For our second special for Earth Week, we are talking to Bilge who works as a research scientist at Meta AI. Her open-source project Carbon Explorer evaluates solutions to make data centres operate on 24/7 renewable energy. Why this is easier said than done and how engineers can help within their day-to-day work to reduce their carbon footprint are among the many things Pascal and Bilge discuss in this episode.

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Links:

Carbon Explorer: https://github.com/facebookresearch/CarbonExplorer
Holistic Approach for Designing Carbon Aware Datacenters: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10036
Open Catalyst: https://opencatalystproject.org/
Open Catalyst SchrepTech Interview: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/how-ai-is-helping-address-the-climate-crisis/

Timestamps:

Intro 0:05
Intro Bilge 2:18
Optimising for the Environment 4:01
Carbon Explorer 5:02
Mitigations for Renewable Intermittency 7:17
Operational and Embodied Footprints 10:57
Motivations for Carbon Explorer 13:06
Battery Storage 14:36
Renewable Curtailment 15:52
Empowering Engineers 18:20
Carbon Intensity APIs 19:22
AI Carbon Intensity Forecasts 22:07
Carbon Metrics 23:17
Where to Learn More 25:38
Outro 27:32
Bloopers 29:45

41: Earth Week Special - Carbon Explorer with Bilge