The Week in Green Software: Powering AI on Atomic Energy

TWiGS host Anne Currie is joined by Stefana Sopco, Marketing Manager at PortXchange and a passionate climate activist, for an insightful discussion on the intersection of AI, sustainability, and the maritime industry's decarbonization journey. Stefana shares how PortXchange leverages green technology to help ports achieve net-zero emissions through innovations like just-in-time arrival and emissions tracking. They also dive into the challenges posed by AI's growing energy demand and explore nuclear power as a potential ally in the climate fight. Throughout the conversation, Stefana emphasizes the importance of mindful technology use and the urgency of adopting sustainable solutions.

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Stefana: Is ChatGPT going to decarbonize the maritime sector? No freaking way!

 I haven't heard of anyone saying how they plan to use ChatGPT to decarbonize or to help ports account for their emissions.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Anne: Hello and welcome to The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustAInable software development. I'm your host today, Anne Currie. And today we're going to be joined by Stefana Sopco, Marketing Manager at PortXchange, a leader in driving ports towards a net zero future.

Stefana's work centers on using digital solutions to reduce emissions in the shipping industry. So a bit, a little bit different from our normal guests who are mostly directly programmers or very programmer related. So Stefana's vision extends beyond ports to broader decarbonization goals across the tech industry and the maritime industry.

She's also passionate about D&I, diversity and inclusion. And hopefully we'll talk a little bit about that today as well. So in this episode, we're going to talk about three articles that are all about AI, and the effects AI and the demand for AI is having on grids, particularly in Europe. We'll be talking a little bit about the power requirements of AI and the, grid capacity requirements.

And we'll be talking a little bit about whether or not it's always going to be a bad thing, or will actually could potentially be a very good thing for grids. And I'm quite a positive person. I think that there are massive advantages that come from the extension of the grid to support AI. So that'll be an interesting thing to talk about.

I'm also really interested in talking to Stefana about this because a lot of the issues around AI are effectively logistical issues. And logistics is something that we don't think enough about in the tech industry. But in the maritime industry, they think about it a very great deal, so I'll be very keen to hear Stefana's thoughts.

So, on that note, welcome Stefana. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Stefana: Thank you so much, Anne, and thank you for the invitation. I'm really honored to be here and super nervous, to be honest, because it is a heavy subject, and I really hope I will do it honours. My name is Stefana Sopco. I'm the marketing manager at PortXchange. I've been working in the energy and maritime industry now for five years.

And for the past two years, I've also been a core member of Women in Tech, Netherlands, an NGO striving for diversity and inclusion, as you beautifully mentioned. Here I act as the marketing manager and spokesperson as well for our Dutch chapter. I'm an active member of WISTA NL and for those who don't know, WISTA stands for Women in Shipping and Trading Association.

And like I like to say about myself, I declare myself a climate activist next to my proud feminist tag, which I've learnt to embrace completely, especially in the past couple of years, and one fun thing about me, you will always find me mitigating for a cause. Either diversity in the industries that I work with, or animal rights, animals are my life. And of course, climate change. And next to my professional activity, I try my best to act as a role model for the younger generation.

I mentor and guide young professionals who either want to start their career in marketing and come into these industries that are very intimidating for some, or might want to switch careers. And I also dedicate a big bunch of my time to guiding expats, me being an expat as well in the Netherlands, and I try my best to help them navigate their journey here the way I wished someone would have guided me back when I moved here six years ago.

Anne: That's great. That all sounds very good. Interestingly, this isn't even our first all female Environment Variables podcast, but normally that's because I have one of my two co-authors from Building Green Software, the new O'Reilly book, Sara, or Sarah on with me. So I think this is the first one. I'm going to guess this might be the first one,

all women, that doesn't involve Sara or Sarah, so it'll be an interesting change. So say a little bit about me, because I'm not the normal host. I'm quite a common host, but I'm not the usual host of Environment Variables. My name is Anne Currie. I am, as I've said, one of the co-authors of the new O'Reilly book, Building Green Software.

And if anybody who's listening to this podcast, you really should be reading that book. It's suitable for everyone. You don't have to be a techie, you'll enjoy it. It'll be useful. I'm also the CEO of a learning and development company, Strategically Green. So my focus there, our focus is trying to get companies to build up enthusiasm and internal expertise on how to make these changes happen.

