Today, we don’t have 1 or 2 guests but 10! In partnership with the YouTube channel Architect Tomorrow, we are glad to share with you snippets and interviews of the speakers who made the latest Green IO Conference in London a huge success last week.
The audio quality has improved since last year but is still perfectible. Except for this, I hope you’ll enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed crafting Green IO London 2025 for its attendees.

Check Green IO London agenda and the speakers' presentation.  

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Gaël Duez (00:03)
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

This episode is a special one brought to you in partnership with Architect Tomorrow. These nine interviews were recorded live from Green IO London a week ago by Oliver Cronk, who I warmly thank for his collaboration. The sound quality isn't as good as you have been used to, but the quality of the guest is as good as ever. Enjoy the episode.

Speaker 1 (00:51)
Gail, hi. Welcome to Green IO London, your conference that you put on all around the world. So I guess, you know, we wanted to recreate hopefully a little bit more professionally what we did last year. Hopefully with better audio, fingers crossed. Hence audio mic.

Speaker 2 (01:03)
Pretty an amazing job last year.

Speaker 1 (01:05)
So if you've not checked out last year's, can go and have a look at last year's. But yeah, what we wanted to do was give a little bit of a summary of what happened today at Green IO. So perhaps for those that are new to the Green IO brand and concept and thing, podcast, community, can you give everyone a quick summary? ⁓

Speaker 2 (01:20)
Well, basically Green IO was created to connect responsible technologists. That really the main, I would say, North Star, even if I don't like that much single metrics, they can be very misleading, but the mission is there, like connect responsible technologists. And it all started with a podcast where I wanted people doing things in the green IT field. So really focusing on how to reduce my environmental footprint as a technologist, not focusing that much on the other part, which is how can I bring technology to do good things in the world because I believe that there are a lot of great materials, resources, podcasts, conferences, show, whatever about this, there is not that many shows and resources for technology saying, know, I'm every day at the office or behind my desk, what can I do? I want to reduce the environmental footprint, what can I do? And I realize that people in different line of works, whether they're design, ops, obviously, dev, et cetera, et cetera, things but they were not necessarily aware of what each other were doing and it's also happened across countries and even continents so it was like okay let's share the news and this is how the podcast was created and then two years ago, yeah two years ago now, I had the opportunity to partner with API Days who has been very committed in the field of sustainability, inclusivity, etc etc but all this I would say human centered and planet centered ⁓ fights and they offered me the opportunity to create my own conference within the big API Days conference and I said okay yes because I'm still a strong believer that in-person meeting is crucial. And the philosophy of these conferences were really based on three values, respect the planet, respect science, respect people. And what we do for this is we bring an international perspective, cross-disciplinary perspective. We connect people as much as we can because we do this meeting in person. And we respectfully agree to disagree. And that's really something that matters.
last year in London, I don't know if you remembered, you had on stage Mark Butcher saying that basically some tech companies were bullshitting, greenwashing, et cetera. You know Mark, old man yelling at the cloud. And a few talks later, one of these big tech company was explaining its own perspective and it was done respectfully. And so people in the room can have a healthy debate and understand, okay, I understand Mark's point of view, I understand this tech company point of view, I make my own opinion, but without yelling at each other, without this stupidness of a social media bubble and all of this.

Speaker 1 (03:59)
Yeah, that in-person sort of communication is very important for that, isn't it? It's easy to get sort of, almost take away the human aspect of communication when it's online. But I mean, so look, Gael, you've taken this conference now all around the world. What is it about London and perhaps today that you're most looking forward to on the agenda?

Speaker 2 (04:13)
I think we've been blessed to have, despite I wouldn't say communication embargo, but communication strict

requirements from their top management. A lot of the government's people joining, so we follow their rules, like there will be no Q &A, no interviews, no recordings, but they did the effort to come and to share what the civil servants have done in the UK. And to be honest, except for France, I didn't see that level of commitment anywhere around the world. think the UK folks are leading the charge when it comes to providing access

sustainable IT services for the population. They're very into it and I think we will have like maybe 50, 60, if not 100 participants coming from the civil sector. And that's great because my main goal is that when the average techie joining, not maybe Green IO, but like API Days or Generation AI conference or any other conference, when they see a Green IO conference, they might be curious

they might attend one talk and if this talk is the government saying we've done something when he or she comes back in the office and say hey boss you know I think we should do something about green up I think we should do something about sustainable design if the boss pushes back and say wow

that's green stuff, that's Greenpeace talking, we're doing business here. they know, actually the government has done it, or this big corporation has done it, or NHS has done it. Suddenly, it creates a lot of credibility and it can change the momentum internally.

