show Chernobyl. It was really very good. 

+3

Sara (14:46)

Of course. Brilliant show, brilliant show. Yes. But we do like in Sweden, we have quite a lot of nuclear. Because even though we also have, especially in the North, massive hydro power, Sweden is a very long country and the grid can only transport so much from North to South. And most of the population live in the South. And so a lot of the nuclear power plants are actually in the South to again, kind of buffer for that. It's always, it's never not a political debate what to do with them. There's a lot of research ongoing. I think if you go back to the media time after Chernobyl, it was much more of a public debate around it. Whereas now it's more of an accepted status quo, I feel, in the general population. Whereas like, I don't think many people would approve of a new one being built. And I don't think people want to kind of neglect the ones we have, because of course that would also be a danger, sort of keeping them. So it's interesting. France also have a lot. 

+4

Anne Currie (15:56)

France has loads of nuclear. It's almost part of their identity. To be very energy self-sufficient. Yeah, which is a good thing. Which kind of takes us onto another thing about renewables and the energy transition, which is I really approve of where countries have thought about what their transition is going to look like given their own context. 

+1

Sara (16:02)

Yeah. Yeah. 

Anne Currie (16:24)

You were mentioning about, know, lots of people in the South and, you know, this power generation capability in the North, but then you have to get it to the South. Obviously, that immediately reminds me of my favorite possible countrywide strategy is China's East data West compute strategy, which is basically, so this is a government strategy. 

+1

Sara (16:25)

Yeah. Hmm. 

Anne Currie (16:51)

And I'll put the links in the show notes. A government strategy that's been going on for quite a long time, which is basically, okay, well, we understand China. And in China, lots of people live in the cities on the East. That's where all the people are. They're generating loads of data and that data needs to be processed. But there's not a lot of space for nuclear or wind turbines or solar because the people are there. We want the people to be there. So all of the, so loads of energy generation and compute data centers where that data from the people will be processed and insights will be derived from it will be done in the West, where there are few people who live and there's more space for nuclear power stations and solar panels and wind power. And that is a very clear strategy, which makes sense, you know, and it's communicated, they have a plan for where things are. There are couple of other countries that have plans. India have their time of use strategy where they're pushing very heavily. I mean, they've mandated that there are time of use tariffs for electricity across India for households and also for industry as well, which encourage work to be shifted to when the sun is shining and away from when the sun isn't shining based on different pricing. But I just really like to see it. Think that renewables require more thinking of that nature than fossil fuels do. 

+4

Sara (18:22)

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the concrete action that software is taking already. And it's going to have to take, or we argue at least, in the future. I think that's also a fascinating thing. I think it was Asim Hussain who, the founder of the Green Software Foundation, said that it's a way for software to be more in tune with nature. And I like that because I think most software is not very in tune with nature. It just kind of exists side by side. But I like that mental picture of having your software adapt to nature and to what's going on. Because there are some examples. I think Google have been doing their media processing carbon aware. 

+4

Anne Currie (18:49)

Hmm. 

Sara (19:10)

Carbon aware is when you move it in time or space to a lower carbon time or space. And they've been doing it with their media processing for five years now. Also a lot of cloud providers have been making this data available to their customer for a long time. There's a multitude of APIs to provide this data in different shapes and forms. So it's not sci-fi. Even though we both like sci-fi, but this is reality. 

+4

Anne Currie (19:36)

Indeed, yes. I mean, it's an interesting one. There are lots of places that now provide, as you say, quite detailed information about where the grid is dirty, where the grid is clean, where you should move things from carbon awareness. But I also quite like, because there are very few people who are at the point where they can use that data very effectively. As you say, Google are one, and Google is doing amazing stuff. I think they're working with a couple of American grids to balance the grid by saying, well, we'll train AI now and then we'll turn it off because everybody's at home, just put their aircon on or their heating on or whatever. So they'll be flexible to balance your grid, which is amazing. But Google is so far ahead of everybody else. Nobody else anywhere close. I like, I quite like the ridiculously simplistic and easy to understand Chinese thing of: Here is good for this, here is bad for this. Here is not bad for everything, but it's bad for compute and here is for compute. And I like the Indian thing of saying, well, look, you know, here is a time of day when it's good for you to be running stuff and here is a time of day when it's not. And it's easy to understand. I feel that to follow the ups and downs of what's going on in a moment by moment basis is more like third gear, fourth gear or fifth gear. 

Sara (20:56)

Yeah, it's also very tricky if you have to do that at the global scale, because understanding one country's or one region's specific... Because energy production is very decentralized in so many ways. It's very specific to your specific surroundings and renewables is really amplifying that fact. But now it is a factor. Are you in Norway where it's very mountainous and it rains a lot? Okay, you will have a lot of hydro. 

+3

Anne Currie (21:14)

Mm. 

Sara (21:25)

And hydro can act as a battery as well. You can pump stuff back up. Or are you in a place with more variable renewables? And if you are a nation-specific workload, you can probably build a simplistic model that will work. But if you're operating software on a global scale, becomes, yeah, fourth or fifth gear. 

+3

Anne Currie (21:46)

It does. 

Sara (21:47)

And we're just going into second. 