So we do workshops and training, things like that. So if you want to talk to me about any of that, then you can find me on LinkedIn. So what we're gonna be doing today is we're gonna be deep diving into three really interesting articles about AI and their impact on the grid. But before we do that, Stefana, do you want to talk to us a little bit about your work decarbonizing the shipping industry through Green Tech?

'Cause that's something that we have never heard about before, so I think it would be very interesting.

Stefana: Now, I feel even more stressed that I have to do the honors about talking about green tech in shipping. But before we dive into the goodies, I really want to take the chance to thank three of my colleagues, Eugene, Abhishek, and Sjoerd, because they helped me prepare for this session. I was a little bit nervous. I really wanted to put our technology in really a beautiful light and also talk mindfully about technology. And they've been extraordinary. They've been very, very supportive and I wanted to thank them. So maybe I should start by mentioning that PortXchange is a B Corp organization.

For those who don't know, B Corp by definition means impact before profit. And you see now a trend of more and more companies being B Corp certified, which is in direct relation with the Green Software Foundation's principles in a way or another when I looked into it. And in addition to striving towards sustAInability within the maritime sector, we also consider socially responsible and ethical ways for

everything throughout our business, so our entire value chAIn. Our mAIn mission at PortXchange, like you said, is to help port authorities, predominantly, worldwide to achieve net zero emissions. We help them by measuring their emissions throughout the entire port, and not only track them, but also analyze them and report them and take proactive steps to reduce them because that's the ultimate thing that we want in the end.

But I'm really proud to say that our green tech ecosystem is larger than that. We have developed many other products within the shipping ecosystem. So we address organisations beyond port authorities. We have tackled just-in-time arrival, I'm not sure if you are familiar with that, it's a solution that is now quite trendy, but a little bit more difficult to implement because of data sharing fears and thoughts from these organizations. But basically, just-in-time arrival helps limiting the fuel consumption of the vessels, because ships tend to rush through the sea to arrive to the port, like there's no tomorrow, but then, they arrive too early, and what does that mean?

It means that they will stay there, stranded, and the emissions that will go around the proximity of the port population will be higher because they are just sitting there wasting time and emitting more emissions. So our organization acts as a partner in the decarbonization journey of the maritime industry, players like port authorities and shipping companies.

But I really wanted to make a point here is that, as a technology provider ourselves, the computing power that we need also has a carbon footprint of its own. So what do we do to make sure that we are mindful and we remAIn mindful of that? Well, for example, we are extremely careful of using only energy providers that provide the majority of the power sourced through green channels.

We are very transparent with our emissions. We use all kinds of solutions like Goodwings, for example, to make sure that all our traveling is as green as possible. We account for our scope 3 emissions as well. And there's a saying that I really like to attach to PortXchange. How I envision it is business as a force for good.

Anne: That sounds fantastic. So there's loads of things that you've mentioned there, which we could talk about. The changes that you're making within the industry to make shipping more efficient, that's very analogous to something we often talk about in tech around operational efficiency, kind of not using, not being wasteful, not using more resources than you need to, in order to achieve the same goal.

So, and while ships are powered by fossil fuels, then everything that you are wasting is, it results in carbon emissions. So that's really good. But you're also balancing that with thinking about how your tech itself is going to be greener. So yeah, so very interesting things there, which I'm sure we'll focus in a little bit, a bit more on as we go along. But let me zoom in.

I'll get started now with talking about some of the articles that we're going to be talking about So we're going talk about three articles. And to kick us off, the first one is a McKinsey article entitled, The Role of Power in Unlocking the European AI Revolution. So it's an interesting paper and it's all about the fact that at the moment, and it's, there are some very interesting numbers in it.

They are estimated numbers, but they're useful and interesting in and of themselves. So McKinsey estimates that as a result of AI and the desire for AI, data centers in Europe are going to expand from using about 2 percent of Europe's total power consumption to around 5 percent by the end of the decade, which seems quite plausible to me.

And they point out that there are several challenges associated with that for the European power infrastructure. And the article is entirely about Europe, but I think that the issues also apply elsewhere. The first is that we're going to need a lot more green power. I mean, the good thing, the thing that it does say in the article is that the hyperscalers are saying that the power that they're going to want to use to power this new AI revolution will be green.

So that's good. And that was not the case 10 years ago. So I think it's really good that they're now all singing from our hymn sheets on that, they want the power to be green, but they need more green power. They need the ability to get it from where it's generated to the data centers. So they need better infrastructure, better grid infrastructure.

And we need ways to handle the fact that renewable power is not always guaranteed to be avAIlable in the same way that fossil fuels are. So they're gonna need to make changes to, well, we're all gonna need to make changes to handle that. So generally, I thought it was a pretty interesting article.

What was, what were your thoughts?

Stefana: Well, first of all, with any change, we will inevitably feel uncomfortable. But in order to achieve the great outcome that we are all hoping for, we must collectively feel uncomfortable. It should even hurt. And it's okay to hurt because we have to think beyond that. So how does that apply to my world, to the world of maritime and ports?

And do I believe that decarbonization within the port ecosystem is more or less following the same path? Definitely different worlds. Completely different worlds. We are here, within the port world, we are looking at a traditional sector that has been known and popular for having ways of following from back in time.

But we start our presentations at PortXchange whenever we are invited to an event with "ports as battlegrounds for decarbonization." Because if you look in a more simplistic way, ports are the puppeteers, but let's not put a negative connotation there. Let's put a good connotation, as in, it's where the good fight can start for real.

But, as in any other sector, you need proven and robust sustAInability practices. Everything should be backed by verifiable data. I think it's very important here, not verified data, verifiable data. And one thing that is very important and maybe one of the biggest differences between other sectors or other industries is that ports benefit directly from community relations, from public perception, which inevitably leads to public and private partnerships and policy support.

For example, if you look at Norwegian ports, which have declared themselves as the employee of the people. Their ports have managed to not only super digitalize their operations, but they are almost net zero. And it's all purely because of the change in mindset. And I actually talked about this earlier today with someone from Climate Pledge, how your mission and your intrinsically motives can make the difference in this fight for decarbonization. And one good thing to mention is that earlier this month, 

European Seaports Association launched their environmental report. In this report, it has been made a point that climate change is our top one priority for ports. So what does that mean? That means that we should also expect full transparency and full accountability because being at the forefront means you have probably the biggest impact in terms of carbon emissions, et cetera, et cetera.

So ports have the authority in my world. Ports have the authority and influence to move the need. And what I would like to mention is that in my world, I keep saying in my world, it's almost funny because while I'm saying it, I'm envisioning how we're moving from a world to another. We are quite dependent on regulations here, and we have plenty of them.

We have the IMO, I'm not sure if you know about IMO, that AIms to achieve net zero in emissions from international shipping by 2050. And, while we are doing that, we also have checkpoints, 2030 and 2040. Do I think that we will start seeing real progress by 2030? No, I don't think that, unfortunately. But then we also have, since 2023, other mandatory regulations, like in energy efficiency existing ship index.

And then we have the Carbon Intensity Indicator. We have the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification from EUMRV. We have the Emissions Trading System. And more recently, we have the CSRD, which is more predominant for Europe. And CSRD is actually one of our allies in green tech for green tech providers, because it somehow pushes these organizations to report, especially their emissions and their impact.

But now there is a question here that remAIns constantly. We have all of these things and the industry is being pushed from the left, from the right, et cetera. But we ask ourselves, how do we use technology to help us be compliant with all of this? And meet the requirements, of course. And we ask, is AI the answer?

Is, I don't know, well, large language models the answer? Is blockchAIn the answer? What is the answer? We don't know yet.

Anne: So your potential, I mean, obviously when you talk about increasing the efficiency of journeys, making sure people get to just-in-time, making sure that people aren't hanging around getting places early, getting places late, going too fast, optimally using their fuel and being as minimally wasteful as possible whilst delivering the service. So operational efficiency. The obvious thing that springs to mind is can AI help with that? Do you think it can, or do you?

Stefana: Yeah, absolutely. So, AI is not the enemy. Like, It can be. It can be the enemy, but not when used for this purpose. We use AI in our technology as well. We have a couple of case studies about that on our website, but we don't need AI for everything, Anne. That's another thing, because sometimes I ask myself, "do I even need AI in this situation?"