Speaker 1 (05:52)
Great. And so look, this episode, a special episode of Architect Tomorrow in collaboration with Green IO will give a bit of a... you so much No worries. I love this conference and I love what you do. It's amazing. And so hopefully this episode will give people a flavor of what was discussed. Clearly we probably can't cover much on the government side for those reasons that you just described, but I really hope there that people find this is a good introduction to Green IO and then they go and discover more.

Speaker 2 (06:15)
would say that

will have lot of people doing GreenOps on a daily basis, achieving things. But I think this year seems especially interesting because it's good for the planet, good for business, question mark. And the question mark is important here. And this is all the juice of a green IO. Because we will have both people achieving great things with GreenOps,

Speaker 1 (06:33)
Okay.

Speaker 2 (06:37)
that's good to start. A journey needs to start. It needs to start in an accessible way. If you want to reach the star from day one, obviously it's a recipe to disaster. my point is, I think tomorrow what we will see is this dialogue between, this is what you can do on day one, but don't fool yourself. Don't fall in the

of greenwashing by pretending that because you started GreenOps you solved every problem in sustainability in your company or in the world. Start the dialogue, start the discussion, see where you can improve and do it in a very respectful way for planet, people and science.

Speaker 1 (07:13)
Awesome,

well hopefully I'll grab you at the end of the conference to get your sort of in summary. thanks again.

Hi, my name is Amel, Chief Executive Officer at Rezileo, a Swiss startup, 25 people working on the environment footprint of ICT, trying to reduce it, data tools and services. The workshop I'll be running this afternoon is exactly about the data part. So how do you use the data we produce to reduce the footprint of the services you operate? And is it specifically device carbon footprints? Is that what it is, like the technology products? Give everyone a flavor of what specifically it is.

Speaker 2 (07:30)
using

how you get the data.

Speaker 1 (07:50)
that Resilio does. So if you go and check on db.resilio.tech you'll see that indeed we have a lot of equipment, hardware products, but we also have services such as cloud services, virtual machine storage, and we're increasingly adding new... We are releasing today the news that we just completed a partnership with Electricity Map and be able to provide data on...

Speaker 2 (08:04)
services. electricity also and region

Speaker 1 (08:15)
more than 200 countries

on this planet, up to five minute granularity. So that will be a huge part also. yeah, devices, electricity, and cloud services. Hi, thank you so much for having me. My name is Magalie and I lead the international expansion for a company called Soft. Soft, is a platform that allows organizations to measure and decarbonize IT in a holistic way. Brilliant. And it was great catching your talk earlier.

For those that weren't able to see it, how would you give a fairly quick summary of what you were talking about? Yeah, absolutely. So the objective of this session was to do a deep dive on a particular topic ⁓ in the green IT space that is looking at the growing use case around applications, with the number of applications exploding, especially due to AI, the storage and the infrastructure behind applications also.

increasing and therefore looking at how GreenOps can help organizations really maximize their environmental gains by taking an infrastructure level view of applications as well as maximizing their cost reductions. Brilliant. So kind of using GreenOps to look at application usage and that sort of things. Amazing. And have you had a chance to take in much of the other sessions today? Have you got any sort of key takeaways from the event today? Yeah, absolutely.

So Soft is a French based company and many of you know that the green IT ecosystem in France is quite strong. But I think the conclusion of this event is that we're getting some competition. But also demand, I would say, in the UK market for sustainable and green IT. Absolutely. That's really good to see.