Anne Currie (21:49)

And yeah, it becomes really difficult. And actually, this is something we talked about a lot when we were writing Building your Green Software is that people often try to go too far too fast. And it kind of is, but it's fine for you to go through time-of-use tariffs first. You don't have to jump all the way to 

+3

Sara (22:01)

Yeah. 

Anne Currie (22:17)

moment by moment 24-7 carbon-free electricity matching what you're doing everywhere at all times. That's really hard to do. The vast majority of enterprises just can't do it yet. Won't be able to do it for five or 10 years. 

+2

Sara (22:29)

Yeah. Yeah, that's another great real world parallelism to that as well. If you think about countries who were very early with the industrial revolution, like the UK, for example, took a really long time to get from that state to your current economy. Whereas countries who started that process later went through it much, much faster. They could just build on top of what everyone else has been doing. I also don't want people to feel discouraged if they're like, I'm just starting on my level one task. No, but you will likely move much faster because you can be able to reap the benefit of other people's learnings and tools that have been built. 

+4

Anne Currie (23:09)

Yes. Yeah, I we've talked earlier about fossil fuels being first gear for the economy to get you started. There are plenty of countries now which are just stepping over using fossil fuels to really boost their economy because solar, you're in lots of nations in Africa, the solar panels are so good, solar is so cheap, you can bypass first gear. You can bypass first gear and just go straight into a higher gear. 

+2

Sara (23:16)

Yeah. Exactly. And a lot of African countries are doing the same with payment. They're going from cash to mobile. Like they don't need the card step because like mobile is future. But at least they came with that chronological order. 

+2

Anne Currie (23:42)

Yes. Yeah. That's amazingly good. I mean, that's something for us to feel all our countries, particularly the UK, who have massive carbon debts because we started burning coal so early and we've been burning it for a hundred years, we have a massive carbon debt, but at least we helped kickstart a lot of stuff, technology introduction, other people can just take and run with. 

+1

Sara (23:58)

Yes. 

Anne Currie (24:24)

Industrial Revolution started with the UK, but it didn't really continue with the UK. The other countries took it over and went with it. It went further and faster. 

+1

Sara (24:32)

Exactly. Exactly. And that's really, that's cool. And I think that's also why it's cool with energy. Like even though there are some countries who were early on some like hydro, for example, hydro is a renewable. It doesn't have the same hockey stick graph because it's been around for longer, but as they become better and we learn more techniques and they become more efficient, more and more countries can build them without having to relearn how to build with them and they don't have to be so massive either actually. 

+4

Anne Currie (25:03)

Indeed, yes. Yeah, that is very interesting. So you mentioned earlier that there are now more and more solar panels up in Sweden than there were. Actually, UK is interesting because it's had quite a lot. It's had a low level of solar panels for years. But it's now finally, it's going to become mandatory to have solar panels on the roof of all new built houses from 2028. 

+3

Sara (25:31)

Wow. 

Anne Currie (25:32)

But also we've just heard that we're getting balcony solar, so plug-in solar. So do you have that in Sweden yet? 

+1

Sara (25:42)

What? Cool. Balcony solar? No, I haven't seen balcony solar. No, I don't think so. Not that I've heard of. I mean, rooftop solar on any kind of building is quite popular and increasing in usage. I'm not sure if you can put them on balconies because our building is built, it's new, it's only two years old. We don't have on our balcony. 

+4

Anne Currie (26:08)

So balcony solar is an interesting one. It's apparently, it's giant in Germany. I keep seeing photos of like German blocks of flats with solar panels and every balcony like kind of stuff. They generate huge quantities of power. So if you haven't heard of it, balcony solar, sometimes called plug-in solar, is a little panel that you buy and it's about 400 pounds, so 500 euros or something. 

+2

Sara (26:17)

Yes. 

Anne Currie (26:37)

You just, it just has a plug on it and you just plug it straight into a socket and the power it generates, it just circulates around your house. So it's, you don't sell it, you just use it to offset your bills. Just take it home, hang it on your balcony or put it in your garden, plug it in and you know, you get all your cups of tea and you know, a of your heat pump or whatever paid for. And it's so easy. 

+3

Sara (26:41)

Mm-hmm. I don't sell it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I 

Anne Currie (27:06)

It's incredibly popular. Really taken off in Germany. And it will be really extremely interesting to see how popular it is in the UK. So, solar will be, so it's obviously not a thing. It's not, because you have to get all kinds of sign off to allow the grid to approve people being able to plug things in because otherwise electricians can get electrocuted when there's power cuts and things, because there's still lots of electricity running around on the grid. But it's a really, really good thing when it happens. Today we are going to have to cut our recording short a little bit because Sara has to rush over to kindergarten to pick up her that wee one but you will be back in future episodes and we can finish off our conversation in a future episode of asynchronous and unreliable. 

+4

Sara (27:45)

Yeah. People can let us know what they thought about this conversation and what we should dive deeper into next time. Yeah, Balcony Solar, I'm taking that one with me. 

Anne Currie (28:04)

Indeed, yes. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very cool. It's very cool indeed. Anyway, so goodbye to everybody and thank you very much for listening and I'll catch you next time on asynchronous and unreliable podcast.