Last year I was nominated for an award by Women in AI, Netherlands. It was Responsible AI Leaders. And the nomination really made me think, what if instead of chasing unicorns, we grab the low hanging fruit and start implementing and bringing into operations the technology that is already avAIlable and viable.

Because we have so much, we have great technology already and we have the skills for it. So I would like to see, because I'm working in an industry that moves slower by default, because there are many stakeholders and many people and many other third parties involved, I would like to see what we have finally being implemented.

And meanwhile, we train and we upscale. But focus should be on scaling what's already there, instead of maybe continuously developing new tech that needs to go through the adoption curve anyway. One of our core specializations, sorry English is not my first language, like I mentioned is to provide optimization models.

And we also provide estimates based on data. Our technology might not be the fancy, super large language models, which everybody seems to be either an expert or an advocate or something nowadays, but statistical algorithms built for the goal that we want to help ports decarbonize by emissions monitoring or by just-in-time or more sAIling, et cetera.

It might not sound fancy. A couple of years ago, it sounded super fancy before GenAI popped, but it's doing the job and it's doing the job very well.

So sometimes I'm in doubt. Are we really that stubborn to think that we need AI for everything? Especially in sectors like the maritime sector, where there's still so much legacy that needs to be erased and so many things that need to be relearned,

forgotten and then learned. We are, the industry is still working with traditional professionals that are very good at their job, but in order for them to embrace AI, they need to embrace technology.

Anne: Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, we find the same in just pure tech as well, outside of the maritime industry. And that's. The lowest hanging fruit is usually very simple. It's turning things off that are no longer in use. It's right sizing. It's just minimizing waste in the same way that you're looking at minimizing basic waste.

The basic waste minimization is where you usually get your biggest reduction in carbon emissions. There's a French philosopher once said that, the perfect is the enemy of the good, that the pursuit of a perfect solution makes you step over a very good solution that you already have in your hand.

And that's true of, it sounds like it's true of your industry. It's certain true of our industry. Manual thriftathons, turning things off, right sizing, you don't have to do anything clever to really start cutting your carbon emissions quite significantly. Yeah, no, we're all the same, really.

Stefana: Yeah. And we also have to understand I had quite an aha moment last year. I went back to my home country, Romania, and was right after I was nominated for this award. And my mom is a teacher at a school in a small village. And people came to me, they asked me, okay, what's up? How's your life? All that. And it was a really big boom with AI and all that, and they asked me, so what is your opinion on AI?

What is AI? And I realized that the majority of the population needs a more simplistic understanding of artificial intelligence. It's not the fancy super professional profile that everyone is putting on LinkedIn or on their blogs and all that. And in order to see adoption, day to day adoption in our lives and in our employees' work lives, we need to make it simpler.

We need to... again, do we really need AI for everything? I keep getting, I keep coming back to this.

Anne: It's interesting you say that. So I read it, I think it was an article in The Economist, last week. It was talking about how AI, the companies are really struggling to work out what they're going to do with AI. Because interestingly, the people who are finding uses for AI are more likely to be individuals because making ChatGPT a live service that anybody could access for free really did kind of open it up to people could just go on, play with it, talk to it, use it to rewrite their essays at school, all the things, good or bad, that you can do with ChatGPT. There it's, interestingly, it's an interestingly accessible technology, isn't it? But businesses are really struggling to work out what they're going to do with it.

Stefana: Yeah, and is Chad GPT going to decarbonize the maritime sector? No freaking way. I haven't heard of anyone saying how they plan to use ChatGPT to decarbonize or to help ports account for their emissions. And another thing that I experienced actually in my close circle is that when they are, when ChatGPT is being taken from them, like for example, their companies blocked the ChatGPT server, et cetera.

They don't know how to do their job anymore, or they are panicked that they will not be as efficient as before. And it's just, for me, it's quite concerning because as a responsible AI advocate, it's scary to see that. Last year or two years ago, nobody have ever thought "I cannot do my job if I don't have this little chat to support me."

But now we see more and more. In marketing, I've been quite active in testing all kinds of AI solutions up to the point that I hit burnout because I was so afrAId that I will be left behind and I will not be employable anymore and companies will not see me as the next gen thing anymore, that I worked myself to burnout and I don't want to see that massively in all industries because there's, there are still many good things that we can do before we rush into something that might be a little bit over the top.