So you're keynoting at Green IO London 2025. I am. I'm very excited to be keynoting. I'm one of the authors, along with Sarah Sue and Sarah Bergman of O'Reilly's book, Building Green Software, which we wrote to kind of like set the scene of non-controversial. Everybody's going to agree this is what we're aiming for. And today I'm going to be talking a little bit about how AI fits into that model. And I'll be taking us back in time

to say, where did AI come from? Modern AI, not AI kind of like in the 50s, modern AI come from LLMs and chat-chip-y-t onwards. Why is it so successful? And how do we align it with climate change? Because I think that if you don't understand the context, everybody's read building green software, I'm quite obsessed with context and stepping back and understanding where things come from. And so that's what I want to do a little bit. There are lots of things we could do, but given the

of AI, modern AI, what's likely to work and what would be less likely to work? How do we focus our efforts in the right way? So it sounds like trying to find a pragmatic path to using AI but doing so sustainably. Absolutely, yes. Is there anything that you like to look up on the agenda? Well I have to say I'm really looking towards all the talks today. There's a lot of talks from the British government. thought you'd be coming.

Oh, that's a shame. So I'm looking forward to those, not least because I'll be haranguing governments around the world a little bit in my keynote, so we'll see what effect that has. Look forward to that. Anne. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Hello, I'm Mark Buff. So I work for OVO as Digital Sustainability Manager. So I'm overseeing the carbon footprint and other environmental impacts of our tech and digital products that we create and use there. And today we're talking about

collaboration that I've done with Heater around running devices on the hot water cylinders in our OVO customer homes to heat their water but also run compute for us. So yeah, it's quite interesting. Hi, I'm Charlie, I'm a commercial director at Heater. We are building radically more sustainable infrastructure than a typical data center and the way that we do that is by reusing the waste heat from servers and using it for hot water.

Speaker 2 (12:04)
I'm Charlie.

homes for the future of our library to help them with their customer.

Speaker 1 (12:18)
And today we're talking about our technology and our kind of vision of our AI infrastructure, but also our collaboration with OVO to reduce their cloud emissions and also...

It's amazing I'm a big fan of heat recovery I think it's a bit of a no-brainer that we're not tapping into and I've spoken to other people like deep green and others who are looking at it so it's great to get heater I talked to heater as well possibly rounds out most of the people in the space looking at it so no big fan of that Charlie so yeah I guess is there any other sort of thoughts observations from the day that you've kind of picked up? Yeah it's always great to hear from Alan Curry, he's a great speaker I think yeah that the whole AI

interesting to see where that race of AI using loads of energy and then the ramp up of renewables are they going to line up together or is one going to be the other. yeah, interesting to see where that goes. Yeah, I'd say enjoyed especially the end of Anne's talk where she talked about kind of fate being in our hands. We have to make the changes that we want to see and I think we're in the room with the right people to make that. And then also watching Natalie talk, having worked

Speaker 2 (13:23)
happen.

Speaker 1 (13:26)
with lot of big enterprises before.

Speaker 2 (13:29)
trying to help them on this journey.

Speaker 1 (13:31)
I'm also familiar

with the struggles of making change happen, so it's interesting to see how HSBC are managing to make a difference. Amazing, yeah, so ⁓ I'm Dryden, I am the CEO of Carbon Runner, and what I'm into is making some action, especially around bringing my love for sustainability and technology together. It's kind of why we built the tools that we build, and yeah, with Carbon Runner, we're really looking at focusing on shifting cloud compute, be it AI training or GitHub actions.

to low carbon regions to lots of emissions, 90 % emissions. Yeah, I'd love to talk about the combination of looking for lower carbon hosting and running workloads where it's cleaner, but also the cost savings. was really interesting. So just give everyone an idea of what, beyond just carbon saving, carbon is delivering. Yeah, so traditionally, especially like CICD or continuous integration, it's just focused on two pillars, which is price and

performance you know does it run really quick and is it cheap it turns out that github's a great platform but it's actually most of your stuff is super slow and it's really expensive too it's probably the one or most but they have it it's sticky so you use it and you get loads of tools and we you know it's a great service but we want to add two more for modern age which is you know resilience can we run these jobs across multiple clouds in the lowest co2 regions like yeah you can do that it's super easy to do and ⁓

Yeah, and the last one is like that resilience piece, adding resilience and sustainability to those four pillars of a modern CI CD. Awesome. What have you sort of learned or sort of seen that's impressed you today at Green IO? Is there any sort of takeaways or anything that's particularly sort of you found interesting? Yeah, I liked it today because it was more, it feels a bit more action based. I really like, I loved the talks yesterday, but I was very, here's our dashboard, here's our report.

