I got to thinking, "how bad could electricity costs get?" The answer I come to is "not very bad". The potential costs are capped by the capital cost of installing your own, say, solar generation. If I understand these things correctly, which is not likely, it now costs about $1/watt for panels, with about a 20% active time, so $5/watt.
I am not including storage here, so you have to sell 4X your load for the 20% the sun shines, and buy 1X for the 80% it doesn't. The net electricity costs ought to be about 0. The green 500 is running over 2 GF/watt these days, or 500 watts/TF. So you can buy PV panels for $2500/TF. Suppose the installed cost is 4X the panel cost. We're at $10000/TF with 0 operating costs for electricity. Suppose that TF cost $10000 for the computer and AC (I have no idea!). Then the capital costs have doubled, but the lifetime of the PV plant is probably 15-20 years, vs the 3 year cost of the computer. I am sure I am way off on this, but if the figures are usable, then for a 1-2 year hit on Moore's law, you can just buy free power forever. -L _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