Anne: Yeah, it is quite sophisticated. It's still very early days. I'm very ambivalent about AI, but I think there are some amazing things about it. There's some bad things about it, but there are some amazing things about and I really want to see it. So what I'm going to do is talk about the next, because we're chatting a lot, we're running behind. So let's talk about the next thing, because I want to talk about the final one as well.

And the next one, I will put in some of my thoughts in there. So the next article was AI power demand might actually turn out to be good for climate. And it is an article in Energy Connects. And it's talking about what the last article talks about, which is the massively increasing electricity consumption driven by data centers, particularly those supporting AI, but it's, it, has a more positive take on it, which is that data centers are actually a pretty good potential consumer of renewables. We have a lot more ability to shift and shape our work. We're a lot more aware. There's a lot more demand for green, particularly from the hyperscalers, which, as I said before, is great news.

And we want to see it happen more to make sure that it's not just them saying it, but them actually doing it. And one of the things that's coming out of, what's happening at the moment is that AI is quite early in a, massive boost in electricity demand, which we know is coming because the, energy transition is going to drive a massive increase in electricity demand, so we are going to have to get grids ready for that.

And AI is, to a certAIn extent, giving us a little early exposure to that. There's a really interesting stat in the article about 

likening the demands to the biggest demand surge in electricity since World War II, which made me think, oh, I didn't realize there had been a massive electricity demand surge in World War II, but there was right at the beginning of World War II, there was a 60 percent increase in demand for, I went and looked this up on Wikipedia after reading this quote in there, 60 percent increase in electricity demand that came from the fact that actually there were a lot of new electrified factories that had to be built, but also an awful lot of Aluminium smelting. They needed a lot more aluminium to build ships, as you know yourself, and planes and aluminium smelting is very energy intensive, very electricity intensive.

So I thought this was, it was quite, it was a really quite interesting article that I would strongly recommend people have a read through. And it did make me think there were a few things in here. Yes, we do need an awful lot of additional, not just the ability to generate power, but we really need to upgrade grids all over Europe to get that power to where it's going to be used.

We are all going to need to learn to love the pylon is what I'm thinking. What were your thoughts on the article?

Stefana: So I think I have a little bit of understanding of where we are heading or where we should be heading but I'm definitely not an expert on this so more from the sideline. But also as a consumer I want to be very mindful. And PortXchange as well as a green tech provider needs to be mindful of that because we have to live by what we preach.

So from what we know right now, nuclear power does not have a large profile in emissions. So that's green, that's a green check.

Anne: Yeah, indeed.

Stefana: What we also know is that nuclear waste can be catastrophic. And it needs to be handled very carefully and also they are expensive as hell. Solar requires a lot of space.

Windmills produce lots of noise pollution. Also super expensive. And you cannot live nearby, so any communities or There's so many considerates there. Hydro requires a lot of space, and it's super expensive, dangerous as well if it breaks, and it has a direct impact on local climate and ecosystem.

And the one that should not be named, or the one that can't be named, it's fossil fuels.

The nastiest in terms of emissions profile, it's what we all want to leave behind. But unfortunately, as you already know, Anne, and all these articles mention it, with so much demand in AI, the question is, do we have enough time to test all these alternatives? Do we have enough bandwidth to keep looking into solutions and all that?

Or the demand is so high that we go drill, baby, drill, codes with codes, or even worse, we go back to coal, which is one of my recurrent nightmares, to be honest. And that's why I keep getting back to the question, do we really need AI for everything? Do you really need to have ChatGPT giving you that image with cats and dogs and whatever?

Because I don't know if you know, but the carbon footprint of Dall-E 2, similar with ChatGPTs, is at 2.2g CO2 emissions per query. Which is, sounds little,

but if you start doing the math, Jesus Christ... And then the CEO of MidJourney, David Holtz, said a while back that image generation requires about 1,000 trillion operations, which suggests a carbon footprint of about 1.9g CO2 emissions using NVIDIA, A100 GPUs, which consumes, only for that, right, for one image, 400 watts of power. For one image. And I, you probably did this, Anne, you went on ChatGPT, you said "create an image," blah blah, and then it gives you an image, and it sucks, it's horrible, it's... "Jesus Christ, what is this?"" And then you say "no, another," blah blah blah blah, and it gives you, and it sucks even more, because now it's something completely different, and you are stuck in that loophole for 15 minutes, and nine images later, you finally have something, but it's still not good enough, so you go on Google and you find an image that, but you just wasted God knows how much emissions, correct?

