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Trista Bridges and Paul Beddie discuss IT sustainability in Japan, highlighting stakeholder-oriented society, emerging startups, and regulatory roles. Insights on the country's journey towards net zero emissions and the challenges of transitioning to renewable energy and reducing plastic waste. Stay connected for more sustainability discussions and upcoming Green IO conferences.

💭Decarbonizing tech stacks and platforms? This is the challenge many CTO face these days. 🎙️In our 42th episode, 2 CTOs with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business cross share their experience in reducing the environmental footprint of their operations. Ludi Akue, former Lunii’s CTO, and Owen Rogers, .eco’s CTO meet Gael Duez to share their insights and reflect on each other journeys in sustainability.Some Takeaways:🌐 pro and con of migrating infrastructure to a lower carbon region,⚙️ how to leverage technical debt to boost decarbonization,💰 when does optimization pay for decarbonization,⚠️ the pitfall of creating a separate program to steer sustainability,and much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO London is on September 19th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: Ludi's LinkedInOwen’s LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Ludi and Owen's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Putting our websites on a low carbon diet Lunii.ecoCarboSustainable Development GoalsUN Global CompactNot the End of the WorldLucie 26000Transcript Intro 00:00With regard to organizations prioritizing sustainability goals, a big part of that, in my opinion, is ensuring that those goals are publicly stated so that there is an element of accountability around that.Gael Duez 00:24Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! - Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building 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.And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech. Decarbonizing a tech stack, or a platform, or a full information system. This is the challenge many CTO face these days. And beyond carbon, more environmental indicators are taken into consideration. Far from being just a few technical choices to make, it often implies multiple decisions at multiple levels with multiple stakeholders to succeed. Hence, this episode where I wanted CTOs to share and exchange about the strategy they choose to achieve the sustainability goals their company committed to. 2 CTO with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business are welcome today. Ludi was CTO at Lunii for three years, a highly successful toy maker in France, and she's now digital CTO at Bpifrance. But she's also part of a vibrant community, tech.rocks which gathers French CTO in Paris and beyond. Owen is CTO at Dot ECo, a company operating the registry ECO and has successfully run decarbonization of its tech stack. And he's also part of the climate action tech community. And this is where I've had the pleasure to meet him. Ludi Owen, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. It's a pleasure to have both of you in different time zones making the effort to be in the show at the very same time. So thanks a lot and welcome to the show.Ludi Akue 02:41Happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Gael.Owen Rogers 02:44Thanks for the intro, Gael.Gael Duez 02:48So without further notice, I would like to ask both of you the same question, and it's a highly complicated one. What was the impact, or in another word, what were the goals you were aiming to achieve when you started to reduce the environmental footprint of your technical operations or your tech stack? Maybe, Ludi, you want to start?Ludi Akue 03:16Yeah. Thank you for the question. So the goal was pretty big. It was, we need to change the way we produce everything. So it's a big, hairy goal. Not clear at all. That was the goal I had in the beginning, knowing that the company Lunii was a toy maker. So as you said, a hardware toy maker. And I managed both the hardware teams and the software teams. So the challenge was just clear. Very clear that we need to change things. We need to be impactful, but we don't have a clue about the KPI's to get there.Gael Duez 03:59It was kind of top down. It was like a big strategic enterprise goal and in a very sort of OKR approach, like we've got something very ambitious to achieve, I guess not in a single year. Make something with it. Am I correct here?Ludi Akue 04:19Yeah, I think it's much more subtle than that. There were some key results, let's say more on the supply and the manufacturing side. The first model of the toy was made in China and brought back the manufacturing to France. For example, you have big goals but after those goals, when coming to the tech stack, everything about the tech operations, architecture, there was a blank page. Like, I needed to build a plan with my teams, of course, to measure and to reach the goal of changing, be more responsible.Gael Duez 05:05I guess this is a moment where I have to admit that, a) my daughter has bot histoire, b) actually, I know this because the one my daughter has has been made in France on top of it, but the one my nephew has, which is one year older as still made in China. So I was like, oh, my God, they made it. Congratulations.Ludi Akue 05:31But, yeah, I just want to add something very quick. I was really impressed by the vision of the founders. It's like they wanted to change things as they are growing a growing company. They now have a working business model. I can share some figures. At that time, there were about more than half a million customers, more than a million of toys sold all over the world, in France, in Europe, North America. So they had this strategic vision to say, we need to measure and change our impact. I was really impressed by that.Gael Duez 06:15And what about you, Owen? What were the goals when you started this sustainably journey at .eco?Owen Rogers 06:23So I would say for us it was pretty different in as much as it was more bottom up instead of top down. And we are purely virtual. We just deal with digital products, so there's nothing physical for us to have to worry about optimizing. So my job, I think, was probably significantly easier than Ludi's in that regard. So for us, we operate the .eco top level domain in partnership with the global environmental community in the face of increasingly dire climate effects that we are seeing in the world around us. We were feeling like there had to be something more that we could do some way that we could have an impact ourselves. But it wasn't totally clear how we could do that. Being a company that focuses strictly on digital products, we started to learn about the climate effects of technology and realizing that there was in fact, a lot that we could start to do to reduce our impact. So we wanted to understand what was our carbon footprint. None of us had any expertise in doing carbon life cycle analysis and carbon footprint calculations. So we went and spoke to a number of auditors that will evaluate the carbon footprint of organizations. And the response that we got for most of them was, we're super busy right now, and perhaps there's some work that you can do on your own in order to understand your own footprint, compile the data, and then perhaps we can come and assist you later. So we started to do that ourselves. We started to work with our vendors, with our partners, and pull together whatever data we could to understand our own carbon footprint and realize pretty quickly that this is not complicated. Doing basic carbon calculations is not a hard thing. It's certainly something that you're doing some pretty rudimentary mathematics, and it's something that most software engineers should have no trouble with. And so that enabled us to calculate the carbon footprint of our company, and that served as a basis for optimization. So we did our first carbon footprint calculations in 2020, and we established a goal of reducing our overall, that's our Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3, carbon footprint by 4% for our 2022 fiscal year. And a lot of that was through optimizing our digital services.Gael Duez 09:23But just for clarification, Owen, your goal was to reduce by 4% in two years.Owen Rogers 09:29Within one year. So that was for our 2022 fiscal year. We were quite close to achieving that objective. We managed to reduce our overall carbon footprint by 3.7%. And we have a similar target for our 2023 fiscal year. We actually have no Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions because of the fact that we're a purely virtual organization. So during COVID we gave up our office space, so we work entirely remotely. We also don't ourselves run any data centers. We don't have any office space. So everything for us is Scope 3 emissions. So we've tried to be fairly broad in terms of including as much as we can within our Scope 3 footprint. So one of the things that we account for is 100% of the energy used in the homes of our employees within our footprint, which actually is quite a significant portion of our footprint. But the recognition being that's where work is happening right now. And so we should account for that footprint. And our employees are not otherwise attempting to account for their home. Any emissions associated with energy use in their home.Gael Duez 11:09Fair point. By the way, Ludi, did you have the same approach? And what can you tell us about the carbon footprint of a toy maker?Ludi Akue 11:23Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Yes. We had the approach of measuring the carbon footprint. And for Lunii at that time, we have the three contributors that we have. The first one is everything related to supply logistics. So transportation, production, and manufacturing. So it's big. If we need to address only one point, we need to address that. So the first contributor, I think it's something about maybe 40%, I think. I don't have my figures. I don't have the figures here. And the second one is the operations like customer service. And the third contributor was the tech. So they take about 6%. I remember the figure because it was 6% of the whole. So as a hardware company, the real job is to tame the production before the other one.Gael Duez 12:32Right. That's true that you're a CTO, but you're a CTO not only in the way you were a CTO at Lunii, but not only in the way we think about it in the digital sector or in the IT industry, because you are in charge of the IT infrastructure, obviously, and we will talk about it. But you were also in charge of the entire designing and building of the toys itself.Ludi Akue 13:00So the first thing is to measure. So we have these carbon footprints measurements with the leader in France. It's Carbo, hellocarbo. So we found out that our… So we have pretty much more Scope 1 than everything else. Even if we needed to help our suppliers to comply with our mission, our goal said. So we had a supplier code of conduct to do that. And the key results were bottom up. So we had this high goal. We have this big result, like relocating in France, co-designing the product, and for the rest… So the operational teams come with the key results they need to address, they need to tackle. So you had all the production team, the production is supply and everything. The real job here is to tackle the Scope 1 carbon emissions. So the production teams managed to has the carbon emissions. So it was a great win that we can have carbon emission.Gael Duez 14:18That's very interesting that you say that actually the IT itself was only 6%, because that's, I guess, a challenge that many CTO and CIO, they face, that they don't weigh that much within an organization, but if we gather all of us together, we weight sometimes as much as the ROT freight transport worldwide. So that's quite significant. And that's what I call the green IT curse, which is you're small within an organization, but eventually you're super big at that global level. So if we focus on this more IT side of things, Ludi, you mentioned at the beginning that you had a very aspirational goal. How did you manage for IT operation and also the firmware, as you mentioned, to make it something tangible, something actionable.Ludi Akue 15:13The first thing to do is once we have the measurements, like the carbon footprint, we have something to reduce. You have a goal, you have something to reduce, like a salesperson, let's go differently. And how we tackle that is to identify where we are not very good. Like for example, something that I want to stress here is imagine it's a fastly growing company. It's a scale up. So the scale up, as every scale up has some technical depths. And so here the technical depth is an opportunity to think differently. We need to rebuild something, so how can we rebuild it? For example, let's go mobile first to reduce, to optimize the web pages. Some indices were like, let's move into the cloud. So I decided to move into the cloud and to use managed services and to benefit from the calculation. Even if the calculators are not really reliable, they can show you some trends. So that's interesting. You can measure that. Let's be simple in the way we move to the cloud too. Taming technical labs is when we had an existing microservice architecture, but we don't really need a microservice architecture. So it's like, it's to say like the vision, technical vision is to go back to a modular monolith, for example. It was a strong choice. Our job is pretty simple. So for the scale, everything was homemade. Like you have an e-commerce platform that is homemade on a microservice architecture. Lunii also has a mobile application for the usage of parents and kids can recall their own stories as well. And you also have an application, a usage application, I will call that, that you can download stories, you can buy stories, you can download stories, manage your toy. Right? So the technical vision here is, okay, everything was built for growth. Right now, what is the company’s job? The company's job is to make toys and audio stories. So we don't need to continue to build an in house e-commerce platform. So a strong decision was like, we need to stop building the e-commerce platforms and buy an e-commerce platform like Shopify. This was a strong decision, so we don't, don't need the whole infrastructure that comes with building an e-commerce website.Gael Duez 18:13And that's super interesting, because to make sure I understand it well, your main point here is leverage technical debt, because you were in a scale up company, so you had the opportunity to redo things and you, like, technical debt becomes an opportunity to rethink everything and rebuild everything in a more sustainable way. And the way you did it was a bit counter intuitive regarding state of the art architecture, etcetera. It was more… So, obviously, you had like, let's try to eco-design, let's try to move to the cloud. I will have one question about it, but it's maybe we were too ambitious with our architecture and a good old fashioned modular monolith. And buying more off the shelf stuff will actually help us to reduce environmental footprint.Ludi Akue 19:05Yes, absolutely. It's like, it's just technical debt was the leverage we needed to do things differently. It is simplicity [and] optimization, simplicity and automation.Gael Duez 19:21And just for the sake of understanding this e-commerce platform that you've chosen, was the sustainability criteria taken into consideration?Ludi Akue 19:33I think that, no, we didn't include that. Maybe we did, because we have a supplier code of conduct. I'm sure we have those because we have a companion wide supplier code of conduct. It was a matter of simplicity. So I think the first thing is simplicity and automation. Yeah.Gael Duez 19:54And what about you, Owen? What were the technological choices you made to achieve the -4% reduction? Was it cloud migration or anything related or a very different approach?Owen Rogers 20:10So, like Ludi, our digital services accounted for only 10% of our overall Scope 3 emissions. So not too far off from the 6% at Lunii. The 4% reduction target was going to be entirely achieved by optimizing the efficiency of our digital services. So really what that meant was we were looking to reduce the carbon footprint of our digital services by upwards of 40%. So for us, we are running entirely in the cloud. So it didn't entail a migration from physical data centers to a cloud environment. We were already there. But one of the key things that we did was moving our infrastructure from one region to a lower carbon region. So we ended up migrating our entire stack to Quebec, Canada. Electricity in Quebec is entirely generated through hydropower. It has one of the lowest carbon emission intensities in the world. So that was definitely a positive move in reducing our footprint. Otherwise, we did quite a bit of work in terms of optimizing the footprint of our website and services similar to what Ludi was talking about doing work around optimizing images, JavaScript, CSS. Our sites are currently already static. Not entirely, but most of them are already static. And that's definitely a huge win because you're not running any servers or we're not running any servers on the back end. But my approach architecturally is actually a little bit different from the solution that Ludi was suggesting. I can definitely understand why with a microservices architecture you may end up with a very large fleet of instances depending on how you distribute that work, cross compute. But our focus is more on trying to eliminate servers altogether and ensure that everything that we're building can run through serverless. Serverless is, I think, the current end state or optimum for virtualization within cloud providers. It enables them to maximize multi-tenancy so that you can have the most compute being run through the fewest possible instances. So that's the direction that we're moving, at least for the parts of the tech stack that we have under our control. We were already using serverless and we're continuing to use serverless, but in terms of architectural direction, that's where we're headed. Anything new that we're building, we're trying to make it serverless first and move away from having to deal with any infrastructure that we need to manage ourselves.Gael Duez 23:10Did you use a specific tool to measure the carbon footprint of your tech stack or how did you tool up? And maybe the answer is not at all. We didn't need to.Ludi Akue 23:22We used a tool, Carbo. Carbo is a French tool. I think it's hellocarbo.com. It's a bit of calculation and declarative, also measure. We also use the cloud calculators. So you have a lot of calculators with the major cloud providers so you can have an estimation of your carbon footprint. Something that works great at Lunii is we build external accountability. How do you do that? Is like we sign the global compact. So the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN we signed that we needed to provide every year some reporting on how we are advancing the mission. We are also signed with a collaborating company, Lucie. So Lucie 26000, we needed to have a clear goal in our OKR to have a Lucy label by 2022. So we build external accountability to make it work like it's not just us with our OKR, but we need to report to the UN that we measure everything that we build this, we build that, so this helps us move forward.Gael Duez 24:48But as far as I know, hellocarbo is a generalistic carbon accounting tool. So you didn't have the need to tool up specifically to measure anything regarding your IT stack except the data provided by the cloud providers, as you mentioned. And what about you, Owen? Did you use any specific tool or not that much?Owen Rogers 25:14So for us, we followed the sustainable web design methodology as the foundation for our carbon footprint calculation. For our digital services, that methodology uses data transfer as a proxy for calculating energy consumption, and then on the basis of that can be converted into carbon. It certainly is not perfect, and unfortunately, there aren't really perfect measures at this point in time in the cases where you don't own the infrastructure. But it does have the benefit of relying on data, data transfer that is relatively easy to obtain. So what we did for our digital services was look at data transfer, whether that be transiting via the content delivery networks that we were using, or load balancers, etcetera, and estimated our footprint on that basis. So that's the tooling that we used. It's not a specific third party tool. A lot of this data was just aggregated in spreadsheets, and then the calculations were being performed there.Gael Duez 26:33And there is nothing wrong intrinsically with using proxy metrics, as long as we don't claim that it helps us understand absolute values. And for anyone following Gerry McGovern's work, I think using data as a proxy, it's far from perfect. There is a question of embedded carbon, etcetera, etcetera, but it doesn't lead people in the wrong direction. That is simply not true. Maybe we will have better metrics, better tools, as you say, Owen, but a company strongly engaged in reducing the amount of data produced they manipulate the exchange is not going in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing our environmental impact. Now I'm fully convinced of it.Owen Rogers 27:23Well, in general, data transfer is correlated with energy consumption. But if you look at most organizations in terms of how they're calculating their carbon footprint, especially for their Scope 3 emissions, it's almost entirely based on spend. So whatever their expenses are, they're using some sort of a general metric that is converting dollars spent for this category of product into carbon intensity. And personally, I think the data transfer is going to, at least within the technology space, be better correlated with energy use than spend. And spend also gives me nothing. I mean, I can try and optimize my spend, but it may point me in the wrong direction, like what we were talking about before. I could move all my infrastructure to a high carbon intensity region, reducing my cloud spend and therefore, under that basis of calculation, reduce my overall carbon footprint. I mean, it's just crazy. It leads to the wrong types of outcome, at least with data transfer. Plus, one of the nice things about the sustainable web design methodology is that it is somewhat component oriented. In cases like for my infrastructure, I have a better way to calculate the footprint because I know the number of instances that are running and I can estimate the infrastructure and I know what the carbon intensity is of where that infrastructure is running, I can get a better estimate for that component. But if I want to have a broad scope that includes emissions associated with the use of our products, so the energy drain on end users devices as a result of using our digital services, I can still estimate that under the umbrella of the same methodology and use data transfer as a proxy for that. I'm hoping there's going to be a revision to the sustainable web design methodology. The better accounts for what we're learning now about the energy use associated with the various components involved in the end to end journey for digital services, so as to better discount the network component. But I do want to underscore the importance of something that Ludi was talking about, which is with regard to organizations prioritizing sustainability goals. A big part of that, in my opinion, is ensuring that those goals are publicly stated so that there is an element of accountability around that. So Ludi was talking about the UN Global Compact as establishing a requirement for a public report around sustainability. Similarly for us, we publish our Annual Impact Report and part of our impact report is setting targets for the upcoming fiscal year around sustainability and impact. And so that means that you have an element of accountability there to your customers, to the community you serve, to the general public. And I recognize that that is hard, especially in cases where we're relying on data that we know isn't perfect like there… I know that the sustainable web design methodology has flaws associated with it and that I'm sure in a couple of years we will come up with some sort of more comprehensive methodology that will enable us to produce more accurate carbon footprints. But I don't want to let the imperfect be the enemy of the good. I think it's much better for us to try and get in front of this and be transparent about what we're doing with the data that's available. Recognizing that at some point later we're going to have to say, okay, we're going to need to revise these estimates of our footprint and our impact, because this is where the state of the art is now.Gael Duez 31:35Ludi, Owen mentioned not the cloud migration, like you had to do at Lunii, but relocating within the cloud operators in Quebec, which has tremendously low carbon electricity, even if we include embedded carbon from the hydropower. When you talked about the migration you did to the cloud, did you consider the region that you wanted your services to be hosted to make sure that actually you might not migrate from a very old data center with a PUE of 2 to a brand shiny cloud providers with a PUE of 1.2, even a bit less if you listen to their marketing communications, but hosted in an area where the average carbon intensity of the electricity will be at time five or six higher, which is very classical case with a very famous three letters hyperscaler. But I will stop here. So my question, sorry, I'm rambling a bit, but my question is, did you have the opportunity to consider the intensity, the carbon intensity of the electricity grid from the region where you relocated your cloud activities.Ludi Akue 32:56Not directly. We were on a pass before. We didn't pass. Like I said, we had this microservice architecture, and it was really ineffective in terms of management, in terms of billing, bills were very expensive and ineffective. Like, we cannot really measure things in fine-grained speaking. So the first thing is we consider green goals when moving to the cloud. This was really clear. We work with a provider that helps us migrate because they're green objectives while moving to the cloud. We also consider GDPR goals when moving to the club. So we were more like, we want to stay close to our customers. And at the same time, our customers were kind of everywhere. But our big, you know, huge base of customers were located in Europe, and we chose to locate our clouds in Europe. So privacy was first, the closeness to our customer base was second, and then ended in green objectives.Owen Rogers 34:24For us, we migrated from Ohio to Quebec. And so Ohio, the grid in Ohio is largely powered by coal and by gas, and so there's a 200 times difference in carbon intensity between Ohio and Quebec, so it's significant. And Ohio is not the worst in terms of carbon intensity within the United States. So there are much worse places to be and many of those places operate large data centers. So I think it's absolutely something that technologists should be taking into account when they're considering a cloud migration or when they're looking at ways to reduce their carbon footprint.Gael Duez 35:14And just a side note, that's something really to pay attention to, because unfortunately, sometimes carbon incentives and financial incentives are not well aligned in the hyperscaler industry. And that's really a shame, because obviously, the dirtiest place should be the most expensive. And that's not always the case. And sometimes a CTO faces a very difficult challenge to explain that he wants an increase in 5, 10, 15% of his or her bill, because that is to achieve a target of decarbonization, and that shouldn't be the case. But that's okay. So that's something to pay a lot of attention to.Owen Rogers 35:50Well, it did increase our bill by moving to Quebec. It is a more expensive region for us to operate in, but not significantly so. So that was a price that we felt like we were quite comfortable to pay. But to both your point and to Ludi's point, as a CTO, it's essential to find alignment between overall business objectives and your environmental objectives. Now, fortunately, in many cases there is alignment. There are ancillary benefits that can be achieved as a result of reducing carbon. So specifically, a low carbon intensity website is generally going to be a higher performing website. So you're able to pitch this type of an initiative under the guise of performance improvement, which will boost user experience, hopefully boost retention in sales. So there are these ancillary benefits. Similarly, a low carbon intensity infrastructure, so relying on serverless or higher levels of virtualization, is generally going to be more cost effective. So often there is alignment between an infrastructure cost reduction program and reducing carbon intensity. At the very least, you can find it if you look for it. It's not to say that reducing spend within the cloud is always going to lead to lower carbon, but you can find and make the case for where those two things are going to be aligned, and then that gives you a lever to push on.Gael Duez 37:30And what a wonderful transition. Because I wanted to ask both of you the question of process and strategy, like how you connect, how you align with the business strategy, and what were the process, what was the organization that you set up to achieve these goals? Because we discussed quite a lot the technical side of things, but it's more a human thing than a technical thing. So maybe, Ludi, you want to share also how you actually created something from the wide statement. And of course, how did you manage to align them, as Owen just said, with the overall business goals?Ludi Akue 38:11My context was easy, because you have these big goals for the company, so everyone is aware it's a strategic goal. And I recommend that green initiatives should be taken at a strategic level for everybody to be aligned. Right. So once you have that, the fact is, as you are a growing company, you scale up, don't have time, do not really have time… the tech team didn't have really the time to build the product, ship the product, take a technical debt and also take into account something to reduce the carbon footprint. So for a long time, it was kind of a failure to add some green initiatives to the backlog. Something I learned is adding some green initiatives to the backlog is the failing mode. You should be able to initiative into the existing backlog. And the first thing is to work with the teams is to come up with the optimizations. So optimizations pay for the business. That's the first thing. So if you have optimizations, if you have your website that respects the providers, for example, it's good for the SEO, it's good for the user conversion. So you can show the business your optimization strategies. Link to the ARR of the subscription number of the user that will convert it to buy a product, to use your service more so you can showcase that your optimization is aligned with the business. Right. When taking the example of the cloud migration, for example, is to show that the existing is very complicated, it is costing us. So the hidden cost that we have with the existing systems and to show the return of investment with the migration to the cloud. So it is the same thing. And it is to make the business case of when you can make the business case and for the rest, as it's the whole company initiative, to show that you are working towards the goal of reducing carbon footprint.Gael Duez 40:42If I understand well here, there are two main takeaways of what you've just shared with us. One is optimization will pay for decarbonization. And I would love to comment on this one. And the second one was do not try to create a separate track, a separate program about sustainability. Just add it as a new criteria in the definition of dawn or a new type of task or sprints in your backlog. But do not try to run something separately, which is, as far as I know, kind of now a state of the art approach. Also, when it comes to cybersecurity or accessibility, for instance, don't try to create things on their own. So same applies to sustainability, am I right?Ludi Akue 41:33Yeah, you are correct. You need to shift left on sustainability.Gael Duez 41:39When Ludi mentioned in our previous talk that there is a sustainability manager, or at least a sustainably reference at Lunii, was it the way you were organized at .eco? Did you have someone kind of running the show? Or did you have some sustainable reference in the different teams? How did you make sure that the key results, we're not talking about the overall strategy, but the day to day operations embedded in the sustainability goals.Owen Rogers 42:13We're a small organization, so there's not the same level of challenge associated with communicating and disseminating these types of objectives throughout the organization. In general, we have a set of KPIs around impact that are pretty well broadly understood. We review them on a monthly basis, along with how we're tracking towards our other goals for the organization. So I think it's pretty front and center for our team.Gael Duez 42:45Would you be able to share this KPI? Not the numbers, but what they are?Owen Rogers 42:50Well, I think the main one in terms of climate impact is our overall carbon footprint reduction target for our fiscal year. So again, we're aiming for another 4% reduction from our baseline target. We also have an objective to register through SBTI. And one thing that we have achieved recently, which is not directly related to climate, but all kinds of plays together, is that we are now B Corp Certified. We will be certified as a B Corp. And that touches on a lot of different pillars around sustainability.Gael Duez 43:29So if I understand it well, it was a very bottom up approach. You're a small team, so the communication was pretty straightforward the moment you had the right goals and not that much of an issue on how to incentivize people. Ludi, if I get it right, it was more a top down approach and your organization was scaling at the time where you were trying to reduce your environmental footprint. So what about the human side of this? Did you face challenges to get the sustainable angle adopted? How did you convince people to join?Ludi Akue 44:10Yeah, so we have these goals, these top down goals, but I think in the same test, even if you have 100 people, you have the people who were at the company at that moment were really aligned in terms of their own values. So you have these top down goals, but you also have a bottom of approach. Like the teams were responsible for their key results and their key initiatives that should align with the goal, like, because they are doing the work, so they know where to look at. And something that really works, in my opinion, is having a sustainability manager reference. I think it's something really powerful because she did a lot of training. So first, the whole organization has champions into the teams. So every department has sustainable champions. And the champions help spread the world, spread the culture, spread the training, the information. The challenge was not on the human side, the challenge was on the workload side. Picture, scale up, growing fast. We need to build 10,000 things in parallel. And we want teams to focus on sustainability. That's not going to happen.Gael Duez 45:41And how did you manage to get some positive arbitrage towards sustainability.Ludi Akue 45:47We learned to make it right at the executive committee level. We needed to come up with priorities first to tell the teams that, okay, now we don't have 10,000 priorities to chase. You have five ones. And sustainability is one of them. So make room for that. So when we started to have those ok in place and to have these priority likes, every executive committee member has the priority to make sustainability happen.Gael Duez 46:22I've got one last question. What about the trend that you see in our industry? And for that, it's very interesting to see that you've got two different perspectives. Because, Ludi, now you don't work for Lunii anymore, you're at Bpifrance and you see dozens of different startups, scale ups, companies, and you've still got this sustainable young angle at heart. So I'd like to ask you the question first. What is the trend that you see today regarding digital sustainability?Ludi Akue 46:55What I'm saying is sustainability is not anymore an option. It's not. I can build my company and I will figure out that later.Gael Duez 47:08Can I borrow your statement that sustainability is no longer an option? To make it the title of the episode?Ludi Akue 47:18With great pleasure.Gael Duez 47:21And what about you, Owen? You're in the heart of the web hosting industry in particular. More generally, is the digital technology sector sustainably an option?Owen Rogers 47:35I think that for the time being, it is an important consideration for anybody looking to get into the technology space, whether they're launching a new business or an organization, is to think about how they can do so in the most sustainable way possible. At a certain point in time, I don't think it's going to matter. I think that with the rapid decarbonization of our electricity grid that we're not too far away from a scenario where most data centers are going to be powered using renewable energy, or at least low carbon energy. But I think that we have a role to accelerate that transition as much as possible by helping to educate the general public that their choices matter and that there are options out there that will reduce their climate impact and it won't cost the earth that there are cost effective solutions out there. One of the KPIs that I didn't talk about earlier that we have established for ourselves is the proportion of people using eco domains that are using sustainable web hosting. So on an annual basis we go and evaluate every .eco website and run it against the green web, check from Green Web Foundation to see whether or not they're using sustainable hosting. And what we're seeing is year over year growth pretty significantly. I believe that last year we saw an increase from 33% to 40%. Now, some of that is hopefully due to our education, but I think a lot of it is actually due to the changes that are happening in the overall industry where more and more hosts and data centers are working on ensuring that they offer a sustainable solution to their customers.Gael Duez 49:43So that's excellent news, because once we will have achieved decarbonizing the data centers on the energy consumption angle, we will have to open the even more complex and complicated question of embedded carbon and making sure that we use equipment as long as we can and not change them every five or six years. But that's a different debate.Ludi Akue 50:10Yeah, but it is the... I think that it's... When we are looking at the statistics, it's the huge problem ahead. It's a huge problem you need to tackle. Like, we went talking about community, we also have. We are also responsible not to like having heavy websites, heaven applications that will need people to change their mobile phone, for example. So we have many things to do on that side too. And for me, the end device is where the problem meets the core problem. It is something we need to fix what we can fix, the decarbonization, like you are talking about, Owen, to move to the real problem. The real problem is there. The end devices and the raw materials also. I mean, together.Gael Duez 51:16Yeah, agree. And that's true that with your angle of being someone who also had to produce hardware, you've got this, I would say some awareness about the fact that end user equipment still accounts for the largest part of the overall digital sector, carbon footprint. It's true that with an episode with a CTO, we tend to focus on how to decarbonize a tech stack, and how to actually reduce the environmental footprint of the tech stack. But if you look at the entire digital sector, the data centers and networks are not the places where the majority of the impacts happen. It's still a very significant chunk of these impacts. But the end user equipment is even worse, that's for sure.Owen Rogers 52:08I'm optimistic that that's what's coming next is that we'll see a real revolution in terms of e-waste management and like a cradle to grave approach with regard to electronics manufacturing because of the fact that they're. They're full of valuable minerals and it's... At a certain point it's going to be a lot more cost effective to reuse those minerals than it is to continue to extract it. I'm on a bit of an optimistic kick right now because I've been reading Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, who I think would be a fantastic person for you to invite on the podcast. I know she's been doing a bit of the podcast tour lately, but I think it is important for us to ensure that we're also telling positive and optimistic stories about our future because it's too easy to get drawn into some of the fear and negativity around climate change.Gael Duez 53:11So two fun facts when I'm seriously considering, but I don't know if I can afford her, but to have Hannah Ritchie as a keynote speaker, or at least as maybe a keynote speaker. I would like to thank you again, both of you, to join, to make the effort to find a way to accommodate our different time zones and to be that precise when it comes to the goals, what you did and what you didn't do, and the process and the the human side of things as well. So thanks a lot for joining. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.Ludi Akue 53:51Thank you, Gael.Owen Rogers 53:52Thank you and thank you both. Thank you, Ludi. Great to meet you.Ludi Akue 53:55Yeah, great to meet you too.Gael Duez 53:59Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, please share it on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter (if you are still there)! We are an independent media and word of mouth is the only way to get more listeners. I don’t ask you to rate it 5 stars on Spotify or Apple podcast because of course you already did it, didn’t you?  In our next episode we will talk about Japan, not because the country used to be super dear to my heart. Yes, before the K-pop wave, another generation - mine - discovered Japanese animation and was crazy about it. Anyway, we won’t talk about manga but how a super techno-centric country is now considering sustainability and the potential limits that the ongoing ecological crises might create to our digital world. A fascinating discussion with 2 experts who have been living there for ages: Paul Beddie and Trista Bridges.Stay tuned.  BTW, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in London on September 19th. Early bird tickets are not available anymore but … you can still get one of the 90 free tickets for Green IO listeners using the voucher GREENIOVIP. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world, one byte at a time [Roxane’s voice]❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

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Explore how Janne Kalliola and Satu Heikinheimo discuss triggering action in green software, including the trend of employees resigning over conflicting values, importance of collaboration for sustainable products, concept of carbon-neutral software, and Nordic approach to fostering sustainable initiatives.

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Seasoned software engineer Sara Bergman discusses the angles covered in 'Building Green Software' such as AI, temperature-aware computing, cloud providers, and carbon vs grid-aware computing. They delve into the responsibility of software people in utilizing hardware and the importance of major cloud providers. The conversation also touches on the concept of temperature-aware computing and the environmental impact of hardware in software development.

💡In product management, there is a strong culture of adapting to change, testing, and rapid learning. Talking about change, we have a big big one ahead of us: climate change! How can product leaders include climate considerations into the build and run of digital services and scale sustainable practices? 🎧In this episode, Gael interviewed two hands-on experts and daily practitioners in product management on how to become a climate-conscious PMs. Antonia Landi, based in Germany, is a strong voice in ProductOps, and François Burra, based in Canada, is the co-author of the Climate Product Management Playbook.What product manager should consider?🌱 Environmental impact throughout the product life cycle,💻 Minimalistic approach on user experience, 🎯 Climate-related OKRs and reducing costs through intentional data storage.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. Learn more about our guest and connect: Antonia Landi’s LinkedInFrançois Burra’s LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Antonia and François' sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Climate Product Management PlaybookDigital Product DecarbonizationPaper beats plastic? How to rethink environmental folkloreTranscript[00:00:00] Gaël DuezHello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world. One bite 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. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech Product managers have always lived in a world of contradictory injunctions. They are at the converging point of all requirements, business requirements, of course, and all the others. Let me illustrate with some sentences which might be familiar to many of you. We cannot launch feature X because I need some time to deal with my technical debt. Make sure your product is accessible and secure. We need to launch this proof of concept to test our hypothesis next week, but beware of being pixel perfect because of the risk for our brand image. Accessibility is key in our values. Such as innovation. So let's not miss the latest trend in virtual reality, et cetera. And now after cybersecurity, accessibility, performance, et cetera, a new wave is coming. Sustainability, with sentences like beware of your carbon budget. How much will this new feature impact our CSRD reporting? Watch out for greenwashing with these product claims. Did you check the W3C sustainability guidelines for your product? And product managers in charge of back end products are not off the hook. How does it perform with our API green score? Our cloud operations are too carbon intensive. Can we delay some process to enable carbon aware computing, or even better, grid aware computing? To be honest, I'm not that worried about the product management world succeeding eventually to overcome these new challenges. There is a great culture of adaptation to change, testing and fast learning in the product management line of work. The main questions are how and when, because time takes time with climate change. And many sustainability tools for product managers are still missing. Hence, a question for this episode is how to become a climate active product manager today, not tomorrow.And to try answering it, I asked two hands-on experts and daily practitioners in product management to join our show today. Antonia Landi, a former Aviv Group colleague, has become one of the top voices in European product operations. Being a community person at heart, I can testify, and loving bringing people together, she leads Germany's only meetup for product operations in Berlin, where she's based. You can easily find her work online. She has written for publications like LeadDev, Product Alliance, and MindTheProduct. François Burra is a Canada based product lead and UX consultant, mentor, and speaker with 13 years of experience working with startups and agencies in North America. After taking almost a full year off following climate courses, he pivoted his career to fight the climate crisis. He now helps digital companies and product teams reduce their digital emissions via consulting, measurement, and training. And talking about training, I had the opportunity to meet him via the wonderful climate action tech community when he was presenting his newly released climate product management playbook, which was well received in this community and others. So welcome Antonia. Welcome François . It's a pleasure to have both of you on the show. [00:03:56] Antonia Landi It's a pleasure to be here. [00:03:58] François Burra Thank you for the invite, Gaël.[00:04:00] Gaël Duez It's my pleasure. Thanks a lot for joining to set the stage. I would like to ask a general question about the context and the momentum. Why do you believe both of you that product managers have a unique opportunity and responsibility right now to embrace sustainability? Maybe François , you want to give the first shot? [00:04:23] François Burra Sure. I think product managers have a unique opportunity because their role, the sense of what they do is based on influencing. So whether it's influencing their team or even beyond their team, they collaborate with all departments across the organization, they tie the strategy with the execution. So they have these posts, like the way I see it visually, like a vertical and horizontal influence. And because of that, if they integrate sustainability as part of their vocabulary and part of their processes. Then suddenly it can shine throughout the whole organization. So that's why for me, they really have a unique opportunity to play a big role in making their job, a climate job and their company, a climate company.[00:05:08] Antonia LandiYeah. I think to add to that, for me, PMs have a unique responsibility because we'll actually have, or should feel a unique responsibility, right? To make sustainability the forefront of what we do, and especially looking at the climate impact of tech off the everyday things we use, right? How? How sustainable is this? You're actually working on and how much could you actually meaningfully change. And if we all individually take small steps to take sustainability to the next level in our digital products, then together we can make a very big impact. So to me, that's exactly why we should be talking about this.[00:05:53] Gaël DuezAre more people talking about sustainability in product management these days than before? I mean, both of you, you're privileged witnesses in your industry. So is it still a happy fuse or do you see something a bit more general happening? [00:06:11] Antonia LandiYeah, I think for me, honestly, there's still not enough. I think there's definitely more than there was even a year ago, right? We are starting to think about sustainability in product management. We're starting to right shift left with sustainability, not do it after the fact, after a product has been created, but really as we create the product. But to me, it's still not nearly enough, honestly, like we are scratching the surface only just barely, which is also why I was so excited to have this happen to have this recording where we uniquely focus on what PMs can do. [00:06:51] François BurraI 100% agree with Antonia. And thank you so much, Gaël, for creating that space because we need more person like you and podcasts like you to raise awareness, not only on the topic of digital sustainability or green IT overall because being French, I have ties in Europe, but living in Canada and North America, I can see the gap that exists between those two markets. And I usually joke, or it's not necessarily funny, but that there's maybe a three, five, seven years gap in terms of awareness between the two continents. And when it comes to product management or climate positive best practices, we even behind I think he started more with designers and engineers, you know, this movement but product managers still are lagging behind those two roles. And that's why I got passionate about trying to do something about it because when I was in a position with a startup. That was borderline doing greenwashing without bad intentions, right? The leveraging of the marketing that would come with it and the benefits that comes with this. I was faced with a sense of not being able to properly address those concern or I was not educated and didn't have the tools to influence the company to do a better job and avoid implementing those practices that were not necessarily transparent, which reminded me of a company, a startup that I used to work with a few years back before I made my pivot to work as solely on the climate crisis as a PM. I didn't have the tools to properly see through the marketing strategy that we had, and basically we were making claims that we were environmentally friendly companies or aiming towards net-zero and so on and so forth. But purely basing on the whole strategy on offsets on carbon offsets without any other actions or awareness of what it means to be in a zero or try to fight climate change. And we were making those big claims to our users that if they were using our app, they would do a good gesture for the environment. And I always knew that matter was super high. Unfortunately, I didn't have the tool to properly educate people or push back against it. So it ended up being part of the strategy and released and everyone was leveraging it in our social network and so on. And that's also why I felt this frustration, this not necessarily anger, but this desire to start educating myself and, and with that, try to spread the message and raise your awareness for my peers. [00:09:31] Gaël DuezIt reminds me of a very personal story of a guy who had a very significant over several hundred millions of budget in a big company as a CTO or group CTO, you name it the way you want and didn't do that much because he just thought that it was all about asking AWS to be greener. I must admit this guy was me. And yet, François , it's interesting what you've described because it's really what Harriet Kingaby in a previous episode on greenwashing, she referred to it as unintentional greenwashing, like greenwashing was the best intention. It's just that you don't have a, like a master plan and with people with dark hoodies saying, "Oh, we're going to screw our customers." No, it's just. You believe this is the right stuff to do because you don't have the information and the basic information regarding offsetting is sorry dude but the civil aviation took all the available land on earth to plant trees to offset their only activities and there is no room left for any others so that's just the basic issue with offsetting but I still love this example.[00:10:35] François BurraAgainst planting trees. Right. [00:10:37] Gaël DuezBut yeah, it's super important. Yeah. It's super important to plant trees for sure, but it doesn't offset anything. It's just that it will help us to rebuild the carbon sink that we need so badly. And what about you, Antonia? [00:10:53] Antonia LandiYeah. I mean, just listening to you, François , like I worked at the sustainability startup for a little while. Like, our whole thing is it was a reusable shipping box, right? You could reuse hundreds and hundreds of times. It had some smart trackers and everything. Obviously there was an app, right? So even though our core mission was sustainability, recycling was enabling the circular economy by, I don't know, packing your old clothes in the box or dropping it off at the center, having a community around all that. It's stopped at that product. Right? Even back then, we weren't savvy enough to think about where our data is hosted? How much of this data do we actually need to host, right? How many iOS versions or Android versions are we supporting, right? Things that nowadays, after my own research, after sort of embedding myself more into these topics, seem almost like common sense to me, but even in such a climate active, I suppose, environment. We weren't even thinking about that because tech was always only seen as an enabler and not as one of the root causes, right?[00:12:17] François BurraI think there's something that I observed over the years, which is that people especially climate tech or sustainable companies because their whole mission is to deliver impact based on their mission, they forget that the why is not allowed to align with the way they do it. And they could implement the worst practice in terms of, like, digital, right? And yet the target, like, claims that they're doing a good thing for the word, but, it's kind of like this duality that is not well understood. And what I could observe is that the reason why the company is created and the how, which is how they build their software from a digital standpoint, because they implement the worst practices at the end of the day, backlash the whole reason why they were created in the first place, which is something that obviously. No one is perfect, right? So the intention is to try to do good in all areas of the company. And there's parts that would be more advanced than others, but it's important and that's what today is important to raise awareness about, like how you can build software and digital products because that could impact. I have a great impact and you need to be aware of it to lessen the negative impact that you can have while building and maintaining what is created to solve this valuable problem, the society.[00:13:43] Gaël DuezI think it's very valuable feedback that you share about this discrepancy between what we want to achieve, what we are truly doing, et cetera. But both of you are daily practitioners, so let's get our hands dirty. How can we become a climate active product manager today and what is sustainable product management?[00:14:08] Antonia LandiI think for me, sustainable product management really is, so I have this super basic definition of what product management is, right? It's delivering value to the user in a way that benefits our business. And to me, sustainable product management is in a way that benefits our business and our planet. I think ultimately sustainable product management starts from the moment you are identifying problems and scoping solutions, but it can run the whole gamut of, and this is something that people will not want to hear, right? But how much data are we storing and how much of that data are we actually looking at? And then, I mean, I addressed this beforehand, right? Like the implications of our product choices. How many mobile phone versions are we going to support with our app, right? And it becomes more and more narrow every single year. And the consequence of that is that we are excluding ourselves from people who want to have older and perfectly working phones. I think there are just many small knock on effects that we just need to play through in our minds. We just need to think through the ramifications of small choices like that.[00:15:32] François BurraYeah, I love it. I think, as you said, like, we need to, as PM, consider the environment and sustainability as we used to think about the triptych technology design or user and business. And for me, we can see sustainability as the fourth pillar, or we can see it another way, which is kind of underlying conditions. So, if you apply those best practices will create a better experience, will create better technology because you learn faster, but also will drive better business results. So I kind of see this triangle like 3D shapes in my head right now, which may not make sense, but I think it's, we can really see it as something that will make your whole business and product better, but I think what is missing that we were referring to earlier is that because the awareness is is is lacking on the topic, we don't know the impact that we have. And if we start to line things together from an energy standpoint, carbon emission, water consumption and so on, then suddenly, we would've another lens to see the problem and other tools or reinforce the desire to implement the tools and the best practices that we all know that are good to implement. Right. So for me, that's where there is a huge opportunity for the PM. [00:16:49] Gaël DuezCan you indulge us in a structured way to deep dive into what are the big bunks of stuff or actions or tasks that you would advise as an overview to pay attention to when you're a product manager, because Antonia mentioned the data. She, and that's very rare in our industry, mentioned the hardware and making sure that we are not part of the planned or even not planned, but just technical obsolescence problem that our industry is rigged by. So, wow. Big kudos for that. And François , how would you structure everything because this is exactly what you've done in your playbook.[00:17:27] François BurraTo double down on what Antonia said, like the whole manufacturing, hardware, distribution, end of life and so on and so forth. That represents about two thirds of image emissions of the digital industry, right? So we cannot state enough in this podcast and in our lifetime, how big our impact, how big digital is physical. So to answer your question, Gaël, with a playbook that we co-wrote with Antoine Cabot, with a friend of mine working at Salesforce in BC, Canada. We structure it around five chapters, but maybe we can focus on some of them for the sake of the discussion. The first one is to, as a PM, embed climate or sustainability as part of your rituals and it's all about how you choose the right metrics, how you track your digital footprint, how you include your planet into your product requirements documents, your briefs and so on and so forth. So that's the first chapter. The second chapter is how you build in a more mindful way. So thinking about the planet as a Persona, animals as a Persona. How you try to tie your strategy to sustainability, sustainable development goals and so on and so forth and how you avoid obsolescence tactics and how you can leverage AI in a sustainable way because. As much as we want to make sustainability a trend for PMs, right now, AI is like leading the race by far. So we have to see what use from this momentum that they have to do the same for sustainable topics for PMs. So anyway, that was the second chapter. The third chapter is like how to apply frugal minimalist best practices. So coming back to what Antonia was saying, like how you minimize the amount of data that is being transferred. How you simplify and build a straightforward user journey that avoids all the fluff, remove product loads, you remove features that are not used, you remove data that are not used, you remove scripts and components and so on and so forth and don't forget to kill features. The fourth chapter is about how to be more carbon aware and or read aware, but just as a concept that normally we should make sure that we consume the least amount of energy, but also the low carbon energy as much as possible. And we migrate your server or your hosting provider to choose a sustainable one and things like that. And the fifth pillar, and I'm going to stop here because there's so many things that we can talk about about each of those topics is to leverage your influence. As we said earlier, we have a huge influence internally, we have a huge influence in our ecosystem, in our value chain, the way we choose our partner whether it's to transport our e-commerce website, let's say who are we partnering to deliver our product? Are we choosing a provider with sustainable practices or who uses electric vehicles or like bikes even for delivery. So like all of that is kind of how we can use our influence internally and externally. And I think this is a power that usually we have, but we don't realize that we have it. And there's a big miss opportunity if we don't leverage it to the full extent. So those are the five chapters. [00:21:03] Gaël DuezAnd thanks a lot for structuring it because now I'd like to play a little game with both of you, which is let's go for each chapter and pick one example that you would like to see widely adopted for each of these chapters. And of course, feel free to pick the chapters in whatever order you want. And Antonia, I might bet some money on which chapter will come first, but please feel free to start. [00:21:34] Antonia LandiI mean, honestly, there were so many things that resonated with me as you were talking, but I think first and foremost, and this is something that I stress over and over again, right? Sustainable product management is also just good product management, right? Don't build things nobody needs, right? Get rid of that bloat. I love that you mentioned minimalism. But I think to me, this really comes in two different forms. One of them is really actually how we structure the user experience of our products. Like, Netflix, if you let it, it will just keep playing. Like, YouTube will just keep streaming. Same with Spotify, right? They are built to keep streaming high quality, expensive data, right? Because that's how they make their money. But that has a massive, massive climate impact. [00:22:58] Gaël DuezAnd, I really love Antonia's idea of letting the user choose. And especially when you look at all these experiences with, as you mentioned, Netflix, YouTube, et cetera. In their values most of them is like do no harm provide the best possible experience when you say that one of the worst health crisis that the word is actually under and it's completely under the radar is a sleep crisis that we are literally destroying our health because with so much stimulated that we don't sleep enough in almost every country compared to the minimum requirement of our body. You could seriously challenge it if it's that much sustainable, offering people nonstop video and nonstop audio, at least without a message in some kind of action. I say, “Hey, by the way, you've just spent three hours.” It's 2 a. m. in the morning. Most of the people will go to bed at that time. Do you still want to like a bit like on the cigarette packet, but what was it your idea, Antonia? [00:24:07] Antonia LandiSo first of all, this also broadens the scope of sustainability, right? Is mental wellbeing part of sustainability as well? I'd like to think that's a part of it as well. But the second one, like now you're going into the... so I have made exactly this case of the climate impact of watching Netflix on your phone. Like, you download that episode, you're on a flight, whatever, watching Netflix on your phone. And two things usually happen, right? People are shocked at the impact of something so small and so mundane. And then people despair, right? Because it's like, well, I do this all day, every day. If we're in zoom calls, we're streaming data to each other just a whole entire time, right? What is the impact of that? But I think it's also realizing that yes, you might be contributing to the problem, right? Currently. And yes, there is this initial shock you have to go through to understand just how big the impact of our everyday actions with tech are. But all of this information, like all of us talking about this, isn't to make you feel bad about your daily habits. It's just to allow you to be more conscious in the future, to have that maybe sense of responsibility to have that just extra second where you think, well, hang on, do we really need this? Right. Can we give users an option? [00:25:48] Gaël DuezSo enable the user to pose and give them an option. I think it's a beautiful statement. François, do you want to go for the second round? What would be a very actionable idea or best practices that you'd like to share and where does it refer to in your framework, in your five chapters framework? [00:26:11] François BurraYeah, I actually wanted to react to what you were saying, because it was so interesting. I think Gaël, you were referring to Netflix and the need to sleep, but I think it was a Netflix CEO that actually said that their biggest competitor is sleep. So I think it shows how problematic it is and how we can talk about sustainability and responsibility, but we do have an impact in many different ways. And that we need to embody that in a more responsible way. And then when we talked about do every new employee needs to have a brand new computer, and what do we do with existing IT fleet and equipment that we handle? For companies that have hundreds or thousands of employees, just thinking about the lifespan of their equipment, if they push, like sometimes there are internal policies that you may have seen every three years you have to change your computer because you have to be the best performer. And, we want employees to be productive. So we're going to change it every three years, right? If you push that to maybe four years or five years, the environmental impact of that measure, that's kind of a simple quote unquote measure. Could be huge in the environment, considering what we talked about earlier about how much it costs the environment and the planet to build new devices and equipment. So that's 1 example that you can take as you could be the CTO in charge of that. There could be many people responsible for that type of decision, but this is super critical. And coming back to the next example, again, about autoplay, which is an environmental disaster, and only because of the example we just talked about, there's two practical ways you can fight against it. And I saw it with a client that I'm working with at the moment for the past few months, they are a media platform. And basically there's two ways you can approach it. Either you ban autoplay or you avoid it as much as possible, which is not necessarily the most acceptable way. But another way to look at it, and by no means it's perfect, right, is to instead of launching the video, the autoplay after three seconds, where the user basically doesn't have a choice because it goes so fast that it just happened, right? Maybe can you extend it by 5 seconds or 10 seconds, 15 seconds? So at least you give the user the control, the power. To reflect on that and maybe there is a chance also to educate the user. Hey, is it time to sleep? Or hey, do you know the environmental toll that streaming has? So the intention here is not to blame users and put the responsibility on them. It's us as digital creators and builders that need to build by default something that is green, right? Or sustainable. But there's so many ways that when you start understanding the problems and become an expert of the problem, and that's all about being a PM, right? You have to become an expert of the problem because before you become. Expert of the solution. So when you add sustainability into your framework, then suddenly you can have new creative solutions to embed into your product. And that's what I find fascinating. It's not like something more that you have to add to your day that is kind of bothering you and you have to make it fit. It's something that can unlock new possibilities and make your product better. [00:29:25] Gaël DuezIf I'm allowed to bounce back on what you say, François, you use the word framework, and I reckon an entire chapter is dedicated to culture, rituals, etc. And I know for you and Antonia, how pivotal this culture question is starting with you, François , what would be a good idea, a good practice to entrench the sustainability mindset in product management?[00:29:55] François BurraThere's different ways you can surface climate into your product. And we can start with OKRs. I think we were talking about OKRs before the show started. You can take those as opportunities, right? Either you have a company that is mature enough that you can be sustainable. Or climate related OKRs, like we want to reduce our footprint by 10 percent by the end of the year and then you break it down and you kind of see how you can reach that goal or you have non-climate OKRs, let's say, increased revenue or reduced costs, but when you talk about that, like when you break it down, reduced costs, probably like if you're a big tech company, cloud expenditure, it's probably a big center cost, right? Cost center, sorry. And why is that? Because you store a lot of data and oh, okay, so how can we reduce that data stored and, and see how we can be more intentional in the way we store what we need and what we, and not store what we don't need? And then suddenly like you become more aware of the lifecycle of data and then you can remove things that are not needed because as Antonia said earlier, like you don't need all the information about users that churn five years ago about what they did on a specific day, right? And so when you become a bit more intentional and minimalist and like more specific about why we are storing this? And why are we building this? And why do we keep this feature that serves no one suddenly like you will trim down your product, make it lighter, maybe make it faster, remove the fluff, trim images, compress and so on and so forth. And then, oh, well, we just reduce the cost of our cloud infrastructure by 5, 10, 20 percent and that feeds this. Okay. This is about the bottom line and we didn't talk about sustainability, right? We just did. What is what makes sense? But at the end of the day, we have a climate impact. So I think either you need a conversation with environmental topics, or you just find the opportunities within existing strategy, given that most of I don't want to overgeneralize most of sustainable and climate best practices for PM or for digital folks there. Is good for the business and the product, and there's other ways you can do it, but you can set carbon budget when you release a new feature to make sure that you track this you track and you make assumption and projection about how much a feature could, could wait in, in term of carbon and when it's released, like making sure that it doesn't exceed the sets, an amount of carbon emitted. So you stay within a range of an acceptable amount of carbon emitted. You can look at page weight. There's a page weight budget as well. There's tools out there that can help you to build pages that are not exciting. Let's say two meg or three meg per page. And that's a way that you can embed. The discussion with your folks, like definition of done and acceptance criteria with the designers and developers and start to make them part of the discussion and challenge them with them with this. And that should be something that excites them as well.[00:32:58] Antonia LandiYeah, I think for my side to add to that, like honestly, if you're really serious about this, make it a prioritization metric. Just like everything else, right? You, we talk about complexity, we talk about the size of the problem space, we talk about the projected ARR, right? If you've identified a really exciting new feature that might make you a million in ARR, and was terrible for the planet, are you still committing to doing that? And I think it is. We do have to retain a certain pragmatic approach in that everything's a trade off. Some things you might identify as an organization. We do not want to compromise on the specific part of the user experience, but we're going to do our best to do everything else everywhere else, right? It is right. It's not about despairing. It's not about we're doing everything wrong. It's really just about educating yourself, understanding your trade offs and then making them a reality, right? Like embedding them in the product management process, right? This is the future we've planned. This is how it's going to positively or negatively affect our climate bottom line.[00:34:14] Gaël DuezWe mentioned OKR. We mentioned how it needs to be ritualized in the definition of dawn, etcetera. I have a low ball for you because I'm still struggling with this one. And don't get me wrong. It's already super hard to get a key results around carbon budget, page weight, carbon footprint, you name it, whatever, but we know that if you're a frontend, I would say product manager and I'm struggling to find a proper key result that could be connected to an overall sustainably objective about how we make sure that we do not contribute to technical obsolescence. [00:35:02] Antonia LandiI think the perfect one is going to be difficult, but off the top of my head I would probably more likely look at the percentage of people included or excluded if you move up, let's say an iOS version, or if you move up a certain OS requirement and then it becomes about inclusivity as well, right? It becomes about how many people on the planet can use your product. And at that point, I don't know why people aren't thinking about this more, right? Like I used to work at the startup here in Berlin that had a fitness app and they purposefully wanted to exclude older versions because that was like a more premium thing now. Our app is only for people with new phones, right? But I think I would rather think about the percentage, right? Set a target percentage for the cement of people on the planet who can use our app rather than set specific targets for near specific versions, for example. [00:36:09] François BurraYeah, we tend to agree. I think we can look at versions being like, Oh, I covered the five latest versions of this OS and maybe I could go to five or like six or seven or eight, ten, right? Or we can just be a bit more diligent and thoughtful about, okay, who are our users? Like, how are they distributed amongst OS and versions and so on and so forth. And then, with this kind of idea, like percentage in mind and distribution in mind. Then we can, if we are delivering a good experience and we can be more specific about defining good for each company. But if we only cover a good experience for like 90% of our users, how can we make sure that the 10% others are also, even if they're run on old OS or equipment, then they can have the best version of the app. And if they can, because the device itself cannot support the most flashy features that you offer to the latest iPhone, then how you degrade or adapt rather the experience so that they could do everything that they need to do, but maybe in a more streamlined and minimalist way again, and I will go even beyond and that may be in the sense that by designing our software, we exclude people from the get go. So how can we go even by making our app or product even more accessible? We can increase our target market, right? Because suddenly if let's say we support a bank application, support transactions by SMS or by text messages, right? How much more we can unlock new customers and acquire a new target audience, right? So I think we also have to see the opportunities and not just be constrained by existing users. Let's think about non users as well. [00:38:02] Gaël DuezI'm very relieved François because I was afraid I was once again about to make a lecture on the survival bias and the fact that countlessly people were telling me this is our audiences is what we should focus on and I'm what was always like, you know, the survival by years, the plane, blah, blah, blah, World War II anyway, is there any one last darling best practices that you love to share, whether it's about culture, whether it's about onboarding your CEO. You name it.[00:38:30] Antonia LandiI mean, for me, like again, it's this ecosystem thinking, right? Like it's not just the digital products we build, it's how we build them. And, this is such a stupid example, but do you have oat milk or do you have almond milk in your office? Right? Like it takes a huge amount of water to produce an almond, which you then squeeze desperately trying to get something akin to milk for your vegan and lactose intolerant friends. What do you have? Reusable cups? Or do you have mugs? Where does the recycling go? Like even at this workshop I was giving a talk on sustainability and there was nowhere to recycle my paper cup. And that was awful to me. And it's just these little details that make up the entire environment of how we produce digital products that matters. [00:39:31] François BurraYeah, absolutely. As for me, I think as we stated at the beginning of this talk we have an issue right now that this is still the best kept secret, right? Like the impact of sustainability of digital products on the sustainability of the environment and the planet. So let's get people talking. There's plenty of people that care about this topic, and the more you dive in, the more experts you discover, and there's experts on sustainability everywhere around the world. So please invite some local folks to do talks at your company, and do a workshop about the environment like there is the digital collage that probably has folks around you that can come and speak about the interconnection between climate and sustainable products, digital products. Sorry. So I really started making this topic more broadly talked about. And maybe one thing that I really want to put a focus on by making your product emitting less emissions by using the least amount of energy you will get a product that will be faster that would perform better if you have an e-commerce platform, it would convert better as well, because the experience would be so smooth, regardless of the design, the device and the user satisfaction would be higher. Retention would be higher. And so suddenly with those product benefits that we're kind of starting to line up together, then they materialize into business benefits because your product will be differentiated. You would increase your margin. You will increase revenue. You would acquire more users, as we just said before. And considering the newest generation like the Gen Z and so on and so forth, they were raised and they are being raised with eco anxiety, so if your brand doesn't care about climate or he's using leveraging greenwashing tactics, it's likely that they probably some of them at least would not like to work for you. So from a talent attraction and retention standpoint as well as customer traction and retention, like climate needs to be part of your strategy. Like all jobs is a climate job and all companies are climate companies because you don't live in a bubble. We live on the same earth, right? So that's really something that I would love people to understand. We're not just like a pure environmentalist, you know, eating grass and feeding yourself with sun, right? There are ways that you can have the right value and serve your career, serve your business, serve your product and your users better. [00:42:02] Gaël DuezOne last question before we close the podcast. So we talked a lot about tactics at product management levels. We talked about OKR. We talked about the carbon budget. We talked about using some key results, the weight making sure that you can use your apps or your products on multiple equipment platforms. There is still something that I believe is related to what you said about leveraging your influence because product managers tend to have quite a lot of influence within a company. And it's how do you pitch your boss? How do you pitch your CEO? And, you've stated both of you that the sustainability momentum is getting traction, but it's not that big yet. And let's be honest, it's usually not among top business people that it's the biggest. And when you start traveling outside some places, you discover places where it's just simply not there at all. So how do you pitch your boss and do we always have this fight or this competition between sustainability in business and here I would like to set apart an unsustainable business model. Obviously, if you are drilling for more oil and that you have no transition plan and that you want 2 100 to do exactly the same business. You can build the cleanest possible digital products IT stack, et cetera. You've got a bigger issue than just this very specific part of your activity, but for, I would say regular economic activities, is it that much tension between sustainability of business? [00:43:41] Antonia LandiI mean, I think I'd go back to what François just said, right? Like it's actually just good business practice. You don't have to lead with sustainability, lead with lower costs, right? Client computing, especially like that, is always a huge bill. Lead with improved UX, right? Lead with more people who can use our product. And then by the way, this also means that we're lowering our footprint. By the way, this also means that we are now more mindful of what we store and how much we store and where we store it. And I've had to do this a lot doing, like, trying to get traction for mission important things under the guise of something else. But it's really just learning to speak the language that will resonate the most with your CEO, with your CTO, right? Getting that buy in and you can do it on such a small scale. You can do it for one feature, right? You can do it for, I don't know, the next AWS migration, because it's going to come sooner or later. I think almost using these valid business benefits as a Trojan horse to get people into the habit of thinking this way. And then honestly, before you know it, it is part of your culture. [00:45:03] François BurraAntonia said it perfectly. I don't know what I can add to it, but choose the right metrics that can resonate with them. Because like, as we know sustainable product best practices can really feed into many areas and avoid moralizing. Like no one wants to be on the wrong side of an argument and create for more. There's so many examples that we didn't share today, but like big companies and smaller ones that are doing great things in that area. So look at what's happening around them and create for more, because maybe your competitor is actually starting to implement those practices. And suddenly, people will start to freak out because they're like, okay, they're doing it. So we should do it. And also waves a bit of the flag of some climate risks that come with it. There's a lot of regulation in Europe. There's not that many in North America and we need those to come like GDPR. It just came in a wave and suddenly everyone adapted to it. And so there's also that part of the equation that maybe it would resonate better with some people. And we don't want just negative doom and gloom, but you know, you need to approach benefits, opportunities, and risks to be part of this question. So I think we have many tools basically to be able to convey that point. And as you said, Antonia, if sustainability isn't even part of the discussion, be my guest that's also perfectly fine. [00:46:21] Gaël DuezSo thanks François , because there were a lot of tips. Fear of missing out is pretty cool. Climate risk and fear of regulation is pretty cool as well. I think finding the right allies is so true. I mean, it really depends on some companies. That's so true that your CFO will be your best friend or the ESG director will be or sustainably director will be your best friend. So that's a very good point. My last question before asking the traditional closing question will be, do you need that much permission to become a climate active product manager? [00:46:54] François BurraIf I may start on this one, Antonia, it's kind of interesting because I'm giving training at the moment. And the 2 assignments that I give to my fellows are 1 looking at the playbook and the 33 best practices in the playbook and looking at the ones they can implement without permission. And the one they can implement and sometimes it's either there may be, they can influence both implement and influence, and sometimes they can only want to do one of them. So absolutely there's so many things that you can do that are part of your job and you don't need the approval of anyone. And the second assignment that I give to them is how to pitch them internally, which is what we just talked about. And basically helping them to create a slide deck to pitch this topic internally and see how we can be tied to the strategy of the company. So yeah, it's just so on point.[00:47:45] Gaël DuezSo you can say to your students, no need to use ChatGPT, just listen to the latest Green IO episode and you'll get a good grade. And what about you, Antonia? [00:47:57] Antonia LandiYeah. I mean, I'm all for asking for forgiveness rather than asking for permission. Even in product management, like there's so many of us that wouldn't be able to get to do the things we really want to do. Like, God forbid actually speak to some customers, right? You just need to find different ways of doing it. And like I say, use a Trojan horse if you need to go find it to get your job done without having to ask and don't even let anyone know. Right? Like once you have a strong enough case, that's when you can go talk about it. That's when you can go and say that, by the way, I've actually been doing this for the last month and it hasn't disrupted anything. So why don't we do this for all teams?I'm a huge, huge fan of this approach. [00:48:46] Gaël DuezThanks a lot. I love this approach as well. I'd like to ask you the final closing question, which is, would you share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability, maybe even sustainably in the IT sector? [00:49:01] Antonia LandiActually for me, the positive news is that this podcast is happening, that we're having this conversation, that I now got to know a whole other person who is so passionate about this topic. And I think this is the biggest marker of future success for me, because I think the more people talk about this, the more people with a meaningful voice talk about this and share really specific, actionable, real world strategies, the sooner we can get to a place where this is no longer a niche subject. [00:49:39] Gaël DuezGreat. I'm going to have a mainstream podcast now. I love it. [00:49:45] François BurraI wish. That's all I wish for your podcast. I think my positive news will be in the same sense of what Antonia just said, I think two years back, because I admit by pivot, like not long ago in all respect, you know, like it was two, three years ago. When I talked about it, I was the only one, like, especially if I talk about my context in Montreal, Canada or North America, like when I talk about climate and products, people were just looking at me like, what are you talking about? But now, people reach out to me so that I talk about this topic and it's only my personal story. But I see that the momentum is shifting in North America. Like there's more lights shining on this topic. And before I had to push the topic everywhere so that maybe someone will pick up on it and talk about it, agree to talk to me about it. Now people reach out to me to talk about this topic. And I would hope and I would assume that is the same thing for many other person in that ecosystem, which I think just shows and demonstrate that there there is a momentum happening and that the awareness is slowly picking up and hopefully with the awareness, people will start taking action, which is at the end of the day, what we what we need because t o come back to your introduction, like we need to start acting now and not tomorrow.[00:51:05] Gaël DuezThanks. It's great to see this momentum indeed. It was really cool to have you on the show today. There's very practical insights. I mean, I guess there are a lot of constants to be extracted by anyone working in the product management field. So I would say mission accomplished. Congratulations to both of you and I'm looking forward to continuing our discussion offline.[00:51:30] Antonia LandiIt was lovely being here. Thank you for the invitation. [00:51:33] François BurraThank you, Gaël. And great to meet you, Antonia. I think we have many more discussions to have together. [00:51:38] Antonia LandiAbsolutely.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

📈 44 cm water level rise under the IPCC business as usual scenario.This number shows that climate change is very real for Singaporeans and for their data centers, close to 10% of the whole of APAC! 🎧In episode 36, Gaël Duez discussed with Professor PS Lee, National University of Singapore Dean's Chair of Mechanical Engineering and one of the top experts worldwide on data center cooling, the challenges in making data centers sustainable.🔍Some key points of their exchange are:🌡️why temperature rise has multiple downside 🌡️energy challenges that affects the sustainability of data centers🌡️liquid cooling technology as an important option🌡️why lessons from DC operating in tropical climate apply almost everywhereAnd much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: PS's LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Poh Seng's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Coastal Risk Screening Tool A Heat Dome Hits Virginia: One Data Center's StorySingapore Climate 2023: The Year in NumbersWorld Without End by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc JancoviciFuture of the human climate nicheTan Tin WeeSUSTAINABLE TROPICAL DATA CENTRE TESTBEDEED TranscriptGaël Duez 00:21Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is a podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time, twice a month on a Tuesday. All guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech when it comes to sustainability, I have a sweet spot for Singapore because of its uniqueness. This is one of the top cities in the entire world which has benefited the most from the global extractivist, highly carbonized and financialized economy, and also one of its most at risk of climate change. Hence a blossoming of initiatives there on how to both pivot towards more sustainability and mitigate climate change impacts. And these efforts apply especially to the backbone of its infrastructure data centers. As we are growing aware that the human body has some physiological limits that can be reached during heat waves where the wrong mix of high temperature and humidity is reached. It's death for people staying outside too long and this concerns everyone, not only the populations usually at risk like infants or elderly people. It was really well illustrated by Jancovici Jean-Marc and Blain Christophe in their international bestseller comics World Without End and based on a 2020 mega study published in Environmental Sciences, a third of humankind is now at risk to live in places where temperature could be lethal several weeks per year. Well, everything that I just said about humans applies to data center equipment which also needs to be cooled down 24/7 for many obvious reasons. Starting with latency and sovereignty, we cannot move all data centers in the world where the air will remain cool like the Nordics. Hence a serious challenge for the tech industry, how to run a sustainable data center and more specifically how to build sustainable data center hubs where tropical climate creates hurdles which are getting bigger due to climate change. To discuss this, I'm honored to have Professor P. S. Lee on the show. Based in Singapore, PS is National University of Singapore Dean's Chair of Mechanical Engineering and one of the most cited scientists in mechanical engineering and transport energy rings worldwide. He has specialized in data center engineering for two decades and he is also a field practitioner. The founder of Coolers DC, what a cool name, which advises top DC operators like Equinix or Meta. He will also be our keynote speaker at the Green IO Singapore Conference in two weeks, April 18 to be precise. One reason among many reasons to join the first conference in Asia focusing 100% on green it and Green IO. Listeners can get free tickets using the Voucher GREENIOVIP and how exciting it is to kickstart my discussion with Professor Lee. Welcome, Poh Seng. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.PS Lee 03:54Hi guys, thanks for having me. So it's my pleasure to be on your podcast.Gaël Duez 03:59So PS, I played again with the excellent Climate Central's coastal risk screening tool, which enables people to simulate the impact of a sea level rise, among other impacts. And the results were already concerning for a 44 cm water level rise, which is the current IPCC best estimator for the business as usual scenario with most of the iconic gardens by the bay in Singapore under the water. And if we simulate a 2 meters rise, a likely scenario. If some tipping points with ice in Greenland or Antarctica are reached, well, the entire Singapore's harbor is at risk. My point is, climate change is very real for Singaporeans. Could you maybe explain to us why and what is more precisely at stake here?PS Lee 04:53Sure. I would like to refer to the recently published 2023 Singapore Climate Reports, which marks an alarming continuation of global warming trends, with Singapore experiencing its fourth warmest year since unprecedented temperatures, especially during the months of May and October. This underlined the urgency of addressing climate change. The report's projection of up to 326 high heat stress days by 2099 in high emission scenarios starkly highlights the impending challenges, especially for industries like the IT sector.Gaël Duez 05:33Correct me if I'm wrong, but Singapore is a very massive IT hub in Southeast Asia, is that correct?PS Lee 05:42Yes. As of two to three years ago, in Singapore, the total data center capacity is actually close to 1, that is close to the 10% of the whole of APAC. So for city states to be hosting that kind of capacity is actually quite amazing, but it's actually important to manage the power and the associated carbon footprint. So it is. Right now, the data center industry is already consuming 7% of Singapore total electricity consumption. And if we don't manage this in a couple of years, this can actually go up to 12%. So that's why the Singapore government has actually imposed a data center moratorium about two and a half to three years ago, which they finally left the year before. Thereafter, there was a data center call for application, which the industry expected to meet very stringent criteria, including PUE, no more than 1.3, as well as the adoption of innovative and sustainable data center solutions.Gaël Duez 06:59You mean that for two years and a half it was not permitted to build new data center facilities in Singapore.PS Lee 07:07That's right.Gaël Duez 07:08And just to make sure I understood well it's already 7% of electricity consumption and it could triple with the current trend.PS Lee 07:17Yes and especially with the interest in AI in other high power workloads. So if we don't manage this in a sustainable fashion, this percentage is certainly going to increase very sharply over the next couple of years.Gaël Duez 07:35So clearly the Singaporean government doesn't want to go the Irish way with the Irish scenario. Where I recall today the electricity consumed by the data center industry is already above 20% if not 25%. I don't recall the number exactly but it was really mind blowing. And so you were mentioning this very strict criteria to build a data center in Singapore, obviously low carbon electricity and also innovative solutions. Maybe it would be interesting to unpack the challenges that data center operators in Singapore and more largely in tropical climates are facing.PS Lee 08:19Yeah sure. I think the first and foremost operating data centers here in the tropics with a high ambient temperature and humidity is actually going to be a very energy sapping exercise because of the constant cooling needs in order to maintain the IT equipment within acceptable temperature range in order to ensure proper and reliable operations. But associated with the heat stress that we're experiencing during the recent few years due to climate change, this has actually imposed a more challenging condition for data center operators to ensure the resilience as well as efficient operation of data center here in the tropics and specifically here in Singapore. So that's definitely going to be they are constantly looking for more energy efficient cooling solution and this goes beyond operational efficiency, rethinking energy sourcing as well and potentially integrating renewable energy sources to mitigate the carbon footprint. And for city state like Singapore in terms of domestic generation of renewable energy is going to be limited as well. I think the only viable renewable energy source here is actually solar and based on a report published by the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore series which is hosted here at NUS. So even if we were to sort of use all our rooftop space for the solar panels, so the percentage of the electric supply that comes from solar is actually still going to be very limited, well less than 10%. So that's why I think Singapore is actually adopting innovative approaches whereby we're actually cutting agreements with our Asian neighbors to look into the imports of green electrons, low carbon electricity. Then I think related to the temperature challenge or the temperature or what we call a thermal management challenge associated with operating data center here, there's also this wear and tear on it equipment because the increased heat stress days will directly translate to accelerated depreciation of critical data center equipment. And this necessitates more effective maintenance and proactive design consideration that can withstand the rigor of a harsher climate, and again, related to a climate. So when it comes to heat rejection, typically we need to operate the cooling towers that actually consume water, then that brings about the water sustainability issues. So given the intensity or the intensification of the extreme weather events. So water cooling, the technologies, while efficient, may actually impose a sustainability challenge. Hence, we are always actually looking at better ways of reusing water recycling along with explorations of air and more efficient liquid cooling alternatives. And these are now becoming imperative. But we are also grabbing with, for example, the challenge of a skilled workforce, especially if you look across the region, Southeast Asia. So the data centers industry is actually booming. So how do we actually adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change? Data center also means nurturing a workforce which is proficient in engineering and understanding sustainability practices and technology. So there are definitely quite a few challenges that we are confronting today in order to ensure the sustainable growth of the IT industry.Gaël Duez 12:42If I follow you here, in trying to wrap up what you say, I've listed four challenges. You've got the energy challenge, the equipment challenge, the water challenge, and I would say the workforce challenge.PS Lee 12:56Yes. These are the exact four points that.Gaël Duez 12:59I mentioned, and I think it will be worse deep diving on all of them. So if we start with the energy challenge, I've got a first question. So you mentioned solar, and solar not being able to attend more than to contribute to more than 10% of the overall electricity production. But what about wind energy? Is there any ability to put wind from around Singapore or is it just something completely nuts because of all the boat traffic?PS Lee 13:33Yeah. So Singapore is what we call a renewable energy challenge country, right? So when it comes to the wind, unfortunately, our wind speed is actually on the low side. If you were to put in the wind turbines, whatnot, right. In terms of the energy that this can generate will be very limited, right. Because of the low wind speed. Hence comparing the different options, solar is actually the only viable renewable energy option. Although in the recent one, two years, there have been a lot of interest in assessing the potential for geothermal. And there's also talk about going into nuclear, although I think the nuclear question has not been fully addressed because we are in CD states. So certainly the public perceptions, the safety related issues will have to be adequately addressed before Singapore to take a position. So we are very much constrained in terms of renewable energy options.Gaël Duez 14:47I think I'm not 100% sure that regarding this energy innovative approach you mentioned, which is basically outsourcing the production of low carbon electricity, I think you're the one who mentioned it as a geopolitical problem. Could you elaborate a bit on what are the pros and cons of sourcing your low carbon energy elsewhere than on your own territory?PS Lee 15:13So sourcing, renewable, the energy or the low carbon electricity from for example our neighbors. So that actually requires the cutting of bilateral agreements. And if let's suppose the electricity is actually to pass through in more than one country, then that actually requires multilateral agreement. Hence the political issues will then come into the picture. But I think Singapore has been actually very forward looking and over the past year or so, in fact we have signed an agreement totaling more than four gigawatts of clean electricity imports. But obviously the data was in the details. For example, what will be the price that would be paying for such clean electricity? The imports, because our other neighbors also have their net zero commitments. So there are actually a lot of issues. But the one thing is clear, I think once the Singapore government decides on the course of action, they will actually put in all the necessary efforts to realize them. So I feel hopeful that it will be a win-win arrangement. For example, we will collaborate deeply with our asean neighbor so as to sort of increase the deployment of renewable energy projects so that when they have access they can actually look into exporting some of these clean electricity to Singapore. But it may actually require some sort of differential pricing. For example, maybe for their domestic demand the rate will be kept at the lower level, but for those that they are exporting to Singapore, that may actually incur a certain premium.Gaël Duez 17:10What about the infrastructure? I mean, you need a connection cable. Are they already there? Do you plan to construct more?PS Lee 17:16Yes, I think the associated grid infrastructure will be actually critical when we look at linking up the grid that cuts across different countries. For one, I think there may be differences in terms of some of the standards. I think this is something that Singapore will have to work with the neighbors to finance the grid infrastructure and that may actually require quite a big amount of upgrading or the expansion of the existing grid. So I think this will likely be a costly exercise. But I think if this will actually be a win-win arrangement, by adopting a collaborative approach, we can actually increase the renewable generation capacity.Gaël Duez 18:05And if I run a data center facility in Singapore, how does it work concretely for me? Is it more okay, my government is in charge of decarbonizing the electricity, so I consume the electricity that I've got in the grid. That's it, period. Or do they also have to close a deal like purchasing power agreement or some sort of directly with foreign countries?PS Lee 18:32So I think this