Very cool project . Not to be pendatic , there is lot network equipment between request and the cluster which still very much run on non renewable power.
Once starlink is live , perhaps requests between two phased array clients can make networks truly solar .
That is true and addressed as an issue in the blog (to be transparent). It's a problem low-tech magazine also faces and wants to improve.
I'm in an apartment and my solar is in a terrible spot. The solar array is crazy over-sized to provide enough power to sustain the Pi and charge the battery.
I think it's easily doable for a person with good solar to put the entire chain Pi-switch-modem on solar.
I did not mean the blog owner’s equipment which the author covered in the post. I meant the ISPs and transit providers in between the server and any user wanting to see the blog. There is not much we can do to control the power sources in that .
While undersea cables and ISP network switches etc perhaps are efficient on a per packet level, they consume substantial power I would imagine .
The battery sizes on most satellites are very small due to weight considerations and probably more so in starlink , and is designed to last few hours at best, so how it is charged first time is not likely significant .
I had mentioned elsewhere I am sidestepping the carbon footprint of undersea cable laying to building and launching satellites as they are fixed upfront and not per packet sent.
However I am pretty confident laying cables and digging all the other infra to your home and all the ISPs connects is definitely more carbon intensive than building and sending satellites on reusable rockets.
Perhaps it will not be as efficient , however we cannot control the power consumption of the transit on wired or satellite, satellite by its design is going to be solar though. I don’t think ISPs are look at carbon footprint for their equipment at the moment
I am side stepping the entire argument on cable laying v sat launch for setting up the infra . Likely satellites are have lesser carbon footprint than cable laying, but there are lot of variables .
If we consider carbon CapEx - Falcon 9 is 500,000 kg of fuel. For that amount of fuel you could lay down a trans-atlantic cable. Then conside that sattelites still need to be serviced by large base-stations across the globe linked by optic fiver.
Then consider that a single cable lasts much longer than sattelites do in orbit and carries more data.
Then conder the fact that radio transmission across almost a thousand kiloneters is a lot more power intensive than optical transmission.
Satellite internet is cool, but energy efficiency is not one of it's features.
Most cable laying ships are in 10,000 tonne size , ships this size use typically 50 tones of fuel a day at cruse speeds , cable ships travel much slower than that. The fuels ship typically use is one of the dirtiest as compared to RP-1 kerosene a falcon 9 uses. I am not so sure rockets are not cleaner approach.
On the downside The life of a cable is 20 years or more , as compared to only 5 years of a starlink sat . Definitely lot more data can go through a cable , it is not apples to apples comparison .
Once starlink is live , perhaps requests between two phased array clients can make networks truly solar .