Anne: Well, yes. But we were at the beginning on AI. I mean, I, they're good and bad and sometimes, and, there's an awful lot of waste associated with AI, but I think we have to kind of say, "look, it's coming and we need to make the best of it." It's, people want it, it's useful. It's really at an early stage.

We will definitely get better at it, and we will get more efficient at it.

Stefana: What we need to get is a little bit more environmentally conscious. So I want it because it's shiny and cute and it helps me. But what do I do to compensate for the carbon footprint? Educate myself first of all, right? And then compensate with that.

Anne: So there was something in the article that wasn't what they meant it for me to take away from the article, but I took away article, from this article, which is that when they talked about the massive increase in electricity demand in World War II, and then I looked on Wikipedia and a lot of it was from aluminium smelting.

So aluminium smelting, really, we still do tons of that because we all want aluminum for everything. It's an incredibly useful metal part of our day to day lives. Nowadays, we don't do, we don't tend to do aluminum smelting off a national grid anymore, because it's a very expensive way of doing it. A lot of aluminum smelting, take it for Europe, takes place in Greenland, because Greenland has 24/7 carbon-free electricity from hydro, from water running off glaciers. It's another source of energy that we don't often think about, but should think about more these days. Water running, melt water running off glaciers is a potentially a really good source of cheap carbon-free electricity.

And so a lot of aluminum smelting moved to Greenland where it's done in a very low carbon way compared to doing it on a grid. And I talk about this with AI, I've talked about this with AI many times before in that, there's a lesson to be learned there. Sometimes you need to take the very electricity-heavy load to where there's a load of low carbon power to do it.

And yeah, I'd love to see. We've had this conversation on Environment Variables loads. I'd love some, a lot more AI going on in Greenland. 

Stefana: 100 percent sure that with this increase in demand, especially, we are putting more pressure on the ones that move the needle and can really do a change. And we also need to keep in mind that when we push for more green alternatives, there will be more pressure to invest in that. And with the conscious use of AI,

the same as there are activists that, fight against Shell or fight against the shipping industry because that happens as well. There are also now climate change activists that militate for green or conscious use of data, of technology, of AI, so on and so forth. So every trend creates different ecosystems and different communities. And communities and individuals have the power to push for more things like you mentioned.

The moment we become conscious of how we use them and the moment we become conscious of how they impact the global matters of things and not only us per se.

Anne: Yeah. You're quite right that we have more power than we realize. If we actually shout for things, if we shout for green AI, if we demand that hyperscalers are running off green power, if we demand that the growth, that things are running on smaller models, running on local devices, rather than over egging it and not thinking about these things.

Think green AI all the time. And so these articles have been quite useful because they suggest that the hyperscalers are pushing for green AI. And they're only doing that as well. They're doing that partly because they're not idiots. It's

Stefana: Exactly. That's what I wanted to say. 

Anne: That's, we know in the future that, renewable power is where all the growth is.

If you look on our, I always recommend people have a look on our world in data, excellent source of all graphs on anything you might want to have a graph on, but they have some excellent graphs on, global solar power generation, global wind generation, but mostly global solar power generation. It's going up exponentially.

And you kind of think, well, that is the future. Fossil fuels are not going up exponentially. Solar power is going up exponentially, so we need to be ready to use it. And then the hyperscalers know that, but at the same time, they feel the pressure from customers constantly saying, what is your green story?

Stefana: Absolutely.

I put my hopes into that.

Anne: Yeah, absolutely.

Because, 

need like you,

Stefana: and there was that ad right at the beginning of generative AI trend, where a construction company said, "Hey, ChatGPT, come and finish this building." It was a brilliant ad. Now, if you think a little bit at the environmental situation that is happening in Europe, and not only in Europe, but also the geopolitical situation that is happening, and one of our closest and one of the saddest examples that I will give right now is what happened in Spain,

Anne: Oh, yeah.

Stefana: And the floods that they've experienced.

And one thing that you will ask now is, how is AI fixing that? How is AI helping those people right now get their lives back together? Is it helping or is it contributing to their catastrophe? And that's a question that I ask myself constantly when I think of mindfulness in using technology and AI and so on and so forth.