is the part that is still not quite clear yet. So for example, can you achieve the data center operators, can they cut a direct view, for example, power purchase agreement with renewable generation plants, for example, in Indonesia? So this is the part that is still not quite clear because the agreement that has been cut is still country to country. But I think there's actually a lot of interest from the data center operators to have access to as much green electrons as possible. But the details have not been ironed out yet. But I suppose it will be done in a phase approach. First, country to country, the agreement has to be done then that can actually trigger down to the various sectors. Certainly. I think data centers are one industry that has strong demand for the low carbon electricity. But there are also other sectors, right? So I think the Singapore government will then have to figure out a way. Then when they import such, the green electrons, which sector should it go to? Is it the data center industry or is it the semiconductor industry? Or would they actually allow, for example, the sector to actually cut direct agreement with the renewable, the generation, the plan overseas? So this is not clear yet. So I suppose over the next two to three years, right. There will be actually more clarity. But I think what is clear, Singapore government has always actually had a very consultative approach. So I'm sure they will be actually reaching out to industry, including data centers, to have the dialogue and to sort of come up with a framework, right, such that it will actually benefit, for example, data center operators who have the desire to steeply decarbonize their data center operations.Gaël Duez 20:41And eventually, because I believe the Singaporean electricity grid is fully unified, it's a theoretical question, or at least it's a bit like an analytical accounting question, because an electron is an electron. It's not green or per se, but it's more like between the different business interests, which business interests can claim, between the semiconductor industry, building and heating and or heating, not that much, but cooling. And in the data center industry, which industry will contribute the most to the low carbon electricity sourcing effort? But still. So how many data centers and how many operators are we talking about? Is it a very concentrated market with a handful of firms running larger facilities, or do you still have a lot of smaller or medium sized data centers run by, you know, I don't know, institutions, big companies, etc.PS Lee 21:40I think it's a mixed bag. So for Singapore, the data center industry, it has been reported that there are between 70 to 80 data centers operating here in Singapore. So you look at some of the more recent announcements, in particular, meta -150 mw, obviously it's huge, then, even since they actually consolidated some of the data centers. So they are actually probably in the range of 70 to 80 megawatt. So again, very sizable. And I think there's also the Google, the Microsoft, but certainly there are also the smaller data centers. That's probably in the range of maybe between 10 to 20 megawatt. But I think moving forward, for a mature market like Singapore. We will have to look at the edge data centers, which are smaller in capacity. Maybe we should be actually looking at anywhere between five to ten to 20 maximum in the capacity. And for those data centers, they are handling very high power workloads. For example, if you are doing AI training, I think it makes more sense to actually have this in, for example, Malaysia, in Indonesia, because they have abundance of renewable energy potential, they can then obviously have the green electrons to offset the carbon footprint associated with the very high capacity data centers. So I'm actually very hopeful that the various parties, various countries come together to set up what I call the sustainable data network, whereby we actually work in a very collaborative fashion so as to more effectively manage the carbon footprint of the entire Southeast Asia region.Gaël Duez 23:40Because you're an expert on these topics, whether my electricity is low carbon or not, I think the question of reducing the electricity bill is pivotal here. I would like to ask two questions that are very closely interlinked, as far as I know. How should we build data centers today, or refurbish them, and how should we run them to make sure that we save or we reduce as much as possible, or energy consumption.PS Lee 24:14I think certainly you make an excellent point. There's this constant desire to have access to more green electrons. I think this has to be peltrapped with energy, the efficient technologies specifically addressing the high energy, the consumption associated with operating cooling systems for data center, suddenly we can actually look at innovative cooling technologies, for example, the exploration or the adoption of single and two phase directorship and immersion cooling systems. So these are actually at the forefront of reducing the data center energy use and improving the cooling efficiency. And there's actually another wonderful side benefit that is less reported associated with the use of high efficiency, the liquid cooling that actually allows your hardware to actually operate at optimal efficiency. So, meaning that you'll be able to get the optimal workload accomplished versus, for example, when you are operating your IT equipment under the air cooling mode, which often goes into suggestion like thermal throttling, meaning that you're not able to fully maximize in terms of the performance. So I think adoption of innovative cooling technologies is certainly one of the first things that we want to do in terms of improving the energy efficiency of data center operations.Gaël Duez 25:58Just regarding this water cooling approach, I've got a question, which is how sustainable it is. And my question comes with two faces, and we will talk about the water consumption later. The first, is it mature enough or is it still R & D? Because last time I checked, the moment you put metals in water, bad things happen, corrosion and so on. And that will be my very minimalistic contribution in terms of chemistry. But how much is it like R and D and a bit of hype, or how sustainable it is? And my second question is how big the investment, environmentally speaking. But it also comes with a financial cost, obviously, when you refactor or you refurbish your factory to enable water cooling, because you could have a lot of carbon embodied with the data center facility itself. So hence my two questions, which are two sides of the same coin regarding the sustainability of water cooling technology.PS Lee 26:59So liquid cooling is not new. It has actually been around for a decade. It's just that the data center, being a recent adverse industry, didn't quite adopt it in a big way. But I think we are actually getting to a stage whereby, because of the increase in thermal design power, because of the sustainability imperative, I think we are getting to this stage whereby liquid cooling really needs to be a serious option. And it's certainly well beyond R & D. So to give an example, we actually started a company called CoolDC. We started off with a test bedding at one of the major co-location operators in one of their production data halls. And shortly after the completion of the test vetting, we actually managed to secure a project with a major local bank. And they are actually looking at implementing liquid cooling for 16 racks and this handling production workload. So certainly I think it's actually ready for the big time. But the challenge is actually how do you come up with a system that can scale with demand, when talking about, for example, high power IT equipment, it will not happen overnight, there will be a scaling up over time. So then the challenge is actually how do we configure a cooling system that can scale with demand in a very cost effective fashion, in a fashion that minimizes the disruption to ongoing operations. So I think there are actually ways to do it, because without liquid cooling, in fact there are actually different configurations. It can be air assisted, liquid cooling, which can be pronged into an existing brown fuel air cooled data centers without laying the elaborate piping network. But then obviously, going back to your second question, then what about the impact in terms of the environmental impact, for example, in terms of embodied carbon, so should you, for example, I have to set up new data centers. So again, I think it really depends, right? So we're very innovative in design. In fact, you can retrofit, right? Brownfield Data Centers to be very energy efficient. And that major local bank, the client that I mentioned just now, is actually in fact retrofitting one of their existing data halls. So as to support the equivalent  that can be done. It's just that the engagement, the dialogue with the infrastructure folks and the IT team has to happen at an early stage. So as to minimize the disruption because if after talk, then obviously that will potentially lead to the interruption to the IT operation, but then if, for example, you start the dialogue early, you know, when the IT team is planning to have the next round of hardware refresh, it refresh. If you time the upgrading or the retrofitting of the infrastructure to support liquid cooling in line with your IT refresh cycle. I think that can be done with very minimal disruption. And the other initiative that I have been spearheading, the sustainable tropical data center. In fact, what we did is actually we retrofitted a 40 plus year old power substation into a very efficient data center. That's where, so moving forward, that likely will be the model. Because for one, you want to save on embodied carbon. And the fact that for a mature market like Singapore, we are actually running short of power. We are also running short of space. We can't keep continuing to have new build data centers. But the fact that you see we have a lot of existing building stock, I think there's one perception that liquid cooling may actually lead to increased water consumption. That's not really the case because in fact, when talking about direct to chip or emergent cooling, this can be fully the closed system. For example, instead of rejecting the heat through a conventional cooling tower, which is obviously going to consume water, you can actually perform the heat rejection using a dry cooler. In fact, we have actually demonstrated this at that cold location data center that I mentioned. We actually demonstrated that you can actually simply reject the heat using a dry cooler without consuming the water. So again, really there's a lot of variance in terms of how you configure a liquid cooling system. So I think it really needs to be a very early engagement between the infrastructure team, the IT team, as well as the solution provider, so that you can actually come up with a configuration, a solution that is really fit for purpose because you don't want to over design or under design. Then we need to adopt a holistic approach whereby we actually factor in what's the impact in terms of the embodied carbon, what's the impact in terms of the water consumption. Then obviously, what's the impact in terms of the power or the energy consumption, which is typically measured in terms of power. But moving forward, I think it has to be really a very collaborative approach, and the dialogue needs to actually start as early as possible and not as an afterthought.Gaël Duez 32:49I've got a question for you regarding what you said about water consumption, which was one of the four challenges that you've listed. Where do these big headlines about water consumption of main hyperscalers, at least western ones, come from if water cooling doesn't consume that much water? Because, you know, I mean, all of them, Google, Azure, AWS, they've been blamed for consuming a lot of water. So where is the issue here? Because you tell us that, well, it doesn't, you can run a closed system and it doesn't consume water, or at least marginally so can you enlighten us a bit here?PS Lee 33:32One option, as I mentioned just now, is actually to use, for example, a dry cooler instead of cooling the tower, thereby having a fully closed system without actually consuming water. But then obviously there's a trade off, right? So if you operate a dry cooler versus a cooling tower in terms of the PUE, in terms of efficiency, right? The former, without the consuming water, will be actually less efficient, somewhat less efficient then in terms of the footprint. So the space required for a dry cooler versus cooling tower is actually going to be bigger. So I think it really has to be a holistic assessment. So what makes sense? Do you want to go, for example, the best possible PUE, or do you want to have a more balanced so called matrix involving not only the PUE but also the weight? So I think that's probably what's necessary moving forward. So for data center operators, including hyperscalers, to look at things in a more holistic fashion. But then I think the fact is still hyperscalers actually have very high capacity data centers. So then that obviously will translate to a large carbon footprint. Yeah. So I think that's something actually unavoidable in certain sense, but I think as much as possible we will have to then maybe look into the transition from air cooling to cooling because that will bring about a reduction in terms of the total energy consumption. So I think that's something that we do, but I think the other aspect that can be done is actually the end user. So we also need to be probably more prudent in terms of our consumption of digital services. So maybe you want to limit how much TikTok or YouTube that you watch each day.Gaël Duez 35:27It's a bit like the elephant in the room. Is sobriety like digital sobriety a topic at all in Singapore or in Southeast Asia, as far as you can tell?PS Lee 35:37I think people, obviously so here in the news, in social media, that we need to be more sustainable. Carbon emission is definitely going to be something challenging to manage, but it's just that I think some of the things that don't actually trigger down to the individual, to the personal level. So moving forward, we may really need to consider imposing a personal carbon budget so that you're more conscious in terms of how much digital services that you consume. I think it's all part of being a responsible citizen. Everyone obviously is conscious of climate change. We really need to take it upon ourselves so that we are also very conscious in terms of managing our consumption. I think that certainly will be very complimentary to all the wonderful energy efficient technologies that we are deploying in our data centers. Very complementary to the integration of renewable energy. But if, let's suppose we can in tandem manage the consumption while actually managing in terms of the energy efficiency improvement, integration, and renewable energy, I think all in all, that will make the earth more sustainable.Gaël Duez 37:13The example you gave about making people more aware of the need to refrain from digital consumption, I think it connects pretty well with what you've said several times before that. Dialogue is key. And making sure that all stakeholders start discussing on how to make the data center industry more sustainable. And my question is that a Singapore way of doing things like, it seems to be pretty much in the DNA of Singapore business and governments to talk to each other. I don't know if it includes consumers as well as you've just mentioned right now, and how much of the government is involved and how much more specifically does it use the stick or the carrot.PS Lee 38:07So I can frame it as dialogue and collaboration. So I think Singapore has always been very collaborative. I think one, the key reason being that Singapore is actually a migrant society. We have a very relatively short history. So in our 50 years of nation building, I think Singapore achieved a lot. And I think that happened because we are able to rally people coming from a different background, different races, different religions to come together in a very collaborative fashion, then obviously you see collaboration between government, industry, academia, civil society. So I think that really is very much needed when we want to actually address the multifaceted challenges associated with sustainability, associated with climate change. I think the Sierra Leone government probably will soften, or rather usually will first go with the carrot before they bring the stick. I think really helping the industry, helping the public to see the needs to be more sustainable and the need to be more collaborative, I think that will be actually more effective than, for example, imposing the very draconian measures. I'm still hopeful that Singapore will be able to focus more on inculcating or enculturation. They need to be sustainable, they need to be collaborative so that people come together willingly. Because I think that will be more effective than forcing people to comply with certain regulations. I thought that should be probably the last resort but I suppose it needs to be a balance, because obviously there will still be companies that are non compliant. Certain amounts of regulatory advancement will still be necessary.Gaël Duez 40:20And I'm asking you also the question, because I'm pretty sure you're familiar with what is going on in the rest of the world and in Europe. Very recently, an energy efficiency directive has been launched and it was pretty precise regarding the metrics that a data center should now report above a certain capacity. And it goes way beyond just renewable energy and PUE or we also waste use, etc. Do we have this kind of reporting requirements planned in Singapore, in other areas in Southeast Asia, for instance, or nothing to your knowledge?PS Lee 41:02Not to my knowledge, but at some point we may have to do the same thing. Going back to our earlier discussion that moving forward for Singapore especially, we will need to be very selective in terms of the kind of data center, the kind of workload that we are hosting. Obviously, we are very energy constrained. We have very limited options when it comes to renewable energy sources. So I think at some point we will probably need to mandate that the data center operators will actually need to report various matrixes, for example, maybe pertaining to PUE or WUE, what's the amount of renewable energy, the sources that are integrating into their operations, things like that. But I think it will take a while. I think at least for now, I see Singapore, the government actually engaging industry, encouraging them to go through the green transition. And I think that is something that will take some time. But I'm sure the Sambo government actually provides the necessary support, for example, in terms of grants, in terms of assistance, in terms of technology, so that the existing stock of brownfield data centers, especially those that are quite dated, right, can then go through this green transition.Gaël Duez 42:36Now I'd like to zoom out a bit and talk about resiliency and the lessons for the rest of the world, because tropical, or you meet subtropical climates, are pretty widespread around the globe. And for example, in the state of Virginia, home of AWS, this is a subtract tropical climate. And I don't know Pierce if you read it, but in 2022, the reviewer, security technology published a fictional story about a heat dome descending in the summer of 2025. So it's next year near the town of Ashburn, Virginia. Ashburn is called ‘data center alley’ by its folks in the US, because it's by far the largest concentration of data centers, not just in the United States, but in the entire world. And spoiler alert, it ends with a data center manager having to shut down an entire hyper scaler facility facing the cornelian choice of either losing billions of dollars in equipment or entering its history with the first ever cloud blackout. And everything you said in this interview makes this story some sort of more likely because you describe the worsening climate condition that Singapore faces, all the challenges to cool down data centers, etcetera. And my question is: how realistic it is, and what are the lessons for pretty much everyone running a data center facility in the world from the specific conditions that operators in subtropical areas, the one who are the most at risk of heatwave? Well, what could be these lessons? PS Lee 44:30I think certainly the increasing episode of heatwave is going to pose challenges to the data center industry, especially if they are still using conventional air cooling systems. So I think this is part of that kind of dovetails here very nicely into why I think liquid cooling is actually the way to go because one of the studies that we did, which I thought is pretty interesting. So what we did is actually we increased the supply air temperature as well as the supplied liquid temperature, because we actually have two racks, one which is actually an air cool rack, the other is actually the liquid cool rack, both having the exact same IT configuration. So the only difference is actually the cooling method. So what we have shown is actually for the air cooled rack, the server's performance, the energy consumption, it's actually very strong functions of temperature, because when you're operating your IT equipment using air cooling, all your chip temperature, or what we call junction temperature, are actually much higher, typically in the range of 80 or 90 degrees celsius. And that is actually very close to the temperature threshold, because you want to protect the electronics, [for] the server you usually set the upper temperature limit. So once you cross that limit, then the thermal throttling skips in because you want to protect your electronics. But when you actually operate your liquid cool rack, even with an increase in supply temperature, what we notice actually both the performance as well as the energy consumption actually stays relatively insensitive to temperature. So the implication is actually what if you have a liquid cooling system, or rather if you are using a liquid cooling system, even if, for example, there's actually an increase in your outdoor temperature, ambient temperature, whatnot, that's not going to lead to a big issue in terms of the performance of your IT equipment in terms of the energy consumption by the demand. But if you were to actually use the conventional air cooling, then you'll run into serious problems because of the increase in your ambient temperature that actually leads to your ip, the hardware going into more frequent thermal throttling, which is obviously going to affect the performance. That's also going to mean that your equipment now is going to have a higher power penalty. So I think from the resilience standpoint, I think it makes a lot of sense for the industry to actually look into transitioning from air to liquid cooling. So that's actually my personal experience that I can share when it comes to the data center resiliency from the angle of cooling.Gaël Duez 47:48However, you mentioned earlier that transitioning a full entire facility from air cooling to water cooling comes at a price, and you were advocating more for a modular approach. So if, how much would it cost for a per scaler to migrate entirely air cooling to water cooling? I think it will be ace watering without bad word play.PS Lee 48:15It's true. If you have software looking at retrofitting and air cooled data centers to liquid cool, and suddenly there will be the additional CapEx. The fact that you have a sunken investment on your air cooling infrastructure and for you to replace that with liquid cooling infrastructure, certainly there will be additional CapEx, but it may, you may have no choice, right? If let's suppose your tenants come to you and say, I'm going to bring in one rack of GPU service because I'm going to run generative AI workload. If you don't have the supporting liquid cooling infrastructure, there's no way that your tenants can actually operate his high power servers or his high power rack. Even if they can operate it, they wouldn't be able to get the performance that they paid for. So the multiple factors that you need to consider one is actually, what's the cost, what's the ROI the other is actually what is the business opportunity that you don't do it. Because if you can't support the high power rack, high power equipment, your tenants will take the business and go to your competitors. So I think it really requires a holistic assessment. Certainly ROI is important, but at the same time, do you want to future proof your data centers so that you're able to handle the current, the future workload that's going to come into your data centers? So I think operators probably don't really have too many options. If you don't do it, you are going to fall behind your competitors.Gaël Duez 50:05So when economics incentives meet sustainability incentives, I think that's a nice way to wrap up the entire episode. Professor, before we leave this episode, I've got one final question. Would you like to share a positive piece of news with us? Whether it comes to sustainability in general or more specifically, its sustainability?PS Lee 50:32Sure. Traditionally, the Southeast Asia data center markets are not known to be trailblazers in terms of adoption of the most advanced, most innovative solution. But because of the confluence of various factors, including the increase in thermal design power achieved because of the sustainability imperative. So over the last 12 to 24 months, we have been seeing a lot of interesting developments. For example, data center markets in Malaysia and Indonesia are starting to sort of call for liquid cooling infrastructure. So I think that can propel the region, in fact, to be the leaders when it comes to adoption of sustainable and innovative data center solutions. So I'm actually very hopeful that the region can achieve leadership in terms of embracing the most sustainable and the most innovative solution. But going back to one of the key discussion points, it has to be a highly collaborative approach.Gaël Duez 51:42Yeah, that was the key word here, collaboration. And we've got a lot to learn from a small but very powerful state who has to work well with all its neighbors and to source electricity and to find innovative solutions. Thanks a lot. PS, that was lovely to have you on the show. I'm eager to see you on stage for Green IO Singapore. I hope that many listeners based in Singapore and maybe some of them based in Southeast Asia will come as well. Thanks a lot again and talk to you very soon.PS Lee 52:16Sure. Thanks for having me.Gaël Duez 52:19Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Plus, it will give our little team Jill, Meibel, Tani and I a nice booster. In our next episode, we will talk about product management and more specifically, how to be a climate conscious product manager with Antonia Landi, a leading voice in the european product ops community, and François Burra, co-author of the Climate product management Playbook. Stay tuned. Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit Greenio Dot Tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Singapore, but you already know it on April 18, and you can get a free ticket using the Voucher GREENIOVIP and you already knew it. What you might not know is that early bird tickets for London on September 19 are already for sale. And what you might not already know is that we opened the call for speakers for London, so feel free to apply if you've got something interesting to say regarding it, sustainability, whether it's cloud data, operation design, etcetera. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world one bite at a time.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