here's an API and I think that's why I kind of came and I was super excited to do the talk because it's like, yeah it's cool and I get it like we need all of those things too but it's like actually how we make change, that change is possible sometimes not even that hard and you can make some great benefits so I really liked it there and also it's just nice to get yourself out of the screen and meet people in real life. Yeah I know it totally is isn't it? I'm really impressed by what you're doing so it looks like you've got reasonable traction like can you give us an idea of numbers?

that word. we're actually actively fundraising at the moment. So when we talk to VCs, they're normally like, come back to us when you have like a million ARR. And we're like, but why would we talk to you if we had that much money? So they're always looking for traction. We kind of deal in minutes and jobs. So in the last month or two, we run 60,000 jobs for a multiple, you know, we've got, we focus on enterprises and kind of like quite large enterprises in interestingly, many different sectors, energy being one of them with our work.

the pilot with Hito with OVO. But yeah, it can really range to the customers that we have, but we're building like a super healthy wait list, doing some partnerships and adding more clouds. We can now go like five cloud regions. So we're just trying to make it double down, kind of worry on the things that we can control and just build the best product like we can with our sustainability in our minds as the the top pillar, but appreciating that maybe it's not the fundamental one at enterprises. So we have to really have

a multi-pillar offering. Well it's really interesting to see what you're doing and thanks for talking to me on Green IO and Architect Tile. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

It is super fun to be here. My name is Hannah, Hannah Smith. I work at the GreenWeb Foundation and I'm Director of Operations. If you haven't heard of the GreenWeb Foundation, we are a non-profit based in Europe. We have a mission to see a fossil-free internet by 2030. If you've ever tested the carbon emissions of a website, it's very likely you'll have used some of our infrastructure somewhere along the way, maybe our data set or maybe our open source package.

Today I'm talking about a new project that we've got on called Carbon Text. We are trying to find clever, innovative, but simple ways to address the lack of data transparency within the sustainability field. So we have this really simple idea. Why can't everybody just share the sustainability data at a well-known standardized location on their websites like web address, greenweb.com?

It's a dead simple idea, but often the most simpler ideas are the most powerful ones. So for those that know about web development, there's things like robots.txt and other files that are put at the top of the website. So something similar like that, which, yeah, OK. Yeah, that's exactly the idea.

trying to do is just to take away that difficulty in finding information that many companies have to publish by law, but it's just scattered all over the place. Aside from making the data more discoverable, we're also looking at different ways of making the data more machine readable or more standardized as well. So that's another aspect of Carbon Text. And of course you know quite a lot about this project, don't you, because we've done some collaboration on it together. Yeah, thank you for that segue. I was going to throw in.

this is something that we've been collaborating on with the Tech Carbon Standard. So I'm really proud that we've been working together and that Carbon.Techs can point to someone's Tech Carbon Standard sort of data. So yeah, this is something that I'm certainly put some links to Carbon.Techs and Tech Carbon Standard and what we're doing together. So it's great to see you here talking about it today, Hannah. So great to see you. Thanks for jumping on to give us a bit of a summary about what you're doing. Absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Hannah. So we'll obviously start this off with a comedy. Hi, Ollie. Hi, Ollie.

It's the two of you at Green IO. So yeah, thanks for taking some time to talk to me on Architects.morrow slash Green IO. Kick us off with telling us who you are and who you work for. I am Ollie and I am the co-founder of Root and Branch. We're a digital sustainability and software development consultancy based down in Brighton.

I came across you because you do the green software Brighton or have I got the name of that wrong? No, that is completely correct. Yeah, yeah, we actually started with that community and then it grew into something much bigger than we thought it was going to be and we wanted to just spend all of our time in this digital sustainability space. So me and my co-founder Adam, we set up Root and Branch and we haven't looked back. And so what have you been talking about at Green IO today?

