Perhaps the most interesting of Low Tech’s work, however, was the launch in 2018 of an alternative hosting of the site running off 100% solar power. This solar server itself is located in one of the creator’s apartments, runs entirely off a very modest battery, and a tiny 30W solar panel (probably not much bigger than a couple of A4 pieces of paper). The solar mirror of Low Tech’s site (and the main site does appear to be hosted in the usual manner) also employs a number of adaptations to minimise the energy footprint that other sites entirely gloss over: the background of the website is divided into two coloured blocks, representing the remaining power level of the battery (typically around 60% during writing, due to time differences between Barcelona and Sydney). It’s a prominent and effective piece of visual communication that refuses to elide the material energy and infrastructure involved in serving up the page to the reader. It also employs particular techniques to be able to run in this way: the site serves only static HTML, instead of relying on the usual database, as in most modern CMS’, and images are all greatly compressed and monochrome, saving server work and minimising data transfer. As a result, the solar version has a particularly arresting low-fi, aesthetic almost reminiscent of early 2000s websites.
But it’s not just for show, neither is it just a cute exercise in attempted greenwashing. The project is generative of new knowledge, with the site producing real and useful performance data, working as a proof-of-concept that demonstrably lower-emissions configurations of digital infrastructure are possible, and showing the relatively modest compromises required. In a reflection on the project after its first 15 months of operation, Low Tech described how much traffic the site was able to handle and the miniscule amounts of power involved:
During the period … the solar powered website received 865,000 unique visitors. Including all energy losses in the solar set-up, electricity use per unique visitor is then 0.021 watt-hour. One kilowatt-hour of solar generated electricity can thus serve almost 50,000 unique visitors, and one watt-hour of electricity can serve roughly 50 unique visitors. This is all renewable energy and as such there are no direct associated carbon emissions.
The rest of the post goes to great lengths to explain the embodied, indirect emissions from the equipment used (the CO2 already emitted as part of manufacturing), and compares the emissions from solar (nil) to the equivalent emissions of the same amount of power drawn from the local Spanish power grid. It also considers alternative scenarios, such as what it would mean to scale up the site, to host more websites, how they could size batteries for 100% uptime, and so on. For climate and energy data-nerds like myself, this sort of detail is pure catnip in its richness. But most ordinary readers’ eyes are likely to glaze over, quite understandably, at the discussion of watt-hours, batteries and array sizes, and the impact of variable solar across the year. And while this type of work is absolutely crucial in pushing the envelope of digital sustainability knowledge and practice, it runs into the problem of being for (and perhaps by) the unfortunate figure of ‘Resource Man’.
The trope of ‘Resource Man’, as identified by Yolande Strengers, is a way of capturing the narrow focus of certain narratives around emerging ‘smart energy’ technologies that began to appear in the early 2010s. Strengers explains that Resource Man: ‘In his ultimate imagined state … is interested in his own energy data, understands it, and wants to use it to change the way he uses energy.’ The issue with this emerging persona, according to Strengers, is its singular dominance, presenting a risk that that by basing our plans for climate action on what works for or appeals to this kind of imagined ideal user (like decarbonising web hosting via DIY solar setups) ‘represents a narrow and problematic perspective of human experience – one that promotes the ideal of a data-driven technology-savvy home energy manager who is interested in, and capable of making, efficient resource-management decisions.’
Suffice to say most of us are not Resource Man, even if it is true that most of us would probably say we wished to make digital and creative work in a sustainable way. Most people don’t want to have to accept drastic limitations in order to be sustainable, and we will need to find ways to accommodate them. Most of us are not Jeff Geerling, a professional computer sysadmin, youtuber, and Raspberry Pi advocate who has the time, the skills and the resources to be able to figure out what it takes to make a solar powered web server that can be taken just about anywhere with a 4G connection. But I am glad that someone is, because by doing it, we all benefit. By showing what can be done, we expand the space of the possible, and our imagination expands alongside it. At the end of the video documenting the project, Geerling points to the many potential use cases for what he describes as ‘a resilient, off-grid, low power cluster of computers’. Government and disaster response personnel could make much of such a system and its robustness:
Emergency personnel can’t rely on the existing infrastructure that might have been completely destroyed … having the ability to run a local cluster of low power servers managing applications like databases and check-in systems can help first responders in a bind.
Stories of emergency management personnel struggling with exactly these sorts of digital processes appear in Jen Liu’s essay ‘Living with intermittent infrastructures’ which examines the post-Hurricane Ida clean-up in Louisiana. The essay is one of a number of the exciting pieces in a new online exhibition commissioned by the (equally exciting) Solar Protocol Network; a sort of ‘distributed’ version of Low Tech’s solar site, routing page requests to whichever server has the most solar at the time.
Liu describes residents’ experiences with the expanding and intensifying hurricane season that climate change is bringing to Louisiana, with arresting descriptions of the aftermath and the infrastructural challenges faced by those on the ground. Tent cities of interstate power repair crews, displaced people and businesses operating out of trailers years later, FEMA crews struggling to complete digital forms and upload documents in the aftermath. The picture Liu paints is one of increasing precarity:
People expect the infrastructures to be irregular during and following a storm – the power will go out, the roads will be flooded for some time – but it is becoming harder, and more dangerous, to deal with the increasingly extended outages and longer and longer recovery times.
Liu also focuses on the resilience building practices emerging from within the community itself, with aid groups learning how to build their own solar generators. This type of work necessitates a new level of technical preparedness, and educating groups on the fundamentals of electricity generation:
During the workshop, participants received worksheets to calculate how much load the generator could take on. One community organizer noted how they needed to keep a mini fridge on to keep medications cool for neighbors, while another person said they wanted to create a charging station for people’s phones.