If AI can make the world a better place. God, please do it. God, please save us. AI, artificial intelligence, robots, please save us from ourselves. But until they have that power, if they will have it, you never know, we need to consider our Shorter impact on that. The little step.

Anne: Well, actually, I think that is a, that's a really good question to be asking ourselves, it's like AI is just code. It's just technology. It's just another aspect of technology. But for all technology, what are we doing? Are we making the situation worse or are we making the situation better? If we're running systems that are over provisioned and we're just, we're being wasteful, we are making the situation worse.

We're not making situation better and, even if us, the tool that we're developing will help build it, absolutely fantastic. But then go back and make sure that it's not being wasteful. There's really no downside to going back later and just cutting waste, just trying to improve.

That doesn't mean we have to stop using technology. It doesn't mean we have to stop using AI. Use it in a mindful way. All good. In fact, we shouldn't stop using it. All these tools are fantastic and will be required for us almost certain to solve these problems. Quite possibly, AI will help with these problems in the future.

Predicting when storms are going to happen, predicting what the result of that is going to be, telling people where to go and what to do and how to survive it. Actually, AI can really potentially help with that, quite a lot of it, but yeah, but we just need to be mindful, as you say, mindful.

Stefana: And we need to be in balance. And like you said, AI has tremendous capabilities to improve operations too. We saw that AI has finally managed to understand how whales are speaking and what they are saying. We use AI in our methodology to track emissions and to identify the hotspots at ports. But remember what I said at the beginning of our conversation, business for good use.

Use it to make the world a better place, as cliche as it sounds, and if your organization desperately wants to use AI, work with technology specialists, but also with sustainability and environmental specialists in understanding the impact and the long term strategy that you want to follow in order to see feasible results from that.

And I think we are in a position right now where we need to be accountable for our footprint, for our carbon footprint. So whatever we do, track, monitor, analyze, keep an eye on it, because otherwise we're walking blindly without the data that is out there for us to see. Either it's AI, either it's electric cars, either it's whatever, it doesn't matter.

Anything can be used for a good cause.

Anne: That is an excellent point. And I realized we have, we've chatted way too long and we've completely used up our time to talk about the final article, which actually I thought was a bit of a, it was a bit of a weak article. So I'm not too worried. It was a very good article, but it was a, it was about Three Mile Island by somebody who had, it was written in their PhD about three mile island, which, and, it's about anti nuclear and the dangers of nuclear. And it felt a little bit like, well, because something bad happened in the seventies, doesn't necessarily mean... I would rather that we're focusing on what's France's experience of nuclear been for the past, since then?

What have they learned? Is it now a safe technology? How can we use it? We just, because there was a massive accident 40, 50 years ago doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing to do. We've learned a lot of lessons since then. If we'd given up flying in 1979, 'cause there were loads of plane crashes in the seventies, we would have given up flying and we would know, we would, we'd have missed out on the enormous improvements in safety that went on in flying and bizarrely that the improvements in safety that went on in the aviation industry had a huge positive impact on safety in all other industries, including the maritime industry and the nuclear industry. So sometimes you can't just stop. Sometimes you can't just stop. Hey, what did you, think of that article?

Stefana: You mentioned that if we stopped using planes to fly when we know how many accidents there have been, well, what would have happened if we stopped using vessels when Titanic sank? 

The titanic example like many aviation example, was a striking point for safety and for many other things, right? It was a breaking point, like we like to say nowadays.

I think Anne, unfortunately, I think the Hollywood, and it will sound weird that I say this, but the Hollywood and the media and all that have romanticized the catastrophe that have been happening at Chernobyl, at Fukushima, and all that. There have been so many collateral parties that have gained a lot from that.

And it was just very easy to constantly. It's very easy to rule by fear, right? And we have been brainwashed. Maybe it's harsh to say that, "oh my God, that's the enemy." But I will look at the facts here that I know from my research. Nuclear is stable. AI needs stability. If we really want output there, and if we really want to use AI for the greater use in any industry, it needs stability.

If I look at nuclear, I look at it more as an ally in the fight for climate change, because, like I said previously, it's emissions profile is close to zero. And of course, yeah, we are still scared because of what I've just said. We have romanticized in a very negative way the incidents that happened in the past.