⚙️Cybersecurity and sustainability do share a complex relationship! The two approaches share commonalities, such as grappling with resistance from teams and executives and prioritizing resilience, but they also seem to split in notable ways such as constant updates in cybersecurity impacting bloatware and equipment obsolences. 🎧In this episode Gaël Duez invited two experts on the field, Mary Prokhorova from InDevLab and Michael Oghia from Datacenter Changemakers, to discuss the nuances of cybersecurity and sustainability’s relationship.🔎Some few takeaways from their conversation are:💡the critical role of IT infrastructure in modern business processes💡importance of protecting critical infrastructure to avoid environmental damage and societal impacts💡significance of investing in digital infrastructure to support the green revolution and highlighting the impact of climate risks on both physical and digital security❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: Mary’s LinkedInMichael’s LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Mary and Michael's sources and other references mentioned in this episode: Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish: Dispelling Sustainability Myths with EmXcoreSustainability and Cybersecurity: The Unexpected Dynamic Duo of the Energy Transition Ukraine’s top mobile internet company is down Guidebook for a Cyber-Resilient Low-Emissions Energy TransitionEurope is bolstering energy sector resilience. But cyber risk remains a major vulnerabilityRising sea level and coastal infrastructure optic fiber at risk The Impact of Rising Sea Level on Internet Infrastructure Cybersecurity is an environmental, social and governance issue. Here's why The Rising Role of Cybersecurity in ESG and How Companies Are Taking Action Florida water treatment facility hack used a dormant remote access software, sheriff saysTranscriptGaël Duez 00:00Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because access and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech, cybersecurity and sustainability it has been a while since I decided to have a dedicated episode on the complex relationship between the two. On one hand, the two approaches share some common features, such as not always. Being an easy sell to teams or. Executives, or their common emphasis on resiliency. On the other end, there are some areas where they seem to go the opposite direction. Security requires regular updates, having an impact on both bloatware and equipment obsolescence, resident equipment increases the environmental footprint of infrastructure, and so on. Quite a lot to cover in this episode, so I wanted to bring two experts on board, Mary and Michael, with different angles of approach. Mary Prokhorova is the founder and CEO of InDevLab and also the co-founder of Servi5, which is specialized in cybersecurity products. She's based in Ukraine, where she can unfortunately experience firsthand and on a daily basis the vital importance of cybersecurity. Mary has a specialized education in software design and development and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in software and cybersecurity. So right on the spot with our topic. Michael Oghia is a consultant, editor, and ICT sustainability advocate working within the digital infrastructure, internet governance, and media development ecosystem, currently as a Partnerships Manager & Co-producer, at Datacenter Changemakers at Datacenter Forum. In a nutshell, he knows a lot about sustainability, infrastructure, and resiliency. And a fun fact, he was one of the first persons I connected to almost three years ago when I started my journey into sustainability. It was obvious to me that I wanted him on the show at some point and voilà. Better late than never. Welcome both of you to the show. Thanks a lot, Mary. Thanks a lot, Michael, for joining Green IO today.Michael J. Oghia 02:40It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me, and indeed, it's been a long time coming, so I'm very grateful to finally be here with you.Mary Prokhorova 02:52Yeah, thank you. Nice to meet you all.Gaël Duez 02:55Okay, so to start maybe unwrapping all the different topics, Mary, what do you think about the parallel I draw between cybersecurity strategy and sustainability strategy not always being the top priority and the way teams will handle it? It's important, but it's obviously less important than delivering or providing new features or whatever. Can you comment on this? Do you agree? Because you've got a lot of experience with different companies, is it something that you've noticed also or not that much? Mary Prokhorova 03:29Of course, I agree. I think that cybersecurity will be a part of sustainability. The main focus will be on sustainability, sustainability for a working model, for general organization development, and general impact on this world. I mean, not only like ecological impact, I mean like something more that organization could bring to our people. Maybe it's also mind-changing. It's also focusing on more important things for our nature. But the general sustainability will also based on security tools. If we are talking about sustainability, for example, for critical infrastructure, if we are talking about electric station or about heatric electric station, we're also about talking about how it works with IT infrastructure. And do we have a risk if something breaks from IT infrastructure, this infrastructure still works and will have not any ecological strategy for nature. It's, for example, from my side, from my experience, I have situations when cybersecurity and it infrastructure have a very big impact on manufacturing. In this part of Europe. We have a lot of manufacturing that work, for example, with windows, with plastic, with different tips. And the station was next something went wrong in infrastructure. And all this manufacturing was stopped. I mean, logistics was stopped, and production was stopped. A lot of plastic was broken. And do you know how much plastic they need to utilisate more than one ton per day? So you understand how much trouble it is for nature and you don't know how to reduce this plastic. So it's also about how infrastructure could and cybersecurity could influence to general production and general ecological questions.Michael J. Oghia 06:14I completely agree with Mary's point there, and I wanted to say something very similar in my remarks throughout this episode as well, that there are many different ways that we can kind of paint this argument. Where is the intersection between cybersecurity and sustainability? And one of them that Mary just mentioned is very prominent, which is that if you are a, whether it is a business or a factory if you are struck by an attack, depending on what you're doing or what you're making, you might be then left with a lot of waste or a lot of byproducts that you cannot then produce, you cannot use. So what do we do with that? So I think that's a very specific element that is kind of relevant to this intersection, but that is definitely one of them that I had thought of as well. And if you think about this from many different angles, if you think, okay, well, if you're a factory producing something, let's say, related to plastics, as Mary mentioned, that could be a source of waste. But everything that requires something to be fixed, anything that requires something to be addressed, that is additional carbon emissions, that is additional resources being used to fix a problem that didn't need to happen. It only happens because of often malicious actors, whether state or non-state. And thus it's just one more layer to our very complicated, complex world that we live in that I think is very relevant to this discussion.Gaël Duez 08:00I fully agree. And actually, that was an angle I didn't pay attention to before. I was focusing a lot on resiliency and critical infrastructure, like Mary said, on electric power plants. But I never pay attention to it. Yes, actually, when you've got a cyber attack that could create a lot of waste and byproducts that you absolutely do not want. Okay, let's deep dive into this resiliency approach. Because I think sustainability and cybersecurity are very much related when it comes to resiliency. Mary, maybe you want to elaborate a bit on this one.Mary Prokhorova 08:34Yeah, yeah, for sure. I also want to focus too that modern business having its part inside. And it's a very nice point to focus on because if we are talking about digital, business development, about business growing, we are also talking about IT infrastructure and IT systems development and growing for this business. And all our modern business is growing with their internal IT system. It doesn't matter whether is it an on-premise solution or a SaaS solution, is it Microsoft Office or your customized CRM system. So if you want to grow, you need to also to develop your IT part. And if you do not secure your IT part, you will not secure your business processes. These business processes are based on all these IT tools. I mean like CRM, like Riverside podcast recording, like email, like your personal data in social network, et cetera. So that's why it's very nice to understand for business how much part they have in these business processes. And what's the influence of this IT part on their modern IT process and for future IT processes? Why I also mentioned about future, because we are right now in era of artificial intelligence and the part of this artificial intelligence will be more bigger each day. And also we need to understand where we could use this tool for our business automatization, digitalization, et cetera. And where we need to protect our data from this big smart machine. What I want to say, is if we want to grow, if you want to make a sustainable business, you will use IT tools, IT instruments, IT platforms and sustainable IT infrastructure. If you want to build sustainable IT infrastructure, you will need to focus also on security questions. When we are talking about increasing security for each organization, first we are talking about hardware and about IT infrastructure, about cloud, about servers and about networks. So if we are talking about companies that have their own IT solution for the market, we're talking about software security. Also, we need to be sure that this software is also secured from internal and external attacks. So if we are talking about how to check this software, you need to provide a cybersecurity audit or penetration testing. Penetration testing is the method when you try to hack this software. And there are three methods like black box, gray box, and white box. And they depend on how much information about this system that you want to hack. How much information do you have? If you have low information, it's a white box. If you have nothing, it's a black box, a gray box. It's a mixed something.Gaël Duez 12:39Have something, not the gray box, just Mary, sorry to interrupt you. Just to make sure to understand. Gray box is more the situation where you want to assess the exposure to an internal threat. Like an employee having access to some information, but not all information. When you use the gray box situation, is it this kind of situation that? Do you want to test?Mary Prokhorova 13:02Yes, it's one of the cases. Only one, because Gray box was used also with employees that were in your company and that lived in one or two years and tried to hug you because they are not happy. It's a real case when your previous employers do have not good thoughts and they are not happy and they are connected with your enemies and trying to hug you and provide them corporate information about your general structure.Gaël Duez 13:45And let's start with maybe one example, which is the bring your own device question. We know in sustainability that the more we mutualize, the better it is. But obviously, when you start with this first layer and actually this fifth layer that Mary described, using that much personal equipment might be good for the planet, might be good for the environment, but that causes some issues with cybersecurity. So we see this tension between cybersecurity and sustainability. Sometimes they're fully aligned and sometimes they're a bit opposite. What are your take on it?Michael J. Oghia 14:18Okay, this is a good question because I don't see bringing your own device as it could be incompatible with sustainability, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. It doesn't mean that the company let's say, or whatever entity doesn't have any options, they can choose a partner like Fairphone or refurbish older devices that could work, for instance. I think I definitely understand that there is often perceived as a trade-off between sustainability and cybersecurity, but I don't think there necessarily has to be. There is a neutral way forward in some ways. But I think also recognizing that as something that Mary said, which I think is very important, too, that sustainability and cybersecurity go hand in hand. And they're very complementary in many ways, because the more you're investing in your own cybersecurity, the more you can also think about how you're making your organization sustainable and resilient. And so, yes, going back to the bring your own device question, that's a big question. And I can't say, aside from what I've already said, that I have a specific solution to that because I've never technically worked on that. I would say it really depends also on the needs of the company or of the entity in question. But I would also really suggest then that if let's say, a CTO is saying, no, there is no way that I'm allowing my employees to come in with their own devices, I would then say, okay, well, is there a way that we could provide refurbished devices? Is there a way that we could provide some kind of, maybe we can go and buy devices that are already manufactured or whatnot, so that we're essentially creating less demand for new products, something that's already been made? If you go get a phone, for instance, that was manufactured three years ago, even if that's new to me, that's less wasteful than being like, okay, we're going to provide you with the latest iPhone or whatever, or the latest Android. On the other hand, too, getting a refurbished device can also come with its own positives, such as a lot of times, older devices have a lot fewer bugs because those bugs have already been worked out. So perhaps there are already good security patches and whatnot. But then again, I also recognize that security is a constant cat-and-mouse game where just because you're on top of things, well, somebody is trying to get right ahead of you. So this is a complex question that I think each company or each organization needs to step back and think, well, what are our options?Gaël Duez 17:24So it's interesting because what you're saying is obviously, if you need to invest in redundant equipment or if you cannot allow your employees to bring their own device, it will come with the cost, and you can mitigate this cost with refurbished equipment, et cetera. On the other hand, what you also say is in general and the devil is in the details, but in general, the older the better in terms of cybersecurity. So this kind of sentence that you hear all the time, how we need to update, we need to update, we need to upgrade. Because for cybersecurity reason I think it's not that obvious, isn't it?Mary Prokhorova 18:06I was born in a family who have a small own business with computers. And with all this equipment I was growing between monitors, between hearts, like video cards, mother plates, et cetera. So my first toy was this hard storage. And my parents were very deeply involved in hardware. And they talk like news, not mention it like the better. And also they mentioned it like if you buy a new device, you will receive new bugs and new issues and you will not use this device a full power. Currently, I'm working in cybersecurity and its field and I could say that they were right. But if you come back to your question, the truth in the middle, you don't need to waste your time for ten or 20 years to renovate your equipment and software. But it does not make sense to run for the latest update. Because also if you are talking about hardware, for example, personal devices, we have artificial absolutions. If I could correct when we need to buy the new stylophone to the new droid, more new laptop, et cetera. But also we receive this hardware with new software that has a lot of bugs, and a lot of new issues. And it does not make your job, your work easy. You will meet a lot of these tips and very fucking bugs in each device. But also I have met in my practice, I couldn't say names because it's a government structure. When they still work in 2015 with equipment that was bought in 1990 years, all these computers and the light test version of the operation system was Windows 97. And they still work. It's not a zoo, it's a park of moments, really stone era.Gaël Duez 21:15Interesting that you mentioned Windows because that's a big debate among cybersecurity, security, and sustainability communities about them stopping the maintenance of Windows 10 pretty soon for security reasons. And we're talking about millions, dozens of millions of equipment that might not be compatible anymore. So what you're both saying is that it's actually not the best way to enforce cybersecurity. We know that it's definitely not the best way to enforce a sustainable world. But it might also be a bit counterintuitive to say that it's not the best move to enforce better security for Windows users. Am I right about Windows eleven?Mary Prokhorova 22:03Currently, I see a lot of mistakes in the current system, and my colleagues are also trying to work on this system, on their personal devices. And they have a lot of questions and a lot of proposals on how to fix it. And the biggest one is to drop down and stop Windows 10 and stop any updates from Microsoft for a half year. It's also about sustainability. Sustainability for your personal work because if you can't work with your laptop, with your operational system, and to provide any your digital products, it's not useful, it's not sustainable, maybe.Gaël Duez 22:56Michael, so we talked about resiliency from one angle, which is the environmental impact of a cyber attack, for instance. But they are much more about resiliency than just this. Could you maybe explain a bit more? Why are you both a resiliency expert and a sustainability expert when it comes to its infrastructure? How do you mix the two in your professional life?Michael J. Oghia 23:20This is a great question because I see resiliency as being one of the core ways that cybersecurity and sustainability interact. So how is that the case? One is that infrastructure security is really critical to, for instance, the energy transition. So this is one thing that we need to take into account. You're asking me kind of, how do I see this coming together? The Nord stream attacks in 2022 are a great example of what happens when there is a significant attack, whether it's cyber or physical, on infrastructure that leads to environmental damage, essentially a detrimental impact on the environment. So in this sense, critical infrastructure resiliency is absolutely important. And of course, cybersecurity, to me, includes physical security, and it includes the more technical, let's say software-based kind of security, where, okay, how do we protect our hardware, how do we protect ourselves from software-based attacks? But also, if somebody is trying to cut a submarine cable between two countries, that is also what I would consider a cyberattack. We can debate the semantics or the nomenclature as much as we want, but that, to me, is really relevant for a few reasons. One is because when infrastructure is damaged, alternatives have to be found. If energy infrastructure in particular is attacked, then that means that alternatives have to be found. So let's say a lot of solar is coming online. It is attacked via a cyberattack. In other words, let's say that solar provider is not investing in their cyber resilience, and cybersecurity, then that solar plant might go offline, which means what happens? We might have to start a coal plant. So, do you know what I'm trying to say? In other words, if we're not investing in making ourselves secure, then we have to find alternatives to meet demand. And because the energy companies are prime targets because they have a lot of.Gaël Duez 26:07Money.Michael J. Oghia 26:10Because they're so critical to society, ransomware gangs, for instance, have been targeting them a lot. And it just means, for instance, that we need to think about how our infrastructure fits into the larger place in society and how protecting them is really vital. Because it's not just about keeping a company online to protect its own stock price or things like that, which is fair enough, but it's also about, well, again, if we're not using solar energy because we can't access it for a week, that means that we're probably relying then on fossil fuels, which are easier to ramp up within an energy system or whatnot. These are the ways that I see cybersecurity as really interacting with or really intersecting with sustainability. Sustainability is the sustainability considerations, being the impact of cyberattacks, the lack of investment in cyber resiliency, and ultimately kind of creating instability that then leads to situations that have not necessarily been planned for or damage to the environment and damage to society.Gaël Duez 27:29But that's super interesting. And as you say, there's a lot to unpack. But there is also another angle that I'm wondering how interesting it is, which is building resilient IT systems is also good in the face of climate risks. My point is, that good old SMS should be way more resilient sometimes than authentication via an apps, for instance, because it requires 3G, 4G, 5G, or whatever. And what about climate risk? Do you believe that climate risk is also something that will require us to build a more reliable, more resilient IT system or not?Michael J. Oghia 28:17Well, yes, for many reasons. One is that we talk a lot about the green revolution. We talk a lot about the digital revolution. Digital and green revolutions go hand in hand, and you really can't have one without the other. Why? Because much of the green revolution is powered by, for instance, IoT devices. Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is notoriously insecure, which means that the more that we invest in the green revolution, the more we need to also invest in the digital revolution to make sure that they can stay on par with one another. So that's one way that I think there's a bit of a climate risk. Number two is obviously physical infrastructure, which, again, may not fall under a more traditional definition of cybersecurity, which tends to focus on, okay, but are our computer systems more resilient? Is the code less exploitable by malicious actors? That's a very tight definition, a very narrow definition of cybersecurity. But I consider cybersecurity also. Well, what is happening? What about the physical security of our infrastructure? So I remember a few years ago, I saw an article floating around about how a lot of the subsea landing stations on the coasts are at risk of being inundated by water with rising sea level because of rising sea levels. It just goes to show how the environment is very much obviously connected, very intricately connected to the digital and the cyber components. And so as we face more climate risk, as we face more sustainability challenges, it's going to impact the digital either at the physical security layer, such as with coastal or undersea infrastructure, or it's going to impact potentially, let's say, the digital layer, the cyber layer, or whatever you want to call it, the software layer because we're going to be relying on more and more devices to help us manage the increasingly complex system that we're using to deal with the 21st century. But yet that system might be deeply insecure because of the kinds of devices that we're relying on. So, again, that's why it's complex because a lot of these pieces fit together, but they're not always necessarily being given the same kind of weight.Gaël Duez 31:13And, Mary, is it something that you agree with, having a broader definition of cybersecurity to incorporate also all the infrastructure and all these new risks?Mary Prokhorova 31:23I could only support Michael. And if you are talking about also cybersecurity, we understand that cybersecurity protects all our know-how, all our digital assets, and tips. We need to focus on saving our products from different streets, not only from a human, but maybe from not special destroying, because it's also 100 of service computing people's minds and general coding, design, et cetera. So if we are talking about sustainability and resilience for people at all, we also need to secure their knowledge.Michael J. Oghia 32:23I want to mention two things that I think are really relevant to this conversation. One is that we spoke about waste, but there is also something to say that we haven't focused that much on, which is that the lack of cyber resilience, the lack of real cybersecurity protection for especially critical infrastructure providers, is deeply important to the environment. Why? We already have examples where environmental pollution is either being caused or could be caused by either the hacking of something like a dam, a hydroelectric dam, I mean, or, for instance, in 2021, hackers infiltrated a water treatment plant in the US state of Florida, which allowed them to change the chemical levels of the water supply remotely. Thankfully, that was found and addressed before it could cause any damage. But these kinds of attacks on water and wastewater treatment plans are happening elsewhere in the US. It's happened in Australia, it's happened in Israel. And soMichael J. Oghia 33:37there is precedence for this, not to mention other attacks that have happened in Iran and elsewhere. So that is seriously something to think about, that a facility could be compromised and that can lead to water, soil or air pollution and other, and not just pollution, but serious toxicity, toxic release, that could really seriously damage communities and its surrounding environments. So this is something to consider that this is a very real and present threat at the more macro level to the infrastructure in general. Now, something that I would like to say to also support some of the things that Mary has discussed from a company point of view, is that I think companies, in particular, must-see cyber resilience as closely connected to their environmental, social, and governance strategy. This is absolutely something that impacts their bottom line. It impacts the people who work at their organization as well as their clients, their customers, and their community in that way. And it really comes down to making sure too, that a company can speak to regulators, can speak to shareholders and say, look, we are taking this very seriously and we are protecting and preserving the value of our company and the stability of the society that we are contributing to by taking this seriously and by really protecting our data, protecting our systems and protecting, obviously, one of the most important things that they have, which is their customers trust in them as provider or as a vendor.Gaël Duez 35:33So we're reaching the end of our episode, a very rich and complex episode. I think that the word complex must have been said at least two dozen times. But this is a reality of the world, and this is a reality of cybersecurity and sustainability. So before we stop, I would like to ask you my traditional question, which is, would you share a piece of positive good news about sustainability or maybe about cybersecurity, your choice?Mary Prokhorova 36:05In the last year, I have seen a lot of startups with very interesting concepts that merge cybersecurity, sustainability, and green technologies. I mean, also new concepts for data centers, for computing centers where they have a close ecosystem, for cooler water heating, for citizen computing, and all this very interesting part for world data centers where they not only heat our environment, but they provide some new warm water for customers. I also say very interesting project about equipment utilization, I mean hardware storage utilization, because it's a very important point about data destruction when you want to destroy very high-level security data, you need to destroy equipment. And I saw a very interesting concept and working machine and working equipment where they destroy all this equipment in dust, like real dust. And it's very interesting and very nice for our environment also and for general reducing. So I saw that a lot of startups, and most of them are from Europe, are thinking about new nature and new communication between digital equipment and nature. And all these startup founders are very young generation people, up to 35. And also I see very interesting concepts from schoolers, from very young guys like 15, 18 years old. And it's very nice to see such smart minds who are thinking about sustainability not only for business processes but for more long-term periods. So as for me, it's nice news. It's nice news that we are working not only on the digital ecosystem, but we trying to connect our digital ecosystem of this equipment part with our physical world and to make this whole ecosystem much smarter, much more sustainable, and much more from an ecology angle safety.Michael J. Oghia 38:51So two things I'll just very quickly reply to Mary, Gaël and then I'll reply to your question. But I have to say, Mary, I completely agree with you. I do agree as well that cyber risk and cyber resiliency are becoming more of a front-of-mind topic across the ecosystem. And I think it's really good that people are starting to recognize, or I can't say people are starting to recognize, but I'm glad that companies, especially governments, are saying, yes, this is really a priority and it's something that we're going to be putting resources toward. And I hope that continues to answer the question that you posed. Gaël, I have to say in general, especially on the sustainability side, I skew more toward the pessimistic than the optimistic when it comes to bright notes and whatnot. But there are a few. First, I would be remiss if I didn't say that there are a lot of really interesting things happening on both the security side and the sustainability side within the Nordics. I've been working on the Nordics for the past two years. The Nordic data center sector is growing exponentially and it's combining a lot of really good natural features, such as its cold climate, with really good people who are working on things like integrating data center heat waste into the district utility grids, who are working on a lot of innovation. So the Nordic data center sector is something that I think is really a bright spot for that intersection between sustainability and security. But then I think the second that is also a bit of a bright spot is the rollout of renewable energy and more serious conversations about nuclear energy as well, especially in Europe. I don't see renewables and nuclear as being opposed. I see them as complementary. And obviously one of the kinds of common denominators across the energy sector, whether it be renewables or nuclear, is security. Cybersecurity is physical security. So I think for me I hope that there will be continuous positive momentum. I would rather be pleasantly surprised and wrong versus correct than live with the impacts of my pessimism, which is a very much worse world to live in.Gaël Duez 41:33Oh, thanks a lot, both of you. That's a very nice closing statement. Michael, thanks a lot. And thanks for joining Green IO. A lot of insights are being shared today on a topic that I'm not that familiar with. So I thank you for your time.Michael J. Oghia 41:46Thank you for having us.Mary Prokhorova 41:47Gaël, thank you for the invitation. ❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

🎙️In our latest episode, Hannah Smith, the COO of the Green Web Foundation, and Ismael Velasco, the founder of the Adora Foundation, highlight the potential pitfalls of Carbon Aware Computing a strategy that aims to reduce carbon emissions by aligning software operations with the carbon intensity of the energy grid. While this approach has gained traction among the IT industry, including giants such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google, Hannah and Ismael discuss with our host Gaël Duez its complexities and limitations.💻As they explored the nuances of Carbon Aware Computing, it gave us insights that while it holds promise as a tool for reducing emissions, it also poses challenges that must be carefully considered. The oversimplification of energy grid dynamics and the myriad factors that influence carbon intensity underscore the need for a more comprehensive understanding of sustainable computing practices.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: Hannah’s Smith LinkedInIsmaël Velasco LinkedIn Gaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.     Hannah and Ismaël's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:  Adora FoundationCAT (Climate Action Tech)GSF (Green Software Foundation)Green Tech South WestApple deviceGoogle Cloud PlatformMS surfaceDon’t follow the sun: Scheduling compute workloads to chase green energy can be counter-productiveBitcoin’s Impacts on Climate and the EnvironmentBitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible?How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Actually Consume?Carbon Aware Computing: Next Green Breakthrough or New Greenwashing?The problems with carbon-aware software that everyone’s ignoringHow Texas’ power grid failed in 2021EU countries already hitting some of their sustainable energy targets for 2030 What Role Will Soluna Play in the Future of Computing? A Recap of the Water Tower Research Fireside Chat SeriesTranscript  [00:00:00] Gaël Duez: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building 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. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes, both on your podcast platform and on our website, greenio.tech. Let me share with you a personal story. Last July, I was on a rooftop in Paris, sharing a drink with a friend who happens to be a former colleague of mine.One of the most talented CTO I had the chance to work with. Loïc was asking about what I was doing in the green IT field and the quick wins I was advising to CTO willing to ramp up sustainability. I mentioned carbon computing as a no brainer and I was ready to move forward when he posed me and asked me what I was referring to, POP, do you hear that sound? Yes, another information bubble just exploded. I was so sure that almost every CTO knew the concept, I explained it, he was enthusiastic about it, and since then, it has been my magical key to onboard CTO and Cloud Ops, folks. It's easy to grab, pragmatic, and actionable. They love it. And they're not the only ones.Almost all cloud providers launch some kind of carbon-aware program. And it's a pillar in the Green Software Foundation course, for instance, to get the Green Software for Practitioners certificate. But a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a remarkable series of articles written by Hannah Smith, based on initial research and insights by Ismael Velasco, about some serious pitfalls with Carbon Aware Computing. It might be another case of micro-optimizations not aligning with macro optimizations, like when someone thinks that it's a great idea to film a live show with a smartphone to get souvenirs, but actually, everyone does it and no one can see the stage anymore. I have been lucky to have already had both Ismael and Hannah on the show, so it was super easy to have them back for an in-depth discussion about Carbon Aware Computing.[00:02:28] Gaël Duez: A quick reminder for the people who didn't have the chance to listen to Green IO episode 26 or episode 5 about Hannah and Ismael. Hannah Smith, based in the UK, is currently the Chief Operating Officer of the Green Web Foundation. She's also a pillar in the web WordPress sustainability community as well as a long-time volunteer for the climateaction.tech community and overall an amazing community builder. Hello Green Tech South West as well as a season green software practitioner. Ismael Velasco is also a member of the amazing community. He's based in Mexico and he's a true veteran in the software industry at large and green software in particular. You should check his API grateful degradation concept. His knowledge and commitment go far beyond Green IT with his involvement in the Adora Foundation, which fosters social innovation across the globe, and recently decided to focus more on the sustainability side of technology. So, welcome Hannah, and welcome Ismael, I'm so glad to have you back on the show.[00:03:35] Hannah Smith: Thanks, Gaël. I knew it was a while ago that we recorded our episode. I didn't realize it was episode five. [00:03:44] Gaël Duez: Wow. Yeah, that was a while ago. I don't know why I've waited so long to bring some of my former guests back to the show, but I think I will do it more and more again. The pleasure of having you both here is great. So thanks a lot. And before we deep dive into both your approaches, maybe it's time to set the stage, I would say. And I would, I'd love to ask you, Hannah, the first question, which is not that easy maybe, what is Carbon Aware Computing? [00:04:12] Hannah Smith: Well, oh, I don't know. I think we can make it easy for people to understand. At its basic level, there are two ways that you can approach Carbon Aware Computing. We do talk about it in the article that we wrote together. There is the idea of time-shifting software, and there's the idea of location-shifting software. And you do both of those things based on the carbon intensity of the grid at any particular time. So what that implies is that maybe you've got an API that you can access that gives you data about what the carbon intensity of a grid is at any given time. For carbon intensity, if anyone's not sure what that means, that simply means how clean or dirty energy is. So you have a high carbon intensity if energy is dirty, e.g. is being produced a lot with fossil fuels, and you have a low carbon intensity if it's renewable produced energy, so it's not emitting as much carbon. So the idea of carbon awareness is looking at the carbon intensity of energy and then shifting your software around, either to run at different times of the day or to run in different physical geographical locations. I think in a nutshell, that's it. I know Ismael, you were involved in writing the, well, I think the very first post about Carbon Aware on, Hackernoon. So I wonder what else would you add to that description? [00:05:38] Ismaël Velasco: Yes, I think that is, there's not much to add really, because it is quite a simple concept. So simple and so kind of commonsensical. It was surprising for us to question it because it just made so much sense the grid is mixed, so when is it greener? It's greener. I run my computer there. Therefore, I'm greener that's a simple, principle, right? If the grid has more renewables, I time my computing to run when the green, grid is greener. And that should mean that my computer is reducing emissions because it's running on that green. And that is the common sense idea that's growing. And maybe just to give some examples, so people can. Envisage it more concretely. Apple released an update for their American US iPhone, where you keep it plugged in, and it only charges when the grid is particularly green in your area. So if the grid is mostly powered by carbon and fossil fuels. Your iPhone will not run electricity, but when the grid is particularly green, then it will charge your phone. And that way it's been greener. Microsoft has done the same for your Windows updates. So your computer will wait until the electricity is greener in your location. And if it knows that it's currently greener, then it will say, update my computer now, instead of doing it, when the electricity is dirty. So those are types of examples of how you might do that. And the theory of change is that by doing that, you are avoiding emissions, which is the theory of change that Hannah and I questioned.[00:07:31] Gaël Duez: And the examples you provided, Ismael, are both time shifting, I reckon that quite a lot of time we hear also the expression chasing the sun or chasing the wind, so do you have also examples of location-based Carbon Aware Computing? [00:07:50] Ismaël Velasco: The people who have done this at the biggest scale are Google. So Google first implemented it internally, and now they offer it to all the users of their cloud. So they started computing, where all their data centers across the world were. And then they started finding out, in which location on the planet, the electricity was greenest. And then if they were to do say a backup and could run that backup from a server in any of 50 countries. They would choose a country that had the greenest energy at that particular time. So instead of just saying, I'm going to wait until it's the right time, like with the Apple phone, they would say, I want to do it right now, but I'm going to run it somewhere in the world where it is greenest. And now if you go, and you have your applications hosted in the Google Cloud you can see Which server is currently greenest and there's an API you can even see and say this one is greenest so you can say, okay, whenever you run a job in my application look in Google and find the location. Chase the sun, find the location where? There's a lower electricity and do it there. So we'll put all our jobs there and again, theory of changes. That way we're reducing emissions. [00:09:19] Gaël Duez: Do you know if the prices across the region vary accordingly I had a very interesting discussion with a cloud ops people who wanted to implement it with another big hyperscaler. Let's not name it. And they discovered that the bill would go up by like 30%. So when you see Google went full speed on this Google Cloud Platform, went to full speed on this solution, do you know if it costs, people to move from one place to another, or if you chase the sun or the wind, actually you don't see an increase or at least a significant increase in your bill?[00:09:57] Hannah Smith: That's a great question. I didn't, I couldn't answer that confidently and say, I mean, generally, you know, the renewable energy, on the whole, is cheaper, but I don't know if that necessarily equates in the way that you're saying it, Gaël. That's a great question. An interesting one. [00:10:13] Ismaël Velasco: My understanding is that generally, it is cheaper because very often It's not always this is one of the assumptions that people kind of take for granted But it is very common that the times when the energy is greenest is also when demand is lower. So It can often be cheaper countries like the UK are beginning to roll out carbon pricing as well around electricity and this is something that's growing. So it varies from place to place there have been places where everybody piling on to green energy, so this happened in the US, for example, they started in Texas, among other places, but especially in Texas, some people install US miners in the electricity plants when the electricity was dirty and demand was high, they were paid not to run any compute. And when the demand was low, they were paid to run it. And it was when it was greenest. The result was the electricity prices for the city rose significantly because US used so much. So it's not an absolute rule, but in general and increasingly targeting the greener energy will often be slightly cheaper.[00:11:34] Gaël Duez: I'll try to research that and put, the answer in the show notes before the episode is released. And I think we, we are good. Because it's a very straightforward concept. It is getting adopted very widely, with several examples from very big tech companies. So, problem solved, and we've got, a word record of the shortest, Green IO episode ever. So is the problem solved and that is the best possible tool to use, to reduce carbon emissions from the grid, or actually do we have a problem? What is actually the issue with Carbon Aware Computing? [00:12:15] Hannah Smith: Yeah, well, it's an interesting question because as Ismael said, right, you explain it in the way we've just explained it, and you're like, oh my god, this is the best solution ever. Of course, we should be doing this. This is like, amazing and so logical. So we were discussing this in climateaction.tech, which we're both, as you mentioned, Gaël, in the beginning, we're both members of, and we both hang around in the Slack group. And Ismael posted this thing saying, Hey, look, I've been kind of looking at this carbon-aware stuff. And when I look really deeply at this, and when I actually think about how the grid works in practice, Ismael was like, I'm concluding that this is maybe not the solution it seems. And Ismael in his fantastic way was really in-depth, loads of examples, kind of really kind of got into the problem. And, I happened to stumble upon it at the time that Ismael posted it. And I was like, Oh my word, I think he's got a bit of a point here. This is actually a little problematic. And it all comes down to this idea that carbon aware. Is looking at a very simplistic metric, which is the carbon intensity of energy, at a given location or at a given time, but it's doing that in isolation from how the grid actually works in practice, which is phenomenally complicated and has a lot of nuances around it. And what Ismael did was kind of present the issues and present some concerns here. So I was quite interested in that and sort of said to Ismael, Hey, let's work on this together. Let's tidy this up. Let's format it. And, let's really explain to people in, in as much depth as we need to go into why we think there's a problem here, but in a nutshell, grid aware.Sorry, carbon aware is not thinking about the realities of managing the grid, of how supply and demand actually work in practice. And what happens when you suddenly just shift a load of stuff from one place to another. So yeah, I think there is a problem. But I think it's really important to say that it's not a problem where it means that the whole of this concept is nonsense and shouldn't be done. I think that that was something Ismael and I wanted to clarify upfront. There's a real benefit here. There's real potential for awesomeness but not in the way it's being done at the moment. So I think the way we turned to Ismael was we talked about these warning labels. We said, Hey, look, there's these warning labels that aren't being applied to these approaches at the moment.There are these nuances that are just being conveniently overlooked and this approach is just a little bit too simplistic at this point in time. But you know, the awesome thing is, it can be matured, it can iterate, it can improve, and that's really what we're, well, what we set out to try and do with this work. And this proposal we came up with on Grid Aware.[00:15:16] Gaël Duez: Ismael, could you enlighten us a bit on that, how the grid works? And then explain to us what are the, the pitfalls or the aspects of the Carbon Aware Computing concept, which are conveniently, overlooked, and Hannah just said. [00:15:34] Ismaël Velasco: Yes. And first I just wanna share one of the kind of subjective elements of this. I began super enthusiastic about this. I sort of worked with the Green Software Foundation to organize the first carbon aware hackathon and, sort of looked at their APIs. I love that. I evangelize, I move people, et cetera. It was great. Then as Hannah said, I've got some confusion here. And the biggest question is actually, again, really simple, which is what made me so suspicious of my own questions. If I run my software, if I consume energy when the grid is very green, am I taking away emissions from the planet? Now, that's weirdly enough the question that no one seems to actually have asked themselves at all. And the key concept is very logical, is that if we were running on 100 % or even 99 % green energy, that might work. But at the moment, the planet has a supply of 40 % of renewable energy, 43, and a demand of 100%. And in every country, maybe not Iceland. It's fractional, right? It's 40, it's 50, it's 20, it's 70. But the point is that every day and every year and every five years, there will be a 100 % amount of electricity used. And the emissions of that 100 % will not come from the green energy, they will come from the extra, right? That's logical. Now, the analogy that helped me clarify this is if you think of the electricity we use each day, each year, pick your timeline as a train with 10 carriages, each carriage takes 100 passengers and each passenger is an emission.Four of those carriages are green, and six of those carriages are dirty. What is Carbon Aware Computing? Imagine those four carriages appearing randomly on the train. On the first day, they're all at the front, on the second day one is in the middle, but there are always four carriages out of ten. Now, most days, I come in at eight o'clock, I go to the train, and I go into the first carriage in front of me. It might be green, it might be dirty. But now I'm going to do carbon awareness. I'm going to make sure that every day I take the green carriage, no matter what, I will move to the place where the green carriage is. I will tie my arrival and I will always go on the green carriage that provides zero emissions. I'm going to come out of that green carriage feeling so clean. I've been clean all week. Every day I've been in a green carriage. My body is absolutely clean. Perfect. But what happens? That carriage is always full. So the day that I came into that green carriage, the person who always comes into that green carriage. Now can't get in because I'm already there and there's only room for 10 people. So she has to go into one of the dirty carriages In other words, you always have whenever I get on the plane or the train There will always be 400 people in dirty carriages. So I'm feeling very clean but the emissions. The total emissions of the train are the same regardless of when I run my computer I will always run it In that maximum 40 percent green period there are only a number of exceptions. How could you do this and actually reduce the number of passengers that come out of the dirty carriages?One is if I don't go on the train. Right? If I reduce a person, I don't go on the train, now there are not 1, 000 passages, there are 999. I've reduced emissions. So if I can reduce the electricity that my computer uses, great. That has been great. The second one is if I use electricity that is going to be thrown away, it's called curtail energy. Imagine that the wind blows really hard in Scotland at 3 a.m. That's more energy than the grid can use. So they throw it away. If I run my job there. Then that's not going on the train, right? Those are people outside the train. I am reducing my emissions but the problem is that that is I've estimated between one and three percent of all global usage. So you'll never run at most you're increasing our green percentage to 46 % it's meaningful but time shifting still not really reducing emissions, and it's not straightforward 95 % of curtailment in Britain happens in Scotland. So we only have 5 percent of curtailed energy. In other words, it could be good if you can time it, but it's not enough to make a really big difference. [00:21:28] Gaël Duez: If I had to sum it up, it would be. That we have a limited amount of, low carbon electricity supply. And if you get some strategy to have access to it, no matter the time, no matter the day, like optimizing, like hell, if we don't manage to either increase the total amount of, I would say clean energy supply to follow your wording or that we don't manage to reduce the amount of demand that will by default might go to a high intensity, high carbon intensity energy. Then it's, yeah, it's a zero-sum game. [00:22:18] Ismaël Velasco: Brilliant. Absolutely. Yeah.