Well, we've been doing some work on the software carbon intensity standard, which came out of the Green Software Foundation a couple of years ago. And what we've been doing is expanding that ⁓ foundation so that we could apply it to web applications and websites, which is what we've done. And we've written an academic paper on how we did that.

we're here to just share that work with the wider community. What have you found fascinating? What sort of piqued your interest over the last couple of days? I really liked what Dryden's up to with the carbon runner. The community's been talking about carbon aware.

computing for a long time and there have been some progress made in that area. All these things are really practical isn't it? actually, he's actually doing it. It's really practical, it's such a simple idea and it's often the simple ideas that work and it's a foundation on which we can build more.

more things. So I really like it. I'm definitely going to be checking out later. That's one. Yeah, I It's exciting. I agree. Awesome. Thanks very much. Cool. Cheers.

Speaker 2 (21:12)
Yeah

Speaker 1 (21:13)
Hi Ian, welcome to the Architect Tomorrow podcast. Can you perhaps start by giving us bit of an introduction? Hi Oliver, I'm a senior lecturer in sustainable IT based at the University of the West of England in Bristol. But most of my career has been management consultancy. I was in IBM for 10 years and was their sustainability leader on the DEFRA outsourcing. So I've got quite a bit of history with green IT. Fantastic, and what are you covering today? So today I'm doing the last session. Green IT is good, but it's not enough.

We're going to hear about lots of wonderful green IT stories today and I want to celebrate those, but we also need to be going after the bigger benefits that we can deliver on wider environmental, social and economic effects of sustainability. And of course, we need to challenging ourselves about what's happening with AI, with the huge amount of extra compute being rolled out, how are we going to do that environmentally and sustainably.

And by the other effects, I guess we see a lot of people talking about energy usage and carbon. Are you exploring the material impacts, the water? What are the other dimensions that you're talking about? When we talk about green IT, we typically mean the life cycle of the IT itself. And so I want to talk much more about what are we doing with that? What are the applications? So the industry loves to talk about tech for good, and there are lots of ways in which we deliver social benefits or environmental improvements through, for example,

Speaker 2 (22:34)
section.

Speaker 1 (22:34)
But who's going to talk about tech for bad? Perhaps that's for an academic to do. If you've got the greenest possible IT, but you're using it to extract more oil and gas, perhaps that's tech for bad. And enabled emissions is something that's being talked about. awesome. Well, I really look forward to your talk. And thanks for being part of Green IO. Great. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (22:53)
You did it? You promised me last year that we will be twice more. You did it. Good relation. You passed the exam.

meet you next year. For some, about 400. Seriously, so I didn't plan to do any closing remarks. I'm literally standing between you and a of beer or whatever as you're poisoned. So I guess it's a really dangerous situation. That's my wall. But I wanted to thank you again for joining, for taking the time to learn, to network. I hope you had a good time. If you had...

I have a zero marketing budget. I don't intend to give any money to any Meta or other company. So make some noise on social networks. That works. And just grab someone and make sure that he or she will be with you next year. I think that may be the most efficient way to grow our network and to learn and to be stronger together. Once again, a massive thanks to all of you who joined A massive thanks to our sponsors, whether they are for

profit on profit and all the volunteers. I've never seen that many white t-shirts. I love London. And I think we've still got some stickers. Okay, so weaponized. But the good way, don't leave any booklets there. Drop it at the coffee machine, drop it on the CTO desk, drop it on the CIO desk, use them, they're bit of carbons in this order, so use it. Take some stickers as well.

Be proud of them, put them on your desktop, put them on your smartphone, put them on your laptop, Put them on this asshole who is always denying climate change. But use it. This is a space for you. Make good use of it. And now let's have some fun. Thank you, everyone.

Gaël Duez (24:43)
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, the guest profiles, as well as the transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed these interviews, please share them either on social media or directly with relatives working in the IT industry. It will help them see that a strong momentum is ramping up across professionals and that's good news. 

In our next episode, we will be back in the US discussing water consumption of data center again, but this time from an academic perspective. We will have the pleasure to welcome two of the most renowned researchers on the topic of data center and environmental sustainability, Mohamed Islam and Shaolei Ren. Stay tuned. 

By the way, Green IO London was a huge success last week and you can expect Paris to be of the same quality. December 9th to 11th are the dates with an amazing lineup to discuss how we can build European green IT learning from each other's best practices and feedback across all the continent. As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world "one byte at a time".

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