But like you said, I really hope that we learned from those disasters. I really hope that there are people out there, super smart people, that know how to tackle this. In Romania, we have such a nuclear plant, and it's been staying there, doing nothing, and it has tremendous potential.

If I'm not mistaken, it might, we might have more than one, actually, but I don't want to say things that I'm not sure about here. Everyone was scared when they threatened to bomb the nuclear plant in Ukraine, right? For obvious reasons. But if we look at the facts, nuclear power is, it's emissions profile is very low, close to zero, so it's an ally for climate change, for environmentalists.

And an optimist would say "let's learn from the mistakes that we've done in the past with this alternative and make sure that we don't repeat those mistakes for the greater good." We can.

Yeah, we can't continue, we cannot by any chance continue with fossil fuels and I'm saying this from the bottom of my heart.

At PortXchange we can see the data, we have the data in front of our eyes and the emissions that we see on a daily basis are very concerning, extremely concerning. In the ports ecosystem, especially city ports, Anne, there have been studies that are quite, they are not, the media does not take them, the media does not shine a light on them, but the data shows and the research shows people living in city ports have a 3 percent higher increase, if not up to 7 percent higher increase in lung cancer.

Anne: Gosh.

Stefana: Yes! Fertility rates are heavily impacted in city ports. The closer you live to the port, the more you are affected. There are all kinds of health impacts that have been studied. I can send you a couple. We have quite some good studies in our database.

Anne: Send us that, and Chris will put links to that in the show notes. In fact, all the articles today are in the show notes, just as a reminder.

Stefana: So are there risks? Well, plenty, as with any other alternative. The same risks that we look at nuclear power, there is in solar panels, etc. Risks for everything, but we need to look, what are our ambitions for the future? And AI is very ambitious. And it will require a lot of power. But the Earth doesn't have the resources to power it anymore.

Not the way we've been doing it up until now. So I might sound like a nuclear advocate here, I think I might be, but from the analysis that I've read, it seems like the best solution for us. But of course it needs lots of financial investments because it's super expensive, lots of people to be trained and prepared and all that, and most of our nuclear plants are shut down, so I can only imagine the whole thing that will involve to start them again.

Do we have enough time? That's my worry. Do we have enough time? I don't know.

Anne: It's true. I love nuclear. I really wish we'd started 20 years ago. But, like France. We've done amazingly well on that.

Stefana: Yeah.

Anne: In the Maritime, on the high seas, loads of big stuff driven by nuclear engines. Obviously loads of the aircraft carriers, really heavy stuff driven by nuclear engines, ice breakers, lots of the Russian ice breakers have nuclear engines.

And we've got loads of experience in that. So it's interesting. Are we still about to have the nuclear future that we thought we were going to have back in the eighties? It's, very interesting, but I agree with you that Hollywood had really caused us a major problem there. It's too, it's terrible.

Anyway...

Stefana: sometimes, you sound lunatic when you say that, and I'm often being told, but let's just look at the facts. Why fear, why do you fear nuclear? When you ask a normal person. "Oh, because Chernobyl." Okay. Well, Chernobyl had very corrupt people working there, first of all. The whole system was corrupt, and the incompetency was at a high level, etc. So, yeah, I need to speak from 

I wear many hats when I talk to you, but right now I'm wearing my climate activist hat as well as a green tech advocate.

We must, not we should or we need, we must look into alternatives because we are running out of time.

Anne: And on that fantastic note, we will close our podcast for today. We must look at alternatives because we are running out of time. Absolutely the correct thing to be saying. So Stefana, before we go, where should listeners go to find out more about you?

Stefana: You can find me on LinkedIn under my name exactly as it is here, Stefana Sopco. I'm the only Stefana Sopco on LinkedIn. I pride myself with that. So it will be very easy to find me there.

Anne: Excellent. So that's very good. I'm also on LinkedIn, as I mentioned before. I don't know if I'm the only Anne Currie, but I'm sure you'll find me. So thank you very much for being on the episode, Stefana. It's been a really fun episode. I really liked that bit at the end where we talked about nuclear.

That was excellent. A final reminder that all the resources for this episode are in the show description below, and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. Goodbye for now.

Stefana: Thank you, Anne. Bye.

Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening! Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.