[00:22:21] Hannah Smith: I mean, I think one of the key things to think about here with this, something that really helped me is I really liked Ismael's carriage analysis. I found that really helpful. I also found it helpful to think about it like a balloon. The balloon is still the same size, and all you're doing is just squeezing air into different parts of it. You're not actually reducing the amount of air in the balloon, you're not actually making a meaningful difference to the emissions coming out. And that is down to the fact that the grid always has to balance supply and demand. And that's this element of grid management that isn't really taken into account with this approach, is those people managing the grid have to always keep supply and demand in balance. And as Ismael was saying, what they'll do is they'll use as much of the renewable energy as they can, but then they'll top it up with fossil fuels to meet that 100% of demand. And that's always happening, that's always the case. And they create that supply and demand equation through data, through looking at typically when there is a certain amount of demand, so you know that there's more demand during the day, there's less demand during the night, and they forecast that and schedule it and manage the outputs of all the different power plants in the grid to meet that demand. So you're coming along and making a sudden change doesn't actually make a difference to what those grid operators are doing, because it's unpredictable. They don't know it's going to happen, and it doesn't materially make an impact. And what Ishmael said, I'll just say this bit, because I think this is a useful bit to build on as well. What Ismael helped me realize, and what we talked about a lot within the article, was that, furthermore, shifting that demand unpredictably can actually ramp up the amount of fossil fuels going on the grid because the demand suddenly increases. All right? And look, at the moment, we're talking about fractions of percent. So it's not manifesting in a mad way. But one of the things that we were worried about is that if carbon aware is done at scale, what you actually find is grid operators are then bringing more fossil fuels online because they're the quick things to ramp up to meet the demand. So it doesn't really seem to make sense at the moment when you think about that reality of things going on.[00:24:46] Ismaël Velasco: And that's a really important point because it means we have two dimensions to our argument, really. One is, don't assume it's helping. Right? That's the first one. And what you wrote is exactly what the White House report on crypto summarizes. Said the only two ways you reduce your emissions through computing is if you reduce your demand or you increase the green supply. Most carbon aware patterns don't do either, so they're not affecting it. So, one is, are you making a positive difference? The second point that Hannah just introduced is that there's also the question that no one seems to be asking, which is, are you making a negative difference? And what we found, Hannah and I, as we started looking at it, is that there are lots of scenarios where running carbon aware patterns at scale could not only not help, but it could actually create harm. And we've got some examples of this happening. In Iran, for example, bitcoin miners used electricity so much at the same time that the whole grid broke. The same in Venezuela. So you could imagine that if you happen to have the greenest energy at exactly this moment in a place with a creaky grid, like Texas or Azerbaijan also collapsed. And all of Google says green everybody and runs everything there. You could imagine that you might bring the grid down.[00:26:35] Gaël Duez: But playing a bit of the devil's advocate here, I would have two other questions. The first one is, what about market incentivization? So, like, yes, at an instant time, you've got this demand and supply balance, which might lead to not generating a positive impact, even maybe a negative impact. But the adoption of more and more carbon aware computing practices will drive cloud providers, software providers, you name it, et cetera, energy providers, et cetera, to adopt greener practices more generally to supply more low carbon energy. I would say that will be my question number one. My question is number two, could it also be an incentive to avoid curtailment? And I would like, Ismael, if you could maybe explain a bit more curtailment and the example you took between Scotland, to England, for instance. Because what I understood, actually quite a fun fact, is something that we discussed, just the latest episode on open source software, about all to connect which we are building, at least in Europe, but in many other parts of the world, to connect the grids and to avoid curtailments, to avoid wasting the most precious thing that we've got today, which is low carbon electricity. Could it be an incentive also to make sure that we don't waste energy so we reduce dramatically curtailment? My two questions could be summarized as what about the market incentivization in the medium term, not even the long term? And what about the possibility of using in a better way wasted energy today, mostly curtailed energy?[00:28:28] Ismaël Velasco: So I'll give my version of a very brief answer, but I also think because of time, that this is also a good opportunity for Hannah to introduce the idea that we're not just condemning carbon aware software, that we're saying, let's do it properly, let's do it well, that there are improvements and that this could be a really good solution. But we do need to ask those questions, so it's not all doom and gloom. So one of the positive arguments for carbon aware patterns is that one around incentivization, around culture. So, for instance, I got super excited by carbon aware software and it motivated me to dive into all kinds of other things. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that, oh, I think there's a problem here, Houston. We've got a problem like Hannah put it, but thank goodness that I got into it because it opened all kinds of other fields. So that's great. The other argument that is made in favor of it is that by investing and timing it to the green times, you are motivating the market to invest more in renewable energy. And I think that was true a while ago, but I think, weirdly enough, we won that argument a while ago. The market for renewable energy is now cheaper, so people are investing. The news came out today that there are about four or five countries in Europe that have hit their 2040 or 2030 target now, not because of incentives around carbon, our computer, it's just cheaper. But I think there is a cultural incentive around anything that we do intentionally for green issues, for transparency, for clarity, and evidence. So there are ways to do this. And you can say at the end of the day, I reduced my demand. I used new green energy, like curtailed energy. But you've demonstrated that you've asked yourself, and you've also asked yourself, is this having any perverse side effects? No. And I've said it. Google says it, and Microsoft says it. Right when they're doing this at scale, Apple says it. But when nobody says it, then the potential for greenwashing and perverse effect is huge, especially since this is one of the few areas where the big corporations and the really sincere green advocates like ourselves currently are on the same page. So it's very easy for everyone to go, yay. So we need to simply say, do it, but tell us how it's helping. One example of that, just to finish and answer your question, is curtailed energy, which is basically this idea of green energy that is happening, but it's being wasted because it's happening at the wrong time.[00:31:24] Hannah Smith: So I think the question of curtailed energy is a really good one, and I think it's a really awesome incentive. And through the research, and there's this really deep level of thinking that we did on this, we kind of realized that using curtailed energy is one example where Grid, carbon aware kicks ass. It really is like awesome. And that's what we want to incentivize. It makes sense. And it seems to stack up. So when we were writing this post, as Ismael said, we didn't want this to be all doom and gloom. And we didn't want this to be a takedown because it's too easy to take down other people's work. And that's not really how we build sustainable solutions. We want to build each other up and, you know, work, work, work, work, work, work on each other's stuff. So what we did, we were like, okay, we need to come up with a kind of name and way of talking about. The Times When Carbon Aware Does Work. It's a working title, but we came up with the idea of talking about grid aware software instead. And so that really, the idea of that naming was to say kind of, hey look, this is more than just thinking about this simple metric of carbon intensity. This is actually thinking about the grid and all the complexities there. Because actually, that seems to then push you in a more nuanced direction with the solutions.And so what we said was one of those examples, as I mentioned, is using curtailed energy. But not just curtailed energy in its simplistic form, but coming back to something Ismael was talking about earlier, it's using curtailed energy in stable grids in places which can actually absorb this additional demand coming in. And on top of that, I think it's also doing it in a way that is in harmony with the grid. So I think that long term, what we need to start seeing, is APIs and standards and conventions so that data centers can actually agree to use that data, and they can actually, sorry to use that energy. And there can actually be handshakes that, Hey, we've got curtailed energy. Hey, then data center over here. Now is your chance to be helpful to the grid, and to get some demand. You know, get some computer running here and make use of it. So rather than it being like a free for all pile on, I just, when Nishma was talking earlier, I had this like the image of American football where they all, or rugby, where they all just kind of pile on each other, and it all just goes disastrous, you know, and this, this horrible scrum, and it's all just gone tits up. Like, that's not what we want. We want it to be kind of done in a more organized, democratic fashion. Where the curtailed energy, like someone in the grid is saying, Hey, it would be really helpful if right now someone could come along and use that curtailed energy. And then we have these standards and processes in place that people can know that that's available and send their compute there. And that section's missing at the moment. So Gaël, you're right. This question about curtailed energy feels really central to this proposition of making this load better. [00:34:37] Gaël Duez: How operational today is a Grid Aware computing approach?[00:34:42] Hannah Smith: I think there's work to be done here. So in sharing this work, it's popped up all sorts of interesting people discussing this. I mean, I can talk about the UK. That's where I'm based. It's probably the grid that I have the most hands-on knowledge about. Ismael already mentioned, that up in Scotland, we know that that's where the majority of curtailed energy is. Now, if anyone's not familiar with the geography of the UK, Scotland's right up in the North. It's quite sparsely populated. It's very rural up there. And that's where all the wind energy is. It's offshore farms and in some cases onshore, but actually, the vast majority of demand is based down in the South, down in London. So the energy that's being produced up there in Scotland. Needs to find its way down south. Now, the problem at the moment is that as far as I understand it, the national grid is not producing data that tells you where that curtailed energy is in more specific, more specificity. There aren't also ways to know which data center then would be in a good position to use that data. I think there's work happening on it. It's developing. But right now, if you were a developer, you couldn't just go along, pull out a load of data and make this happen. So there's work to be done here, in this field. And, you know, as I mentioned already, there's real potential in this field. To work on those things, this is what we wanted to propose as the next version of Carbon Aware, which we labeled as Grid Aware.Let's get all these amazing minds working on this part of the problem, rather than getting stuck at the first gate, which was, ooh, acknowledging location time shifting is interesting and fun. We need to push this field forward, and we need to do more on this. [00:36:30] Gaël Duez: I was laughing a bit when you were explaining this because I had this image of what Sylvie Daumal recently shared on the episode with systemic design. And in systemic designs, I've got this hearsay that says that solutions of today are problems of tomorrow. And that's just so true here. Once again, this is us trying to jump on a very easy and technical solution and very appealing. And I was like 100% in for this solution and then suddenly posing and saying, in which environment are we truly evolving? In which system in which almost a biosphere, an electrical biosphere, I would say electrical sphere. Once again, systemic design is everything. When it comes to sustainability, I'm realizing that there is maybe something that might not have been 100% clear for some listeners if they're not that familiar with cloud operations and energy. Claim for hyperscalers that yes, almost all of them, except maybe one of them, explained that they run 100% on green energy. And I had this wording, so I would say low carbon energy, but that we really need to understand that when a Google, Amazon or Azure or Huawei data center operates, it is actually plugged into the grid, and it's using the energy that is being made available at this very moment. And when they say they produce 100% green energy, it does not perfectly match the energy they consume. So actually they pay. Ismail, am I correct? Do you want to elaborate a bit on what I said?[00:38:22] Ismaël Velasco: Sure. And I actually want to focus sort of as we close the episode, on four things that every tech practitioner can actually do already to operationalize this well, and that is within our reach. So the first one is to monitor your own net electricity demand. That's the metric you really want to influence. So more than when is this compute job or this computing job running in the grid? The most impactful thing that I can do is use less energy tomorrow than I did today. If I can do that, I will win. If I can't do that because I'm a growing business, can I slow down the rate of my energy demand? So every year, I consume 3% more electricity. Now, I'm still growing, but I managed to grow only one and a half percent every year. Anything that reduces your demand, that's the biggest win of all. That's the thing that we need. So that's a very practical thing. Quantify, monitor, and improve that. The second thing is time shifting. And location shifting can work. If you want to find a metric for time-shifting and location-shifting privilege. Low demand, not grid carbon intensity. In other words, run your jobs when the demand is lowest, not when the grid is greenest. They will very often be the same, but not always. You might have the greenest grid at 12:00 in Brazil, but it's not your lowest demand. So adding a bunch of demand might not be good. In Scotland, yes, if the lowest demand is 03:00 a.m. It's probably the greenest. But if you're going to use an API instead of targeting, when is the carbon intensity the lowest target, low demand, then as a cherry on top. If you want, add carbon intensity. But if you target low demand, the chances that you're going to have a positive effect are higher and a negative effect lower. If you just target carbon intensity, it's very random and unlikely. So that's a simple operational right. If you are going to location shift, time-shift, and you're in a good grid like Britain, et cetera, you're not targeting Texas, you're not targeting Azerbaijan. You target good, strong connected grids, then target low demand first. If you do that, that's progress. We talked about lowering demand. I'm using less energy. Great. The third one is, how do I add more green energy? One is the curtailed energy, but that one is difficult, and small. In Scotland, the bottleneck is less for computing because you could put your machine there. But the problem in many grids is that, for example, that excess energy cannot travel to the south, where it's being used. So unless you're located there, it's going to break. So how could you add more green power? Which goes to your question. So, one way is generating your own power from your own solar panels, from your own wind turbines. The pattern that we have for electricity historically is hyper concentration on massive power plants. The pattern we've had for computing traditionally is hyper-concentration hyperscalers. But both are distributable. You have distributed electricity and distributed computing. And for the global south. The future is microgrids and distributed computing. And for resilience, they're investing in Texas, because then the whole thing doesn't break if you've got microgrids. So if you were able to power your computer from your microgrid or your solar panel, you are adding extra generation directly. That's brilliant. Has huge potential. And then comes the answer to your question, but what if I run it on Google? Aren't they 100% green? They have done very good things. But what you say is absolutely true. Their data centers are powered by the same grid as everybody else's, which is mixed all the time. So they cannot say my server is actually powered by the sun. They're being powered, but what they do is that they buy what they call additional electricity, which is good. The bad pattern of those things is you're generating green electricity. I'll buy you and I'll take the credit. But actually the demand hasn't changed. Instead, these people are paying someone to build a new wind farm to generate the same energy they will consume. So it's new, it's additional. They can say it is added, but it's not direct. That has also the risk of side effects. So it's not perfect, but it is okay. It's acceptable as long as you are going for additional energy. The fourth one is what you are doing. We need to talk about this. For me, the biggest shock in this process has not been the discoveries, but that I haven't found this conversation happening virtually at all. It's been quite shocking to me that there is no very clear point of reference. Even now, since I published the Hackernoon article, I've had talks with some of the very pioneers of these patterns and no one seemed to actually say, is this reducing emissions? Does this have side effects? And I also want to share that someone in one chat wrote, when this came through, I was going to make a post about my concerns with carbon aware software, but I was afraid to do so. There is a lot of commitment to this idea and a lot of investment in this idea, emotional and economic, from both environmentalists and companies. ET was interesting. That's one of the things that most excited me about working with Hannah was that I just thought, I'm nervous. How do I communicate in a way that is clear-cut enough that we can say there is a problem, but that also doesn't sound like I am hating on people? I've been a bit more direct on the hacker noon one because I think we need to be very direct. But basically, above all, I think we need to create a space where we are talking about this and writing about this. I would love to be proven wrong. That'd be even better. But above all, I think nobody should feel a hesitation to say this might be problematic. As I've been following this thread, I am beginning to question some of our carbon emission metrics for software that we've been using. So it's like a little threshold. We're also exploring with the Mayan people here in Mexico, some experiments with distributed energy generation and distributed compute. So we might be piloting those things. There are companies like Soluna in Morocco, there's a company in Paraguay who do exactly this. They go to power plants and they install servers. The servers help the power plants, and smaller plow plants manage their demand response and monetize it. And they're able to sell server space at a fraction of the hyperscalers. So there is some work going on, all of those things, but it's mostly invisible. So if we can agree to demand evidence from industry, just to demand evidence of impact and risk assessment, just those two things. And if we can explore grid aware software or whatever, or carbon aware software 2.0, but just talk about it, we're still on time, I think, for this not to get out of our hands, but it's a small window.[00:47:10] Gaël Duez: Yeah, I agree. Thanks for mentioning the podcast. But actually, this is really what I'm trying to do here, is having nuanced conversations. And the main thing that we've been trying to achieve with this discussion is not throwing the baby with the bathwater. Usually, I ask my guests to close the podcast with positive news on sustainability, or even better, on green it or digital sustainability. And I think for the very first time, because this is a first, this is the first time I've got former guests coming back in the podcast over. The very first time.I'm going to be the one answering my own question about how rude it is. But I think what I actually find very refreshing and energizing, and which brings me a lot of optimism, is that I strongly believe that three years ago, we would never have this kind of nuanced in our way to tackling its emissions and having the ability to say, okay, so we are doing things, and we are doing things at a large scale, enough to start to see that the pattern is not white or black and that we can really kick-start some continuous improvement process, which is actually how it works in every industry. You don't do things perfectly right from the start, and you've got this discussion, and even in the orange industry, you can think about all this ongoing discussion about software development practices, the agile methodology, you've got ongoing discussion over and over trying to fine-tune things, et cetera. And for me, starting to see this kind of discussion happening for green software and more generally green, it is very positive because it means that we're getting a scale where we can see the details, the nuances, and that goodwilling people can debate without any prejudice to each other and try to find what will be the best way. So that would be my closing words.[00:49:18] Ismaël Velasco: I think carbon aware software done well. Time and location shifting are the future. I think that the more we depend on renewable energy, the more integrated will be time and location shifts in computing to what is called demand response. What Hannah was saying about how the grid has to constantly balance. And when you had fossil fuel only, it was very simple because you had complete control. You open the tap, you close the tap. You open the tap, you close the tap. The reason we have curtailed energy and the reason we have all kinds of risks is that we can't open the sun and close the sun, open the wind, and close the wind. So one of the challenges is when you move to 70% renewable energy, 70% of your energy is unpredictable, which means that we, and this is already happening in many places, will have computed and other forms of event-driven electricity consumption integrated into the grid. So every time the sun goes down, there's low demand, we will have more compute, et cetera. So this kind of. I do think that carbon aware time shifting, and location shifting are intrinsic to the future. And the good news is that the only thing where we're doing well in climate action is the energy transition. That's the only bit where we're ahead of the curve, where we're accelerating. So I think that has implications for us. And as long as we ask enough questions to do it responsibly, I think that all the work that's been done on this will prove to have been visionary and very long-lasting as part of the new societies that emerge.[00:51:20] Gaël Duez: Okay. That was great to have you on the show, Hannah. I'm so happy that you've been back again. Let's make sure that we meet in London. No, that won't be the case, but in Paris for the Green IO Conference. Thanks a lot for joining. It was a pleasure as usual. [00:51:35] Hannah Smith: So thanks, thanks so much Gaël for having us on the show. It's amazing to be able to chat this through and it's really nice to speak it out loud because actually so far my involvement in this work has been written. So actually being here and verbalizing it is a really, really fun activity, and it's been really, really useful to do this. And I love the work you do, and I can't wait to meet you in Paris in December. It's a long time to go, but we will, we will catch up with each other then. [00:52:08] Gaël Duez: And thanks a lot Ismael also for joining the podcast with your energy, your refreshing perspective, and your humility you didn't come here saying, Hey, this is how it works. And this is the problem, but more, maybe we should ask questions. And this is what I found so far. And I will be so happy to be proven wrong, which is. I sincerely believe in the very basics of a scientific approach. So thanks a lot Ismael for, for, for joining in bringing us all these insights and, have a good day, in Mexico today because it, we call it still quite early for you, and hope to see you soon in the podcast.[00:52:48] Gaël Duez: Bye bye. [00:52:49] Ismaël Velasco: Thank you. [00:52:50] Hannah Smith: I'll see you soon. [00:52:51] Gaël Duez: Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Plus, it will give our little team, Jill, Meibel, Tani and I, a nice booster.[00:53:10] Gaël Duez: Today, I had former guests coming back for the first time. And in our next episode, we will have another premiere with a member of the European Parliament among us, Kim Van Sparrentak will join us as well as Max Schulze, the founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance to talk about regulations in digital sustainability. What are they? What to expect? But also have they been built in the Bristol Maze? And yes, we will also discuss lobbying. And yes, it matters to people outside Europe because of the long arm of European regulations. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. Visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. 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