Nihil: Computing Clouds with Zero Emissions

Over the past five years there has been an increasing desire to reduce the environmental impact of cloud computing. Recent proposals have suggested taking a "net-zero" energy approach, where the data centre supplies as much energy to the grid as it takes to reduce the environmental impact. In this paper we propose the Nihil system which uses energy storage and load balancing based upon energy storage levels to provide a system which delivers reliable cloud service with no carbon emissions and no reliance on the grid.