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Comment by l_t | Hacker News Reader

I think the article hits on the key problem:

"Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system."

IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general.

It's far-fetched, but I can imagine it becoming mainstream if mesh networking becomes popular, or if the Internet were to become a widely self-hosted platform (e.g. people had their own "clouds" running in their homes). In such situations, 100% uptime would no longer be an expectation, so the perceived cost of using an off-the-grid system would be reduced.

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Having been in the “mesh” space for years, there’s a ton of this techno-primitivism fantasy floating around. The reality is that people want to access the internet and they want it to work well.

This article is a perfect example. This solar powered server which does not have 100% uptime for artistic reasons is probably sitting in someone’s kitchen next to a refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.

> refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.

Except that the making-cold mechanism of fridges have nowhere near a 100% duty-cycle. You probably wouldn't notice if it didn't even meet two "nines" of uptime.

In fact, that's how frost-free freezers work, by taking advantage that fact to run a heater(!) for some number of minutes several times a day. A defrost timer that does 10 minutes every 8 hours reduces compressor uptime to 98%.

A refrigerator is not 99.999% available (power outages). Maybe 99.9% if you live somewhere without trees and snow.

They seem to be working on that as well: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid...

The solar webserver is another step towards that goal.

Maybe the webserver sits in a hut like Joey Hess' with a fridge that is also solar powered https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/fridge_0.1/

You'd be able to get to normal levels of uptime by putting backup solar servers in e.g. the Sahara and northern Australia, then taking them out of your DNS rotation when they dropped below 5% battery, surely.

Though transmitting data that far might be against the point of the art project.

I think it will more likely come when the true cost of high energy consumption is factored into our decisions, and people are forced to trade off high availability for low power consumption.

>IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general.

I welcome that day.

Why can't you do some non-linear optimization with your resource routing? Power grids have been doing this for ages.

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