Exploiting the Solar Energy Surplus for Edge Computing

Abstract: In the context of the global energy ecosystem transformation, we introduce a new approach to reduce the carbon emissions of the cloud-computing sector and, at the same time, foster the deployment of small-scale private photovoltaic plants. We consider the opportunity cost of moving some cloud services to private, distributed, solar-powered computing facilities. To this end, we compare the potential revenue of leasing computing resources to a cloud pool with the revenue obtained by selling the surplus energy to the grid. We first estimate the consumption of virtualized cloud computing instances, establishing a metric of computational efficiency per nominal photovoltaic power installed. Based on this metric and characterizing the site's annual solar production, we estimate the total return and payback. The results show that the model is economically viable and technically feasible. We finally depict the still many questions open, such as security, and the fundamental barriers to address, mainly related with a cloud model ruled by a few big players.