Douglas Paul

By Douglas Paul

Part of the book: ICT - Energy - Concepts Towards Zero

By Gabriel Abadal Berini, Giorgos Fagas, Luca Gammaitoni and Douglas Paul

Part of the book: ICT - Energy - Concepts Towards Zero

By Lourdes Ferre Llin and Douglas J. Paul

The conversion of heat into electricity through the thermoelectric effect and light into electricity through photovoltaic solar cells both allow useful amounts of power for a range of ICT systems from a few milli‐Watts (mW) for autonomous sensors up to kilo‐Watts (kW) for complete ICT computing or entertainment systems. Photovoltaics at the large scale can also be used to produce MW power stations suitable for the sustainable powering of high‐performance computing (HPC) and dataservers for cloud computing. This chapter provides a background to the physics of operation of both types of sustainable energy sources along with the fundamental limits of both technologies. The present performance is presented along with promising research directions to allow for a comparison of the useful power along with the limits for deployment of each approach to power ICT devices and systems. Finally, the developing field of thermal photovoltaics is reviewed, where the overall thermodynamic conversion efficiency of turning light into electricity and useful heat can be increased through the addition of thermoelectrics or heat transfer modules to a photovoltaic cell.

Part of the book: ICT - Energy Concepts for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability

By Giorgos Fagas, John P. Gallagher, Luca Gammaitoni and Douglas J. Paul

The energy consumption from the expanding use of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable with present drivers, and it will impact heavily on the future climate change. However, ICT devices have the potential to contribute significantly to the reduction of CO2 emission and enhance resource efficiency in other sectors, e.g., transportation (through intelligent transportation and advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles), heating (through smart building control), and manufacturing (through digital automation based on smart autonomous sensors). To address the energy sustainability of ICT and capture the full potential of ICT in resource efficiency, a multidisciplinary ICT-energy community needs to be brought together covering devices, microarchitectures, ultra large-scale integration (ULSI), high-performance computing (HPC), energy harvesting, energy storage, system design, embedded systems, efficient electronics, static analysis, and computation. In this chapter, we introduce challenges and opportunities in this emerging field and a common framework to strive towards energy-sustainable ICT.

Part of the book: ICT - Energy Concepts for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability