In this episode, host Chris Adams is joined by Killian Daly, Executive Director of EnergyTag, to explore the complexities of green energy tracking and carbon accounting. They discuss the challenges of accurately measuring and claiming green energy use, including the flaws in current carbon accounting methods and how EnergyTag is working to improve transparency through time-based and location-based energy tracking. Killian shares insights from his experience managing large-scale energy procurement and highlights the growing adoption of 24/7 clean energy practices by major tech companies and policymakers. They also discuss the impact of green energy policies on industries like hydrogen production and data centers, emphasizing the need for accurate, accountable energy sourcing and we find out just how tubular Ireland can actually be!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteKillian Daly: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:GHG Protocol [09:15]Environment Variables Podcast | Ep 82 Electricity Maps w/ Oliver Corradi [32:22]Masdar Sustainable City [58:28]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Killian Daly: We need to think about this kind of properly and do the accounting correctly.And unfortunately, we don't do the accounting very well today. Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another edition of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we write software, there are some things we can control directly. For example, we might be able to code in a tight loop ourselves, or design a system that scales to zero when it's not in use.And if we're buying from a cloud vendor, like many of us do now, we're often buying digital resources, like gigabytes of RAM and disk, or maybe virtual CPUs, rather than physical servers. It's a little bit less direct, but we still know we have a lot of scope for the decisions, to control the impact of their decisions and what kind of environmental consequences come about from that.However, if we look one level further down the stack, like how the energy powering our kit is sourced, our control is even more indirect. We rarely, if ever, directly choose the kind of generation that powers data centers that our code runs in. But we know it still has an impact. So if we want to source energy responsibly, how do we do it?If you want to know this, it's a really good idea to talk to someone whose literal job for years has been buying lots and lots of clean energy and is intimately familiar with the standards involved in doing so and who has spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure you can tell when the energy you're buying really is green.Fortunately, today I'm joined by just that person, Killian Daly, the Executive Director of the standards organization, EnergyTag. Killian, it's really, nice to have you on the pod. Thanks for coming on.Killian Daly: Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much for having me, Chris. great to be on the pod and, an avid listener, also. So it's always nice to contribute.Chris Adams: Thank you very much. Killian, I'm going to give you a bit of space to introduce yourself, and I've just mentioned that you're involved in EnergyTag, and we'll talk a little bit about what EnergyTag does. Because I know you and because, well, I met you maybe three years ago, I figured it might just be, it might be worth just talking a little bit about our lives outside of green software and sustainability.So, we were in this accelerator with the Green Web Foundation talking about a fossil free internet, and you were talking about EnergyTag and why it's important to track the provenance of energy. I remember you telling, we were asked about our passions. And, you told me about surfing and I never ever thought about Ireland as a place where you would surf because I didn't think it was all that warm. So can you maybe tell me a little bit like enlighten me here because it's not the first country I think of when I think of surfing and when you said that I was like he's" having a joke, right?"Killian Daly: Yeah. Well, I do like to joke, but this is not actually one of the jokes, Well, it doesn't need to be warm to surf. You just need to have waves, I suppose. So, yeah, it's something since I was really very young. I've always gone to the west coast of Ireland. Beautiful County Clare near the Cliffs of Moher.Maybe people know of them. And so we go every year. And my cousins, since a very young age, started surfing. We just, you know, solve these big waves and there's other people out there, surfing, bodyboarding and we're like, "Hey, let's try that out. That looks really cool." So, yeah, since I don't know, 6 or 7 years old, I've been going there every year, in summer, also in winter, me and my cousins also go, yeah.We go at New Year's get into the frigid cold Atlantic. And, yeah, it's magic, really. If you have the right, if you have the right wetsuit, you can kind of, you can get through anything, Chris Adams: So there's no such thing as cold was it bad weather, just bad clothing that also applies to wetsuits.Killian Daly: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It couldn't apply. Couldn't apply anymore. And obviously, in winter, you get the biggest swells, right? so actually, people probably don't know it, but Ireland has some of the biggest waves in the world. Now, on the west coast of Ireland, you have, yeah, really massive 50, 60 foot waves.Yeah, really all you can get some sort of a, all time surf there. So, so yeah, it's one of one of our better kept secrets.Chris Adams: I was not expecting to learn how to go totally tubular on this podcast.Killian Daly: Yeah, Chris Adams: Wow, that's, yeah, that's...Killian Daly: It's not, not for the faint of heart, but yeah, I would definitely recommend it.Chris Adams: Actually, now that you mention that, and now that we talk about, going back to the world of energy, now that people talk about Ireland as, the Saudi Arabia of wind, and it being windy AF, Then I can kind of see where you're coming from with it, actually. It doesn't make a bit more sense. So yeah, thank you for that little segue, actually, Killian.Okay, so we've started to talk a little bit about energy. And, I know that your, the organization you work for right now is called EnergyTag. But previously, as I understood it, you didn't, you worked in other organizations before. And, you've been working as a kind of buyer of energy, so you know a fair amount about actually sourcing electricity and how to kind of do that in a kind of responsible way.And I think when I heard you, we spoke about this before, you mentioned that, "yeah, I'm used to buying significant amounts of power" in your kind of previous life. Could I just like, could you maybe talk, provide a bit of a kind of background there, and so we can talk a little bit about context and size, because that might be helpful for us talking about the relative size that tech giants might buy and so on, and how much of that is applicable.Killian Daly: Yeah, sure. Yeah, so, I've been thinking about energy for a long time, even before my professional career studied energy and electrical engineering since I was 18 years old and did a master's in that, also. And then obviously in my working life as well. I've been basically always in the energy sector.So before EnergyTag, I was basically overseeing the global electricity portfolio, and the procurement of electricity for a company called Air Liquide, which is basically a large French multinational that produces, liquid air. So, oxygen, nitrogen, all the different parts of air which are, essential, feedstocks into various industries, and they consume a lot of electricity.So, the portfolio my team oversaw was about 35 to 40 terawatt hours of electricity consumption.Chris Adams: Okay.Killian Daly: Yeah, it's a lot, it's more than my home country, Ireland. It's about the same as Google and MicrosoftChris Adams: put together, yeah. Okay, so, wow. AndKillian Daly: So, it's pretty big stuff. And obviously, when you're working on something like that globally, looking at various electricity markets operating in 80 countries in these huge volumes, I suppose you, kind of learn a lot about what it means to buy power.Chris Adams: I guess if you're looking at something which is basically as much power as an entire country, then there's going to be like country sized carbon emissions, depending on what you choose to power this from. And I guess that's probably why you, I mean, we, have ways of tracking power. I mean, tracking the carbon emissions from various things like this, I mean, called like the GHG protocol, which is a kind of like the kind of gold standard for talking about some of that stuff.And this is something that I think you have some exposure to and I remember when you spoke to me, I remember us sitting down one time and you were telling me about There's a thing called scope 1 and there's a thing called scope 2, and that scope 2 was actually a kind of relatively new Idea where this came into this. Can you maybe tell me a little bit like maybe you could explain to someone who is Who's heard of, carbon footprinting, and they know there's a thing called scopes.Why would anyone care about scope 2 in the first place? And how does it come about in the first place? Because it seems like it's not intuitive for most people when they first, when they start thinking about carbon footprints and stuff like that. Killian Daly: Yeah. I think the obvious, first thing you need to take into account when you think of like a company's emissions is, well, what are they burning themselves on site? do they have gas boilers burning gas? Are they burning coal to produce electricity? So that's, I think, very intuitive and obvious. But actually that is not the end of the story. And there's actually like a, a very funny anecdote. I put a true anecdote from the legendary Laurent Segalen, who does the Redefining Energy podcast and general energy guru. And he was actually involved in the kind of creation of a lot of the carbon accounting standards that are used today, this Greenhouse Gas Protocol standard, which is basically used by over 90 percent of companies now to report their carbon emissions.It is the Bible of how carbon accounting works, right? and so 20 years back, he basically was, down in Australia and visiting an aluminum smelter. On site, they were explaining, "this is very low carbon product. we hardly burn any fossil fuels on site. This is incredibly, clean production." Chris Adams: The aluminium here, right? big chunks of aluminium. Okay, right.Killian Daly: Aluminum, aluminum smelting. So like one of the, biggest metallic commodities that we have, very energy intensive. and so, he was there on site and just saw these big overhead wires coming in from yonder, from somewhere, right? And he said, hang on, what are the, what are those big cables above? and they were like, "oh, yeah, that's the electricity," obviously driving the smelter because aluminium, it's all about electricity. That's what power is an aluminium production facility. And so he said, well, hang on, where is that coming from?They're like, "oh, no, don't, don't worry about that. That's not our responsibility." Well, it absolutely is, right? so you need to think about where is that electricity coming from? How is that being produced? And in that case, it was coming from a very large multi gigawatt coal power plant right next door. Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So I thought you were gonna say, oh, it's maybe a, something clean, like a hydro power station, but no, just a big, fat, dirty, great coal fired power station was the thing generating all the power for it. And that's whereKillian Daly: Absolutely. So, that's kind of the, just a bit of an anecdote is that's why it's so important to think about what we call scope to emissions, the emissions of electricity that I'm consuming, because especially as we electrify the economy, right, more and more emissions are going to become scope 2 emissions.They're going to be related to someone else either burning fossil fuels to produce electricity and to give to a consumer or ideally, using clean energy sources to generate that electricity without carbon emissions. we need to think about this kind of properly and do the accounting correctly.And unfortunately, we don't do the accounting very well today.Chris Adams: Alright, so previously, before we even had that, there wasn't even this notion of scope 2 in the . , you might have just had direct, and then maybe this kind of bucket of indirect stuff, which is really hard to measure, so you're not going to really try to measure it. And okay, so, I remember actually reading about some of this myself, and I always wondered, like, where do some of these figures come, where do, where does even the notion of a protocol like this come from? And one of the things I realized was, particularly with the GHG one, was that they're like, when I listened to Laurent Segalen speaking about some of this, he was basically saying, yeah, this was essentially like Shell, the oil company, who basically said, "we have a way of tracking our own emissions."And, why not use that as a starting point for talking about how we do carbon accounting? And then, scope 2 was a new concept. That was one of the things that they were kind of pushing for. But I suppose this kind of speaks to the idea of, who's in those rooms for those working groups to kind of, that is going to totally change the framing of how we talk about some of this.And I guess that's probably why this, is this a little bit like why you started talking and getting involved with things like EnergyTags so you could take part in those discussions? Because it feels if this is what we're going to use to define how we do this or how we do that just like you have people talking about okay BP had an impact of changing how we think about carbon footprints from, from an individual point of view.But you do need people involved in that conversation to say, "actually, no, that's possibly not the best way to think about this, and there are other ways to take this into account." I mean, is this why you got involved in the EnergyTag stuff?Killian Daly: Yeah, it's one of the main reasons, because I used to do, so, work for one of the world's largest electricity consumers. And so I was responsible for calculating all of the electricity emissions for that company, right? Like doing the scope 2. And so I read the Greenhouse Gas Protocol back to front.That was how the, all the calculations were done. That's what qualified clean and not clean, right? And I remember thinking, "this is an insanely influential document," right? It's kind of in the weeds. It's kind of stayed maybe, to some people, but I wasChris Adams: of tedium around it, here. Killian Daly: Yeah. But the more I've gotten involved in things like regulation and conversations like that, that is where, it's in the annexes, it's in the details that the big decisions are made often. So I remember thinking back then, this is insanely influential and some of the ways that we're allowed to claim to consume clean energy are, frankly, disconnected from reality in a way that is just not okay, right?As in this is far too weak. And definitely, I thought, someday I'd love an opportunity to be able to, say, "hang on, can we,we fix this please? can we do this differently? Can we start to respect some sort of basic realities here?" So, yeah, it was definitely one of the drivers why I joined EnergyTag, which is obviously like a nonprofit that is, has as its mission to clean up accounting, right? And to clean up the way we think about electricity accounting. So, yeah, obviously it's a great honor, I suppose, to be part of those ongoing discussions in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol update process.Chris Adams: So, We spoke before about how there, before there was even no scope 2, right? So that was like, the bar was on the floor. Right, and then we introduced the idea that, oh, maybe we should think about the emissions from the electricity. So that was kind of a bit of a leap forward by one person pushing for this, that otherwise wouldn't have been in the standard at all, right?And I just realized actually now that you mentioned that, we spoke about oil firms being very involved in this and being very organized in this, and I remember people talking about Shell, that's what you use, and how much, and I'm just realising, oh Christ, Shell's in the Green Software Foundation as well.We should, that's something I didn't really think so much about, but they're also there too. So they are organized. Wow. So let's move on. So maybe we could talk a little bit about scope 2 here. The thing I want to kind of get my head around is I'm like, can you maybe talk me through some examples of where this doesn't, this falls down a little bit, where might be a little, stretching your, you spoke about the physicality, the physical reality. where does it need a bit of work, or need some improvement that you're looking to do, looking to address in EnergyTag, for example? Killian Daly: Yeah, so basically, one way of doing scope 2 accounting is basically looking at the energy contracts or the electricity supply, contracts that companies have and saying, well, where are you buying your energy from? How are you contracting for your power? Right? And there's a kind of a number of fundamental issues.One of them is around the temporal correlation, or between when you're consuming electricity and when the electricity you're claiming to consume is being produced. And today, right, we actually allow an annual matching window between production and consumption. And put in simple terms, what that means is that you can be basically solar powered all night long, right. You can take solar energy attributes from the daytime and use them at nighttime, or you could take them from the daytime in March and use them at nighttime in November. At any other time of year. And this just does not make sense, right?Chris Adams: Not physically how the science works for a start. Maybe if I can just dive into that a little bit in a bit more detail because you've mentioned this idea of certificates for example or like claiming like that and as I understand it if I am running a solar farm right I'm generating two separate things. I'm generating power but I'm generating the kind of greenness so these are two independently sellable things which will sometimes be bundled together. That's how I might buy green energy. But under certain rules, they're not. They can be separated. So it's like the greenness that I'm moving or I'm buying and kind of slapping onto something else to make it green. Is that? And if it's at the same time, it's kind of okay. If it's from totally separate times of day, you do like you mentioned where you're saying this thing running at night runs at solar, is running on the greenness from a solar farm, which is stretching the, well, our imagination, I suppose, and your credulity, I suppose.Okay, so that's one example of this is something that you wanted to get, wanted to get fixed. Are there any other ones, or things that you'd point people to, becauseKillian Daly: I think you know the. The other, the other aspect, I think that's pretty, problematic in today's standards is so we've talked about time and the other big one is space, right? Today we allow consumers to claim to use green energy or clean energy over vast geographical boundaries that really don't respect the physical limits of the grid.So, for example, the whole U. S. is considered to be one region, right? So you can buy green energy attributes produced in Texas and say that you're using them in New York. So you could be 100 percent power by Texas solar in New York. Or if you're in Europe, Europe is considered of one region. So you have really absurd cases where you can be powered by Icelandic hydro in Germany, and Iceland has never exported any electricity to anyone. There's no cables leaving Iceland. So, that just doesn't make sense. And this has real consequences because what we're trying to do is obviously drive consumers to buy green energy. If they're doing it in this way, then they're kind of, in some cases, pretending to buy green energy rather than actually going and buying green energy and incentivizing more production of green energy and clean flexibility that's needed to integrate that solar and wind, at every hour of the day.So, that time and space kind of paradigm is maybe a good way of thinking about, some of the fundamental issues here. There are other ones. I don't know how far we want to go into the rabbit hole, but that's two very high level, and hopefully very kind of understandable examples of the problems we have with today's carbon accounting.Chris Adams: Yeah, I think I understand why that would be something we would address, and so presumably this is the thing that EnergyTag's looking to do now. You're basically saying, well, the current system is asking you to make quite spectacular leaps of faith. And there are certain places where you do want to do leaps of faith and be super creative, but accounting might not be where you want to be super creative or super jumpy. That's not always where you want to have your innovation.So that's, this is, so you're saying, well, let's actually be, make this more reflective of what's really happening in the world. So that we've got like some kind of solid foundation to be working on. So,Exactly. Killian Daly: And just maybe on that point, this is not what we advocate for is not, it's not anything radically new, to be honest, because the way electricity markets work today, the way electricity utilities deliver power to customers, just you know, let's say pure gray electricity on electricity markets.It is based on fundamental concepts of time matching. Power markets work on a 16, sorry, a 60, 30 or 15 minute, like balancing period. In Australia, it's 5 minutes. In Europe, there's things called bidding zones. So that's the area over which you can buy and sell electricity. And all of this is to kind of capture these fundamental physical limits of the power system.You have to balance it in real time. And there's only a certain amount of grid capacity. And so you need to realize areas over which it's reasonable to trade power or not. So all we're saying is, make the green energy market much more like the real power market. So we're actually, if anything, trying to make it a bit more common sense,whereas today, we're, quite detached from some of those basic limits thatChris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay. So in fact, in some ways, there are some kind of comparisons where you could plausibly make where people there's a push right now for people to talk about treating environmental data with some of the same seriousness as financial data and apply some of the same constraints it sounds like something a little bit like that so if people are going to have basically take into account the physical constraints when they're purchasing the actual power part, they should think about applying their same ideas when they're thinking about the greenness of it as well. You can't kind of cheat, even if it makes it a bit easier, for example.Killian Daly: Yeah, well, exactly. And, ultimately, what are we trying to do here? Is the purpose so that certain consumers can say that they have no emissions, or is the purpose to set up an incentive system so that when those consumers actually. Do you say they have no emissions that they've gone through all of the challenges of grid decarbonization?So they've bought renewables. So they've invested in storage. So, fine, you can consume solar power at nighttime if you put it in a battery during the daytime. They're thinking about, demand flexibility. Are they consuming a bit less when there's less wind and sun? They're hard challenges, right?We need to do a lot more of those type of things, and a proper accounting framework will make sure that in getting to zero that you have to think about and take all of those boxes. Whereas today, you can just be 100 percent solar powered and obviously that's just not going to lead to the grid decarbonization in the real world that we want to see.Chris Adams: Maybe if you're in space it might work, but mostly no. Okay.Killian Daly: Mostly, no. Yeah, Chris Adams: Okay, so we spoke a little bit about why there are some problems with the existing process, and like you, we've spoke a little bit, hinted at some kind of ways you could plausibly fix this. So do you, could you mind just talking me through some of the key things that EnergyTag is pushing for in that case?Because it doesn't sound like you're trying to do something totally wacky, like, say you're never allowed, sorry, you're, it's not like you're asking for something like a significant change, like you're not allowed to split the greenness from power and or stuff like that. It sounds like you're still working inside the current ways that people are used to buying power and do all that stuff at the moment, right?Maybe you could tell me about how it's supposed to work on the newer schemes that you're working with.Killian Daly: Yeah. So basically what we're advocating for is that, if you're gonna claim to use green energy based on how you contract for power, then, well, you have to temporally match, right? So you can only claim to use green energy produced in the same hour as your consumption. Not in the same year, Okay. number 1. Number 2 is we need to think about the deliverability constraints, right,and this geographical matching issue. And what we're saying is that, for example, in Europe, Europe is not a perfectly interconnected grid. And so you shouldn't be able to claim you're consuming green energy from anywhere else in Europe, you should be doing it, in the same bidding zone or, at least at aChris Adams: There needs to be some physical deliverable, physical connection to make it possible. Okay.Killian Daly: Or fine, you can go across border, but you have to show that actually the power actually did come across border and that you're not violating like fun. You're not importing, 10 times more certificates than you are real power between 2 countries, right? So we need to have those, limits put in place.And another thing that we think is important is that there needs to be some sort of controls on individual consumers just buying a load of certificates, for example, from very old assets. And I'm totally relying on those to be 100 percent green. For example, if I'm in Germany, right, and I just sign a deal with a hydro power plant, that has existed for 100 years and I'm time matched and I'm also within Germany, spatially matched, and I'm claiming to be 100 percent renewableChris Adams: it's not speedytransition if it's a hundred years old, that feels like that's stretching the definition of being an agent of that. Okay.Killian Daly: that's another thing to kind of, you know, having this 3 pillar framework.Sometimes we call about, and that is very important. I think for an existing consumer, it is legitimate to claim a certain amount of that existing power, but that must have a limit, right? You can't just be resource shuffling and "well I'm the one who's taking all the green energy" and everyone else is left with the, fossil that needs to be controlled also.Chris Adams: All right. I think I follow that. So basically, so timely has to be more or less the same time, right? Deliverable, like you need to be able to demonstrate that the power could actually be delivered to that place. So deliverable there. And this other one was like, additional, like we need to transition, so you can't look at something which is 100 years old or 50 years old and say "I'm using that, I'm fine." There is this notion of bringing new supply stream to kind of presumably displace or move us away from our current fossil based default, which is not great from a climate point of view, right?Killian Daly: Exactly. And I think one way, there's a really, a good friend of mine, who's in the Rocky Mountain Institute, Nathan Iyer, smart guy. We've worked a lot on US federal policy topics, and he actually has a really, good analogy about this stuff. BYOB, right?So, yeah, of these 3 pillars. So, like, when you're going to a party, you need to bring your beer to the party on time. You can't bring it yesterday, you need to bring it when the party is happening. You need to bring it to the party, not to another party. And it needs to also be your own beer.You can't just be taking someone else's. And it's it's kind of like a bit simplified, but it's a good analogy, I think for what we're trying to get out here. It's if we get everyone to start like thinking that way and acting on those kind of fundamental principles, obviously, we're going to end up being much more effective in deeply decarbonizing our power systems.Chris Adams: So, decarbonization of the grid communicated through the power of carbonated beverages, basically. Wow!Killian Daly: What could be better?Chris Adams: I think it's, well, it's topical, at least it's still talking about CO2, just on slightly different scales, actually. I quite like that, actually. I might borrow that one myself, actually. Okay. So, there's one thing that you mentioned then. So this notion of, we spoke a little bit before about there's this idea of greenness that could be split, you're still keeping that, so you're not, saying, there's no ban on saying you're not allowed to sell power, that is unbundled from that, there is, that is still a kind of key idea of flexibility, could you maybe, I mean, cause from someone who isn't familiar with it, they might say, "why do we even have this, idea of being able to have separate these in the first place.Doesn't this make things much more complicated?" I mean, I might be going down into the weeds, but is there a reason for that? is it just because that's how it's such a big change there that, or it's really hard to make that, to get people to shift to a new way of doing things or, what was that, what's the thinking around that part there?Killian Daly: Well, basically, right, anytime you want to claim or have a contract, whether that be an unbundled or a bundle PPA contract, Chris Adams: Power Purchase Agreement, right?Killian Daly: Yeah, a power, like a long term power purchase agreement, for example, right? so anytime you have a contract for a specific type of electricity, you need an accounting mechanism or a tracking mechanism that kind of sits on top of the grid and allocates generation to consumption, becauseobviously, the way that the grid actually works, is that electrons are just oscillating around the place. there's not really a methodology to physically trace this individual electron started here and went there, right? And so, much like power markets do, and they have mechanisms for contractually allocating power between different buyers and sellers, as long as it's matched in time and space, that's a fundamental premise of our power markets work, we're basically borrowing that concept, but attaching the greenness attribute,Chris Adams: Ah,Killian Daly: and saying "provided that this system, of detaching greenness from the power is respecting temporal and geographical matching requirements, deliverability requirements, sufficiently, then that should be the basis of legitimate green claims and that essentially creates a market mechanism for financing renewables.If you don't do that, then you cannot have a green power market basically, right? You,= don't have a way of differentiating buyers who are contracted for green power and those who are not doing anything. So, yeah, for example, a few years ago in Air Liquide, we only did this, we didn't look at what contracts we were sourcing.We just did this location based accounting where you take an average of all the generation in the grid. Which is another way of looking at electricity emissions and a very valid way of doing it. But obviously one disadvantage that has is that it basically leaves all consumers passive.They have no incentive to do anything in terms of driving electricity decarbonization. So that's why we need these, these mechanisms of essentially having tracking Chris Adams: systems. Oh, okay, I see. So, if you, if there's no recognition, if I'm working at a large company, why would I, why would I choose to buy something green if I can't be recognized for me doing something, doing that green step? And, so the downside of the location based approach is that yes, it gives you one single answer, but it takes away this idea that organizations which have honestly massive amounts of resources can influence or speed up a transition.That's what it seems to be a kind of it's trying to respect that reality or at least acknowledge that this is what we expect of organizations if they're that powerful.Killian Daly: And one person, I know you've had Olivier Corradi from Electricity Maps on before they've done, some very good blog series on this topic. They're obviously have insanely deep knowledge of grid emissions is really no one better that I've come across.And they did a very kind of simplified explanation of this stuff. And you have the location based method, which is like maximizing physical accuracy and then you have the market based method, which is trying to maximize incentives and financing. And what this 24/7 accounting framework that we're advocating is basically trying to make those things meet in the middle, right? Today we have a market based system that is too much focused on, I would say, flexibility, making it easy for people to say they're green. and so has led to very valid criticism. And what we're trying to do now is bring that market based mechanism back closer to the physical realities of the grid,Chris Adams: Oh, I see.Killian Daly: But keeping the, incentive system, because if you don't have that, then, well, I don't really see the point in even doing the exercise.Chris Adams: Okay. So there's two things that I wanted to kind of just see if I could maybe dive into a little bit on that then. So it sounds like this whole notion of not having this stuff tied to each other is to reflect the fact that people have all these complicated ways to purchase power in the first place.So in my world as a cloud, as like someone working as a cloud engineer, right, I might buy computing by the hour, but I might also buy it, in advance for three years, for example, for a lower price, and that, that provides a bit of stability for whoever's running my server, but this kind of, this is an example of me having multiple different ways of being able to buy something, and essentially, some of that unbundling there is actually trying to capture the fact that there is, there are all these complicated ways to arrange to pay for something, and this is one way that we can use to value some of the Flexibility and stuff you said before.So for example, you spoke about you can't run something on solar power, right? But if you had a battery, you can capture that and then use a battery bit like a time machine to kind of run at night almost right so but therefore you're trying to but that's more expensive than just making some claims.So you need to have some way to recognize the fact that it takes a battery and a bunch of extra smarts to run something at night from that. That's what you're trying to go for with that, right?Killian Daly: Yeah, exactly. And again, basing things on how power markets contractual, they have ways of already have contracted with allocating power between generators and consumers. I think the biggest issue with unbundling, so, selling the energy attributes and the power to different people. Actually, I think what the fundamental problem is the lack of time matching and deliverability requirements. That's where unbundling has gone wrong. Because it's, it said, "we're going to take the green attribute from this energy in Norway, and we're going to allow it to be used at any time of year, anywhere in Europe."That's insane. That's where it starts to get completely insane. I don't have any particular problem with you producing it in one hydro plant, and selling the power into a power pool. and then that being consumed in Norway in the same hour. That's literally how power markets work on a short term power market.Everyone bids into a common pool. And why not just put the attributes into the same pool and well, they, all have the same properties anyway. So it doesn't make a difference. It's the only way you're ever going to have liquidity, right? so I don't see any fundamental issue with, that.The fundamental issue is with the annual matching and theChris Adams: the physics beyond breaking point, essentially.Killian Daly: And that's, I think that's why I'm bundling, it's got such a bad name, right? And I think that's actually been fair, but I do think that it's not that bundling around bundling or necessarily the issue is, kind of theChris Adams: like those three pillars you mentioned. Okay, gotcha. Thank you for indulging me as I went down that thing, because I didn't know the answer to that, and I've always been wondering. Okay, so, we spoke about this thing called EnergyTag. We've spoke a little bit about how it's supposed to work and how it's basically an improvement on some of the approaches before.And, maybe we could talk a little bit about who's using it? Is anyone, adopting it? maybe we could go from there, because this sounds like a cool idea, but there are many, cool ideas. That no one is paying attention to. And I suspect that would be quite a demoralizing conversation if that was the case.So, yeah, I mean, who's using this and where, are there any kind of big name adopters you might point people to or anything like that?Killian Daly: Yeah, so, yeah, two of the leading ones that kind of come to mind immediately, obviously, especially for software folks like yourselves or Google and Microsoft, they have 24/7 clean energy targets by 2030. Basically, they're committing to buying clean power for every hour, their data centers are consuming electricity, everywhere in, in which they're operating.So they're two of the most, I would say, advanced, ambitious, corporate climate commitments in terms of scope 2 electricity procurement, at least. And they're obviously two major buyers. And they've been signing some really interesting deals as well. So there's, gigawatts now already of these 24/7 or close to 24/7 PPAs signed, 80, 90 percent firmed, portfolios of renewables, and that's game changing, right?that's something we've seen emerge in the last few years where traditionally, the way of buying renewables has been "I'm going to buy a solar contract, and I'm going to blend that into whatever I'm buying elsewhere." And that's fine, right? But it's only giving you maybe 20, 20 percent of your electricity on an annual basis.Now, we're seeing new contract structures that are blending together. Solar, wind, batteries, and getting maybe 80, 90 percent like of a flattened,Chris Adams: so that's what I mean by firmed then, so firmed is this idea that it's basically it's when you say, so if it's not firmed, it's like I'm gonna buy the same amount totally without thinking about when it's matched, but if it's firmed then I am trying to think, I'm taking the steps necessary so that I can make a much more credible claim that the power I'm using is coming from generation or from stored amounts of power or something like that.Ah,Killian Daly: And that's, as I said, there's gigawatts of deals done already to date. Are there people doing this hourly matching stuff? Yes, absolutely. Check out our website. There's 30 projects there, with millions of megawatt hours of hourly matching being done.So, this is not 40 organizations or something doing it 5 continents. So, This is not rocket science, right? This is literally taking meter data. That's very common, hourly production and gen data. You could do it on an Excel file with three columns if you wanted, and matching those things together and seeing where we're at. So it's absolutely demonstrated and leaders are doing it. Is everyone doing this? Is this now the status quo way of doing it? No, absolutely not. And that's what we work every day to try change, right? so we're still, I would say, relatively in the early days of this transition, but, as far as I'm concerned, it's kind of inevitable for credibility reasons, transparency reasons also for pretty fundamental economic reasons. Companies going out there and committing to buy loads of energy that is unmatched to their consumption profile.They're leaving themselves open to a lot of risks. So, what if you say, okay, I'm just going to buy a load of solar. That has no connection to how I actually consume electricity. You're leaving yourself open to a lot of volatility that we're seeing electricity markets today. A lot of super high prices in the evening.For example, when you're, when your solar contract is not delivering you anything, then what do you do? Right? you have all this gas volatility and exposure. So it's not just about decarbonization. It's also about things like electricity price hedging. So there's kind of various, I think, fundamentals that mean that.We are going to move in this direction.Chris Adams: okay, so So if I understand that final point that you've basically made is if I want to do this kind of matched thing for example, or if I want to, if I want to be buying some power, one of the advantages of doing like a longer term deal is that there's a degree of stability. So let's say, I don't know, a one country decides to invade another country and then totally make gas prices go through the roof.I'm somewhat insulated from all that stuff so that it's not gonna massively destroy, it's not gonna destroy the, make impossible to kind of pay my own bills, for example. And like we've seen those of examples of that over the last few years, for example. So there's a bit of insulation from that kind of stuff.Yeah.Killian Daly: Exactly. So now we do get into kind of contracting mechanisms here. It's a little bit similar to what basically, if you're committing to a fixed price, for example, for a number of years, if you sign like one of these PPAs and you commit, let's say, to a 10 year fixed price for power. And if you're committing to like a affirmed profile, let's say 90 percent matched,that has a very significant hedging value. So it means that basically you fixed like a lot of your power price. So no matter what happens, if, there's a massive spike in gas prices and power prices go through the roof. You're protected against that. We actually worked on a really interesting study on this a couple of years back or 18 months ago that said.With Pexapark, who are like PPA analysts, and they basically showed that like a 10 megawatt consumer in Germany could save over 10 million euro, in the best of cases, and at least millions of euro in a given year by signing these 24/7, or close to 24/7 power purchase agreements with clean electricity assets, because one thing that clean energy has as an advantage in an ever more uncertain world is that the costs are basically known up front. You know how much money you need to build a wind turbine to build a battery up front.It's all capex heavy. And that means that renewables can basically Give you a fixed price up front where honestly, gas cannot, because, most of their costs are operational. It's about buying the gas when you need it to.Chris Adams: And there's a constant flow is not Okay, I guess with the sun, I mean, there's maybe a scenario where, I mean, it's not like there's a Mr burns style blackout of the sun kind of thing, right? if you're relying on something where no one has control over, no one can, kind of blockade the wind or blockade the sun.That's where some of the stability is coming from, right?Killian Daly: Yeah, exactly. Right. so you have those things, and you know that those fuel sources basically don't cost anything. Right? so you're all your costs are in construction, materials, all things you basically know, largely upfront, and that does enable you to provide long term contracts, typically way beyond the terms that fossil fuel generators can offer.And so it can protect you for, the consumers willing to take that long term price risk. It can really offer really significant hedging benefits. not above alternatives.Chris Adams: Buy that on like the spot market as it were or buying something just like on the regular market. Okay. All right. So, so you mentioned a few large companies doing that stuff and outside of technology, I know that I think it's the federal government. They've, it sounds like you said one or two things, which are quite interesting.There is this idea that 100 percent is obviously really, good. Right. And that's what you want to head towards. But given there are some places where aren't, they're not going, they're not shooting for 100 percent straight away, for example, they might be going for 50 percent or 60 percent or something like that.This is something that is kind of okay to do, or that's okay to start at. Cause I think I heard about the government, the US government had a plan for something about this by 2030 or something.Killian Daly: Yeah. So basically, what we, we started the conversation talking about accounting. So I think the first thing you need to do is get, the accounting right. So that when you say 50, it means 50 or when you say 100, it means 100 because if you're just saying 100 and it means 50, then well, you're screwed, right?You have a bad system. So, I think, actually being at 70 percent renewable, but saying that out loudChris Adams: 70%. Yeah.Killian Daly: and addressing the, the basic fact that you're only there that's much better than kind of saying I'm 100 percent renewable on some annualized basis and kind of like misleading people about where you're at with, decarbonization.Chris Adams: So it's better to be a real 70 than a fake 100, basically, yeah? Killian Daly: Yeah.And, so, you have, electricity, like suppliers, for example, who are, there's like Good Energy in the UK, Octopus Energy in the UK, most of the electricity suppliers now in the UK, in fact, are, offering these like hourly tariffs.And, I don't think any ofChris Adams: it was only one or two that did that. Whoa. That'sKillian Daly: Now, I think this year it'll become more, a kind of a norm, where they will offer this alongside their a hundred percent renewable tariff. And none of those hourly tariffs are gonna start off being a hundred percent renewable, but it's bringing that extra bit of transparency, which I think is great.And, the likes of good energy, they're already offering to thousands of customers, right? This is not just the Googles and the Microsofts who have their long term targets on this. This is already being offered to thousands of customers around the world because electricity suppliers are basically taking.They're doing all the work. They're just giving the consumer the number on some dashboard saying, this is how much matching you have. if you look at the Octopus Energy example, it's quite interesting. They have a tariff called Electric Match for some of their B2B customers and they're actually basically reducing your price of power. when you're more matched, so that's quite cool, yeah, they're charging you less the more that your demand is matched to their generation. Right? And I think that's quite a cool gamification of this. They're saying basically try to consume when there's more wind and sun in the UK, you'll be more matched and we'll cut, we'll cut your rates because obviously it's sort of, it costs them less to deliver that in the first place.So that's. That's the type of cool mechanism.Chris Adams: So, I swear, every single time I speak to energy people, and they say, "oh yeah, the price is totally changing." Then I think of one level up, when we're like paying for cloud, and it's the same price all the time. Someone's making a bunch of money off us doing all the kind of carbon aware computing stuff, because if the price is going, low, I would expect to see those numbers go low.This feels like something we might want to have a conversation about inside the tech industry then, if they are, if there's savings being made here, because it feels like it would be nice if those were passed on, I suppose. So, all right, let's speak, go on,Killian Daly: I think just very importantly, of the, the more I think one fundamental truth that we're going to see,it's already the case in some parts of the world, but this is going to be an essential truth of the transition. The more renewables you have, the more volatility you're going to have in power prices. And the more flexible you can be in your consumption. It is going to be very rewarding economically, if you can consume, at the times of day when there's loads of wind and sun, power prices are going to be very low and you're going to get rewarded for that. If you can't, if you can only be base load, then that is going to cost you.Chris Adams: Ah, okay, alright. Okay. Alright, that's it, that's a useful thing to take into account. And so, we spoke before about, scope 2 and stuff like that, and you spoke about this idea that you're defining this standard. Now, EnergyTag is a standard in its own right, but, as I understand it, it's not like you're stepping outside of this.You are still engaging with the protocols and all the stuff like that right now, yeah?Killian Daly: Basically, so yeah, EnergyTag is a nonprofit. we do a couple of different things. we're obviously focused on this area of electricity accounting, electricity markets and better green energy claims and all that. And so yeah one of the things that we do is we have a voluntary standard for hourly energy tracking because one of the kind of blocking points we have today, is that the way we do this tracking with these energy certificates, it tends to be on a monthly or even an annual basis globally.And sometimes we don't have the information on the certificates to do this hourly matching. So we're trying to un debottleneck that particular technical issue. Think about how do we track through storage, like doing some novel things there. So we have a standard for that, but that's only one of the building blocks, I would say of this much larger question of, like, how do companies do electricity accounting or how do they do carbon accounting more generally? Our standard is there to work on that specific topic, but actually a lot if not most of what we do today is like working on policy advocacy around the world, working on global standards and basically advocating for those to change because ultimately it's the meta-levers, regulations,standards. Once they change, then we're just there to help technically put that all together with some voluntary standards as long as they're needed.But it's not our aim to be the world's next greenhouse gas protocol. That's really not in our wheelhouse. What we want to do is make sure that global standards and regulations are as good as possible.Chris Adams: Oh, I see. Okay, so that, so if we go for a concrete example of this. So, in Europe, if you want to do a hydrogen project, which is, in some ways, kind of a bit like an AI project in that it's like a building that uses loads and loads and loads of power in one place, right?Really dense. If you're going to make, green hydrogen, for example, you're taking water, adding loads of electricity to split that, and that's incredibly energy intensive. So you've probably want that, if you want the green hydrogen to be green, probably only use green energy. And one of the things you told me about before was, yes, we won that fight so that any, and if people want to get any of the subsidies from the government to kind of do this green energy thing, they need to have those three pillars style approach, right?That's what, that's an example of your strategy, yeah?Killian Daly: Yeah, so this is actually the reason I what really brought me into EnergyTag, it was a Greenhouse Gas Protocol thing, but basically are the key to one of the world's largest hydrogen producers. Right? And so I got put onto this topic a few years ago, which I found incredibly important and fascinating and, maybe not well enough understood.It's like, when we're going to produce hydrogen using electricity, we need to really make sure that the electricity is squeaky clean, because of the efficiency issues and losses that you just inherently have with electrolysis. And so, just to give a quick example, Jesse Jenkins lab in Princeton University, a guy called Wilson Ricks, who is a rock star of power system modeling, they model this right?And they show that in the US, if you basically use today's carbon accounting rules, this annual matching stuff, and you built out a hydrogen sector based on those rules, you will have hydrogen that is twice, maybe even three times as bad as today's fossil fuel hydrogen production. and you'd be calling it clean and subsidizing that production. Totally insane, just literally wasting money.And so it's actually really, important. Billions of dollars of subsidy are going to go into hydrogen in Europe and in the United States. And so we worked a lot with NGOs, advanced companies and other partners to advocate for these strong requirements on green electricity sourcing for hydrogen, both in the US and also in Europe, and we won on both fronts, which hasChris Adams: Oh, the US way as well!Killian Daly: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it hasn't been, so both of those are legislation in Chris Adams: place.They're in! Yay science!Killian Daly: Yeah, that's the legal way now to qualify for the tax credit in the US. In Europe, there's a phase in period on the hourly part to 2030. So, in 5 years or whatever.But anyway, projects built now, they have to be designed to comply with that. And so, Chris Adams: if you know,it's going to be in the law of five, you're just going to make sure you Killian Daly: going to start doing it now, right? more or less. yeah, so that's, yeah, obviously, this is kind of like hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 per year on the line between good and bad rules and that, that's kind of a concrete example of, why these things matter. Right? Like accounting sounds boring sometimes. I definitely thought it was boring before I realized like, "Oh my God, I'm working for a huge power consumer and this is changing everything." So yeah, it's definitely super, super important that we get this stuff right.Right.Chris Adams: Okay, so we spoke about, it sounds like you've done the work with Air Liquide and you've kind of essentially laid the groundwork to move from a fossil based hydrogen thing to hopefully a greener way of making hydrogen, which ends up being used in all these places. And now it seems like you've got the, okay, you said Google and Microsoft, same power usage as Air Liquide in a single year.Maybe they might've changed, but back then, there's, so it looks like we're seeing some promising signs. For that over here. So maybe, I mean, if we, want to see that, what do we need to see at a policy level? Do you need to have, government saying, "if you want to have green energy for data centers, you need to be at least as good as the hydrogen, industry."Is it something like that you need to do? Because what you've described for the hydrogen thing sounds awesome, but I'm not aware of that in the, kind of IT sector yet. That's something that I haven't seen people doing yet. Killian Daly: That is also coming, right? So hydrogen has just been the first battleground or the first palce, I think. Interestingly, actually, on the 14th of January, just before the inauguration of Donald Trump, as US president, so the Biden administration issued an executive order, which hasn't yet been rescinded.Basically on data centers on federal lands and in that they do require these 3 pillars. So they do have a 3 pillar requirement on electricity sourcing, which is very interesting. Right? I think that's quite a good template. And I think, we definitely need to think about, okay, if you're going to start building loads of data centers in Ireland, for example, Ireland, 20 percent 25 percent of electricity consumption in Ireland is from data centers. That's way more than anywhere else in the world in relative terms. Yeah, there's a big conversation at the moment in Ireland about "okay, well, how do we make sure this is clean?" How do we think aboutprocurement requirements for building a new data center? That's a piece of legislation. That's being written at the moment. And how do we also require these data centers to do reporting of their emissions once they're operational? So, the Irish government, is also putting together a reporting framework for data centers and the energy agency.So the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI they published a report a couple of weeks ago saying, yeah, they, you know what, they need to do this hourly reporting based on contracts bought in Ireland. So I think we're seeing already promising signs of legislation coming down the road in other sectors outside of hydrogen.And I think data centers is, probably an obvious one.Chris Adams: So people are starting to win. Wow, I didn't realize that. I knew somewhat about that there was an executive order that there was a bit of buzz about. But I didn't realize that, set the precedent. So, yeah, we should do what that massive industry over there is doing because that's now the new baseline that, that's where the bar should be.We should do that as well, basically.Killian Daly: Exactly, because that those hydrogen rules, it's actually what it actually is. Well, actually, the whole debate was about is what is clean electricity procurement? What does that mean? What does it mean to use clean electricity? And that has been defined now in hydrogen rules and that can be copy and pasted to any large new load.Well, if you want it to be clean, we already know the answer. It's in legislation,Chris Adams: It's how to tell when energy is green,Killian Daly: MIT, IEA, the who's who of energy experts have all modeled this and they've all found that this is the way to do it. So, there's a template there, right? And it's, if you're going to go against that, it, yeah, well, obviously, then you're, obviously sacrificing the integrity of your accounting schemes.Chris Adams: Wow! That was, we spoke about how to tell when energy is green, and you've, We seem to be ending on a high, I didn't realise we'd actually got to that. That's really, awesome. You've really made my day for that, Killian. Thank you so much for coming on and diving into the minutiae of carbon accounting for electricity, but also ending it with a slightly less depressing piece of news, which I'll take in this current political climate,Killian Daly: just to interject before I say goodbye, there's one, one really, it's good to end on a positive note, I suppose, in this mad world we live in. There was a project announced recently. I think people should go check it out in the Middle East in UAE, where basically for the first time, they're going to deliver basically, around the clock solar power. So 1 gigawatt of solar, all night long because they're basically, building a massive battery and a huge solar farm, and basically all year round is going to deliver, green electricity at under 70 us dollars per megawatt hour, which is extremely competitive.So, I think solar and storage, what they're going to do together is going to be, is going to change the world. Right? I really think that is going to happen faster than people think. They're going to start to kill gas. So, yeah, I think green energy economics, despite what politicians will want to do with their culture wars,I think will at the end of the day, hopefully, answer some of the questions we're trying to solve here. So, yeah, thanks so much for having me on. It's been a real pleasure.Chris Adams: Brilliant, thank you so much for that mate, and may the fossil age end. That's really, that's so, so cool to actually see that, I totally forgot about the Masdar thing, which is the city. Yeah, and we'll share a link to that so people can read about that, because if you care about, I don't know, continued existence on this planet, then yeah, it's probably one to, good one to read about.Killian, this has been loads of fun, thanks a lot mate, and next time I'm in Brussels I'll let you know, and maybe we can catch up for, have a shoof or something like that. Take careKillian Daly: Yeah. A hundred percent. Thanks. Bye.  Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode. 

This episode of Backstage focuses on the Impact Framework (IF), a pioneering tool designed to Model, Measure, siMulate, and Monitor the environmental impacts of software. By simplifying the process of calculating and sharing the carbon footprint of software, IF empowers developers to integrate sustainability into their workflows effortlessly. Recently achieving Graduated Project status within the Green Software Foundation, this framework has set a benchmark for sustainable practices in tech. Today, we’re joined by Navveen Balani, Srinivasan Rakhunathan, the project leads and Joseph Cook, the Head of R&D at GSF and Product Owner for Impact Framework, to discuss the journey of the project, its innovative features, and how it’s enabling developers and organizations to make meaningful contributions toward a greener future.Learn more about our people:Navveen Balani: LinkedInSrini Rakhunathan: LinkedInJoseph Cook: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Impact Framework | Green Software Foundation [00:00]The SCI Open Ontology | Green Software Foundation [04:27]SCI for AI - Addressing the challenges of measuring Artificial intelligence carbon emissions | Green Software Foundation [06:57]SCI Guidance [12:07]CarbonHack [13:03]Impact Framework Github Page [17:58]IF Explorer [20:18]IF Community Google Group [23:42]Events:Kickstarting 2025: A Community-Driven Sustainable Year (February 13 at 5:00 pm CET · Utrecht): [24:21] Advocating for Digital Sustainability (February 19 at 6:00 PM GMT · Hybrid · Brighton): [25:10]Day 0: MeetUp Community GSF Spain (February 20 at 6:00 PM CET · Online): [25:33]Digging Deeper into Digital Sustainability (February 20 at 6:00 pm AEDT· Melbourne): [25:59]Practical Advice for Responsible AI (February 27 at 6:00 pm GMT · London): [26:27]GSF Oslo - February Meetup (February 27 at 5:00 pm CET · Oslo): [26:46]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Chris Skipper: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news from the world of sustainable software development. I'm the producer of this podcast, Chris Skipper, and today we're excited to bring you another episode of Backstage, where we peel back the curtain at the GSF and explore the stories, challenges and triumphs of the people shaping the future of green software. We're no longer gatekeeping what it takes to set new standards and norms for sustainability in tech.This episode focuses on the Impact Framework, also known as IF, a pioneering tool designed to model, measure, simulate, and monitor the environmental impacts of software. By simplifying the process of calculating and sharing the carbon footprint of software, IF empowers developers to integrate sustainability into their workflows effortlessly.Recently achieving graduated project status within the Green Software Foundation, this framework has set a benchmark for sustainable practices in tech. Today, we have audio snippets from Naveen Balani, Srinivasan Rakhunathan, the project leads. And Joseph Cook, the head of R&D at GSF and product owner for Impact Framework, to discuss the journey of the project, its innovative features, and how it's enabling developers and organizers to make meaningful contributions toward a greener future.And before we dive in, here's a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So without further ado, let's dive into the first question about the Impact Framework for Naveen Balani.Naveen, the Impact Framework has been described as a tool to model, measure, simulate and monitor the environmental impacts of software.Could you provide a brief overview how this works and the inspiration behind creating such a framework?Navveen Balani: Thank you, Chris. And thanks to all the listeners for tuning in. Let's first understand the problem we're solving with the Impact Framework. Software runs the world, but its environmental impact is often invisible. Every CPU cycle, every page load, every API call, these all contribute to energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water usage.Yet, without the right tools, measuring and managing this impact remains a challenge. This is where the Impact Framework comes in. It's an open source tool designed to transform raw system metrics like CPU usage or page views into tangible environmental insights, helping organizations take action. Built on a plugin based architecture, it allows users to integrate, customize, and extend measurement capabilities, ensuring scalability and adaptability.More importantly, the Impact Framework helps realize the software carbon intensity specification, making sustainability reporting transparent, auditable, and verifiable. Every calculation, assumption, and methodology is documented in a manifest file, ensuring that impact assessments are replicable and open for collaboration.At its core, the Impact Framework is built on a simple yet powerful idea. If we can observe it, we can measure its impact. And once we can measure it, we can drive real change, reducing emissions, optimizing resource use and building truly sustainable software.Chris Skipper: What were some of the most significant technical or organizational challenges you faced during the development of the Impact Framework and how did you and the team overcome them?Navveen Balani: The Impact Framework wasn't just built, it evolved. It was shaped by real world challenges. Lessons learned and the need for a scalable, transparent way to measure software's environmental footprint. The foundation of the Impact Framework was laid through previous projects and ideas. Starting with SCI Open Data, which tackled the lack of reliable emissions data, and SCI Guide, which helped organizations navigate different datasets and methodologies.Another critical component was the SCI Open Ontology, which defines relationships between architecture components, establishing clear boundaries for calculating measurements. Alongside these foundational efforts, real world use cases from member organizations applying software carbon intensity measurement played a crucial role.These practical implementations tested SCI in diverse environments, refining methodologies, and ensuring that SCI calculations were not just theoretical, but applicable and scalable across industries, but data alone wasn't enough. We needed to scale measurement across thousands of observations.Sustainability assessments had to be continuous, automated, and seamlessly integrated into software development. This led to key innovations like aggregation, which enables organizations to condense vast amounts of data into meaningful, structured insights, rolling up emissions data across software components to provide a holistic system wide view.Technology, however, was just one piece of the puzzle. Adoption was equally critical. To accelerate real world impact, we opened up the Impact Framework to our annual Carbon Hackathon event. Where teams worldwide build projects that pushed its capabilities. This was a turning point, validating its flexibility and refining it through community driven development.At its core, the Impact Framework is built on transparency. Unlike black box solutions, every input, assumption, and calculation is fully recorded in a manifest file. Making assessments auditable and verifiable. This commitment to openness has been crucial in building trust and driving adoption.Chris Skipper: Looking ahead, what are the next steps for the Impact Framework? Are there specific new features or partnerships on the roadmap that you're particularly excited about?Navveen Balani: That's a great question, Chris. Looking ahead, the Impact Framework is entering an exciting new phase with a major focus on expanding measurement capabilities for AI. Right now, we're working on the SCI for AI specification. which extends software carbon intensity to both classical AI and generative AI workloads.Measuring AI's environmental impact comes with a new level of complexity. AI isn't just another software workload. The environmental footprint varies significantly depending on whether you're training a model from scratch, fine tuning a large language model, or simply using an AI API like ChatGPT or Gemini.Each scenario has different compute demands. Memory requirements and energy consumption patterns, making standardized measurement both challenging and essential. Through the Impact Framework, we aim to tackle this by developing new plugins and contributions that enable precise measurement of AI related energy use, hardware efficiency, and emissions across training, fine tuning, and inference workloads.These capabilities will collectively evolve, through community participation with researchers, developers, and organizations, contributing to refining methodologies, expanding data sets, and ensuring that AI measurement remains transparent, auditable, and standardized. This collaborative approach will allow organizations to quantify, compare, and optimize their AI workloads.Making sustainability a key consideration in AI deployment. Beyond AI, we are also exploring new partnerships to further enhance the Impact Framework's adaptability. Collaboration with cloud providers, software vendors, and sustainability researchers will be crucial in ensuring that the framework evolves alongside industry needs.Our goal is to make environmental impact measurement not just an option, but a fundamental part of software and AI development at scale.Chris Skipper: Moving on, we have some questions for Srini. Srini, IF emphasizes composability and the ability to create and use plugins. Could you explain how this innovative approach has enabled more accurate and flexible environmental impact calculations for different types of software environments?Srini Rakhunathan: Absolutely. The Impact Framework's emphasis on composability and the use of plugins is actually a game changer for different environmental impact calculations. If you notice that the framework is highly modular, making and allowing users to create and integrate various plugins. What it means is you can tailor the framework to fit the specific needs of your software and it doesn't matter what type of software you have, whether it's cloud based, on prem or hybrid.What is also advantageous is that the plugin ecosystem has a wide range of tasks. For example, it has something around data collection, it can do impact calculation, it can do reporting. It can do also very, very specific tasks like math functions and aggregation functions. What this means, you can mix and match plugins to create a mashed up pipeline that reflects your environment, whether you are running your software on web, cloud, mobile, doesn't really matter. As long as you know what your software boundaries are, you will be able to combine these plugins and create your own, um, pipeline, if you will. And that pipeline will help you, uh, create your calculation pipeline that can either run one time or run as a batch or, you know, run based on certain triggers.What it also means, and if you notice, there is also manifest files, and we will be talking more about it later in this conversation, is that the manifest files ensures that you have a repeatable way of calculation. I mean, you mash up these different plugins and you create a pipeline and you embed it in a manifest file and it's repeatable.So what I think is this framework's capability of composability and plug in can help you make very, very accurate impact calculations.Chris Skipper: How have collaborations with organizations like Accenture and Microsoft, as well as the open source community, contributed to the success of the Impact Framework? Are there any standout moments or partnerships you'd like to highlight?Srini Rakhunathan: Thanks, Chris. That's a great question. So the cornerstone of the success of Impact Framework has been collaborations. And this has been ongoing from the time this project was conceptualized. Bear in mind that when we, like Naveen, who's there also with us, and I, along with the Joseph and Asim started thinking about the project.The initial vision of the project was very different. So we started off with something called SCI Guide, where we wanted to collate datasets across the open source community to help calculate emissions from software. And we built the SCI Guide and that transitioned into something called CarbonQL, which is a primitive version of what we see today in the Impact Framework, which is more like how do we make sure that it is easier for users or developers to calculate emissions from software and the learnings that Naveen, Joseph, I and Asim went through to come up with the initial version of Impact Framework and the amount of work that the team has put together to get it to graduation state is amazing and it speaks volumes about the collaborations that has gone ahead into the building of the tool.One particular highlight I want to call out is every year, GSF organizes what they, what is called the CarbonHack. And in 2024, the CarbonHack focused on getting the open source community to come and build tools.On top of Impact Framework, either extension of the tool or building content or newer areas where the Impact Framework can be used. And you would be amazed at the amount of contributions that came in and newer use cases that looked at calculating emissions, not just from carbon, but from water and other forms of renewable resources was also identified.And that's great. That, I believe, was a standout moment for the tool.Chris Skipper: The IF documentation highlights the use of a manifest file and a CLI tool to calculate environmental impacts. Could you walk us through how these tools work and how they lower the barriers for developers to adopt sustainable practices?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely, we can talk about both the CLI tool and the manifest file. These are actually cornerstone capabilities built within the Impact Framework, and they help us to calculate the environmental impacts. What happens is, the manifest file contains a list of of the software's infrastructure boundary encoded as YAML files.It's in the standard YAML format, and it contains every bit of component that is part of the software, whether it's front end, middle tier, back end, database, API, everything encoded as what's the hardware used, what's the utilization, what's the telemetry involved. So much so that it can be used to give us an input to the Impact Framework CLI tool that calculates emissions.The use of the file enables transparency and rerunability. That means it can allow anyone to re execute the manifest file and everyone will come up with the same calculations. The second piece that we spoke about, which is a CLI tool, it's a command line tool, which means it can be used to run on any environment.It processes the manifest file and computes the environmental impacts. So the way it works is developers can pass the path to the manifest file to the CLI tool, and it'll take care of the calculations. The tool has capabilities to do phased execution and that allows efficient and flexible use of the framework.Chris Skipper: And finally, what lessons have you learned from working on this project that might benefit other teams looking to build tools or frameworks for sustainability in tech?Srini Rakhunathan: Thanks for asking this question. At an overall level, I would like to respond to this question by focusing on lessons learned from two aspects. The first is the execution model and the second will be the technical design. In the execution model space, this project is a good example of how open source collaboration works.The team used GitHub extensively, and most of the meetings were asynchronous. And the engineers and the product managers and everyone who worked on the project worked through GitHub. And collaborated extensively using the open source tools available, which is a great model for scale. The second aspect we should look at from an execution model, and which is a success story here, is how the team used customer feedback as inputs to make the product better.There were constant, if not many sessions with many customers with whom the team worked to engage with them and understand what the requirements are for building a tool that can help them calculate emissions and use that feedback into the process, into the backlog to make the tool better. The second aspect of lessons learned will be on technical design.And here I would want to call out that. The whole concept of building a plugin ecosystem and make them composable such that it can, you have a, you know, you have a set of plugins that you deliver to the community, like a base framework, and then you allow extensibility. So that's a great model, which can help tools that can use sustainability as a calculation engine.And then the second piece is, which is also equally important. As you do this. You also make sure that you have extensive and good documentation that can help anyone who's coming on board understand the framework and be able to get on board and run with building a new plugin as soon as possible. The IF code, the GitHub site, if you go there, You will have a link to the docs page.And if you read through the docs, it's very, very self explanatory and will allow anyone who can come in and who's interested in building a plugin, do that at the fastest possible time. So these are, in my mind, lessons learned both from an execution model and the technical design aspect.Chris Skipper: Moving on, we now have some questions for Joseph. Joseph, the Impact Framework recently achieved the status of a graduated project under the GSF. What does this milestone mean for the project, and what were some of the key factors that led to its graduation?Joseph Cook: The Impact Framework graduation was a huge milestone because it represents the moment when the project is considered sufficiently mature that it no longer needs to be incubated and instead it can largely be handed over to the community. We consider the software to be feature rich and stable enough that people can integrate it into their systems, and in order to graduate, the project had to meet a quite stringent set of requirements, including demonstrating that Impact Framework had real world users, and that we had addressed community requests and bug reports, and that we had suitably comprehensive test coverage, and that the documentation and the onboarding materials were all fit for purpose.Now that milestone has passed, development activity is going to be much more ad hoc and driven by the community, rather than following a development roadmap that's defined by Green Software Foundation. Our efforts at the GSF will now be in driving adoption instead.Chris Skipper: How does the Impact Framework engage with the broader tech community to encourage adoption? Can you tell us what steps the GSF is taking to include the community as part of the IF development?Joseph Cook: Impact Framework is used by all kinds of organizations, but it also has a thriving open source community. And most of the discussion with the community happens on GitHub, either through issues or on the discussion board. But we also have a Google group where we share updates and collect feedback. Open source development on Impact Framework is really fundamental.It's really baked into the very core of the project. Instead of trying to ship Impact Framework with all the built in features to connect to thousands of different services and systems that people want to measure, we instead focused on making it really easy to build plugins, and then encouraged an open source community to develop, where people create their own plugins for all the features that they care about, and share them with each other on our Explorer website, which is like a free marketplace for Impact Framework plugins. This model actually makes the Impact Framework much more robust and much more stable because we have a much greater diversity of voices influencing what Impact Framework can do and what it can connect to. It decentralizes the development of the project without compromising the core software, and it also means that our small development team doesn't shoulder the burden of maintaining a huge code base with lots of different brittle connectors to third party APIs and services.And going forward, we want to keep this community thriving and see thousands more Impact Framework plugins listed on the Explorer.Chris Skipper: How do you see the Impact Framework setting new benchmarks for environmental responsibility in tech? Are there specific metrics or practices that you believe will influence industry standards?Joseph Cook: Impact Framework is a lightweight piece of software for processing what we call manifest files. These are YAML files that follow a simple format that captures the architecture of the system that you're studying. All the observations that you've made about that system and all of the operations that are applied to your data.I like to refer to these files as executable audits because they mean that you don't just report emissions numbers anymore, you actually show you're working too. And this enables the community to fork and modify your manifests and challenge you. And through iteration, you can come to crowdsourced consensus over your environmental reports. We would love to see this radical transparency become the gold standard for environmental impact reporting for software. Not only that, but manifests can be the basis for experimentation or forecasting, and help decision makers to assess the environmental benefits of implementing some change. Imagine you're challenged about why you chose some specific action.Your manifests are your evidence. And we think this combination of transparency and reproducibility, composability, and openness is a unique selling point for Impact Framework, and it could transform the way projects and organizations report their emissions and introspect their own operations.Chris Skipper: For listeners who are interested in getting involved with the Impact Framework, what are the ways they can contribute or support the project? Are there specific skills or areas where the community can make the most impact?Joseph Cook: If you would like to get involved in Impact Framework, there are many ways to do so. If you're a developer, you can head to the GitHub, where we have plenty of open issues, including some specific good first issues to help people get started. If you want to build plug ins, then you can download our template and use that to bootstrap your way in, and then submit your plug in to the Explorer using a simple typeform on our website.We always appreciate updates to the documentation too, and if you're interested in integrating Impact Framework into your systems, we'd You can always reach out to research at greensoftware. foundation to discuss it with us directly. We're always happy to help. If you just want to test the water or you have general questions about Impact Framework, you can start discussions on our GitHub discussion board or communicate via our Google group, IF-community@greensoftware.foundation.Chris Skipper: Awesome. So I'd like to thank Naveen, Srini, and Joseph for their contributions to this episode. Before we finish off this episode, I have a few events that need announcing.Starting us off, we have an event that will be happening today, the date of the publication of this episode, February the 13th, 2025 at 5 p.m. CET in Utrecht, Netherlands. Any Netherlands based listeners, you're invited to a Green Software Community Meetup today from 5pm until 8pm at Werkspoorkathedraal. Join us for a free in person event to kickstart a more sustainable year in tech. You'll hear insightful talks about reducing your software's energy footprint, scaling down for greener computing and building a grassroots digital sustainable movement. This is a great opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals, share ideas, and be part of a growing Dutch community that's dedicated to building a greener tech future. Food and drinks are provided free of charge.Next up is an event in Brighton in the UK, happening on February the 19th from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at Runway East, which features Senior Digital and Sustainability Manager for OVO, Mark Buss, speaking about the challenges with advocating for digital sustainability within his company. The talk will also be live streamed, so we will have a link in the show notes below for that.Next up for any Spanish listeners, we have the first ever meetup of the Green Software Community in Spain that will be happening online at 6pm On February the 20th, Dia Zero, Comunidad, Meetup, Green Software Foundation, España will be a chance for you to discuss how to collaborate with other people passionate about climate change and green software. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes below too.Next up down under in Australia on February the 20th at 6pm AEDT in Melbourne, we have Digging Deeper into Digital Sustainability. How to design and build tech solutions. This will be happening at ChargeFox. Katherine Buzza will be talking about the impact that software is having on the world's carbon emissions, and how to align your career in tech with the decarbonized future we can all play a role in creating.Next up, another UK event on February the 27th at 6pm GMT in London. Practical Advice for Responsible AI will be held in person at the Adaptivist offices. Talks about Green AI with Charles Humble and AI Governance with Jovita Tam. Click the link below to find out more.And finally, on our events list, we have GSF Oslo will be having its February meetup on the 27th of February at 5pm in person at the Accenture offices from 5 until 8pm. Come along to find out how leveraging data and technology can drive sustainability initiatives and enhance security measures and dive into green AI. Talks from Abhishek Dewangan and Johnny Mauland. Details in the podcast notes below.So that's the end of this episode about the Impact Framework project at the GSF. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. To listen to more podcasts about the Green Software Foundation, please visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation, and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye for now!

In this episode, we go behind the scenes of the Carbon Aware SDK, a groundbreaking tool enabling developers to reduce software emissions by running workloads where and when energy is greenest. Featuring insights from Vaughan Knight, chair and project lead of the SDK, the episode dives into its origins, real-world applications, challenges, and milestones, including early contributions from UBS and Microsoft and its recent 1.7 release with NPM and Java libraries. Learn about how the SDK supports Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) metrics, practical examples of carbon-aware workload scheduling, and the roadmap for expanding developer resources and geolocation-based solutions.Learn more about our people:Vaughan Knight: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Carbon Aware SDKIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams sits down with Mark Bjornsgaard of Deep Green to explore a transformative approach to data center design and sustainability. Mark shares insights into how Deep Green reimagines traditional data centers by co-locating them in urban areas to provide heat reuse for facilities like swimming pools, district heating systems, and industrial processes. They discuss the challenges of planning and policy, the rise of high-density computing driven by AI, and the potential for data centers to become integral components of community infrastructure. Tune in to learn about the intersection of digital innovation and environmental responsibility, and how new business models can turn waste into opportunity.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteMark Bjornsgaard: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Mark Bjornsgaard on LinkedIn: Dell's OCP Solutions Propel AI Innovation [07:52]Civo [37:31]Real Time Cloud | GSF If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Mark Bjornsgaard: The government does need to legislate. There is just not enough structure and there's not enough impetus for people to do the right thing. But the also, and particularly in the UK, what the government needs to do is planning is a huge, huge hurdle. I never really understood that until we'd be working with Deep Green for, you know, building data centers.It is breathtaking how Kafka-esque the planning system in the UK is. It's just, It's beyond insane.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Okay, Mark, a few years back, when people were asked what a data center was, if they knew what one was at all, they might talk about some kind of thing, room, cupboard full of a few machines, maybe in a rack inside a unused room inside a building, for example. But these days, in the 2020s, people are more likely to talk about a warehouse full of hyperscale kind of data servers in a building, which is maybe the size of a football field or larger, for example, the kind of things that are run by massive firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, for example.Now, as I understand it, you work with data centers, too, but they can take a rather different shape and interact rather differently with the built environment. So for those who've never heard of Deep Green, or how the stuff you're doing is different, give a kind of brief introduction to like how your approach to like building data centers is and how that has an impact on how it works with the surrounding area, for example, communities.Mark Bjornsgaard: Yeah. So, as you say, most data centers are built in the middle of nowhere, and the vast majority are built without heat reuse. So the vast majority simply eject the heat that comes out of the computers. Data centers, we know, two to four percent of the world's electricity supply, and computers themselves are incredibly efficient electric heaters.So 97 percent of the electrons that go into a computer come out as heat. So you've got us as a species, us in a climate emergency, taking two to four percent of the world's electricity supply, converting it into heat, and then ejecting it into the atmosphere, which 10 years ago, that might have sounded kind of plausible or even sort of necessary.But in a world, as I said, in a climate emergency, that doesn't look so clever. So the difference between Deep Green and every other data center, most other data centers is we are building the data center where the heat can be reused. So very hard to transport heat, but relatively easy to transport electrons to take the data center to where the heat's required.So that's what we do. We build smaller data centers, co-locate them where heat's required. Now that might be a laundry, it might be a distillery, it might be food production, it might be antibiotic production, it might be a swimming pool, but more often than not, it's what's called a district heating system.So these large centralized heat networks that through super insulated pipes supply heat to large areas of different cities. That sort of principle, that district heat systems and heat networks, we're not very good at them in the UK specifically, but we are, the government is certainly planning for us to get a lot best them in the years to come.So, that's where we're anchored. We, you don't build them in the middle of nowhere, you build them where they're required. There's a further, there's a further caveat and a sort of, a kind of context to this, I suppose, if you'd like. Up until the point where AI started to become part of our everyday lives, those normal data centers aren't on very much.They're only on 20, 30 percent of the time, and they don't actually generate very good waste heat. So you can certainly forgive the great, the good of the data center industry for not necessarily trying too hard to reuse heat in the old world. But in the world that's coming where we've got these incredibly dense racks of NVIDIA and other chips, where, you know, she utilising a massive, huge amount more energy than previously the datasets had.That, it's at this point where those are on 70, 80 percent of the time, and they're generating an enormous amount of heat, and the heat's relatively high grade. It's not high grade heat as class within, but it's good low grade heat. So at this point, then the ability to reuse heat becomes a real thing. And that's why we exist.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay, so there's a couple of things I'd like to unpack if I may. So the first thing you said was, okay, so there used to be data centers if they were going to be built in a kind of hyperscale thing. You're looking for kind of cheap land and then that's why they're often kind of miles away and probably maybe near things like say a grid connection or fiber connection or something like that, all right?So that was like one of the previous approaches, but the downside of that is that, well, you've, you might have all this heat, but no one's able to use it, so you just vent it into the sky, so it's basically wasted in that way. So the other, another way you could do this is you can actually build these, where they kind of interact more, where they're kind of more complementary to the kind of urban fabric, as it were, and then you can use that.But the thing that we've seen, one of the reasons that's been stopping that before is that essentially the data centers might have generated some heat, but it wasn't enough heat. So, you said low grade, and when you talk about low grade heat, that's like maybe 40 degrees, 50 degrees? Like, maybe you could expand on that, what that might mean, because I think for people who've never heard of the world of heat reuse, they don't know what high grade heat or low grade heat might be or what some of these uses might be, for example.Mark Bjornsgaard: Yes. Yeah. No. It's so as you say, low grade heat in industrial settings can be as high as a couple of hundred degrees. So when you say a data center is going to be producing heat at 45, 50, 55 degrees, then that doesn't sound very warm at all. That said, 30 percent of all of the economy, 30 percent of all of the industry can use that very low grade heat.So for example, a swimming pool very reliably loses a degree of temperature every hour. And it only needs to be 30 degrees. So if you've got, if you're trying to push heat from a, from one side of heat exchanger into another, if you've got kind of pool temperature water at 25 degrees, one side of that's the heat exchanger, and you've got, you know, our heat at 55, the other side, then heat flows the right way.When it comes to district heating systems and heat networks, the old ones, actually, again, they weren't very, it was quite difficult to plug data centers into them because those old heat networks were quite high heat. They needed heat at 80, 90 degrees. So if you were a data center and you said, I'll give you heat at 35 degrees, it really wasn't that useful. Now, fifth generation district heating systems, the ones that we're building in the UK and the ones that are beginning to be built elsewhere in the world, they can use very much lower temperature heat because the buildings themselves are better insulated. So the whole, the kind of what we think of as ecology, industrial ecology, the kind of ecology starts to, to make sense because lots more offtakers can use this relatively low grade heat,Chris Adams: Ah, I see. And you also said one other thing about, this is kind of one of the kind of flip sides of massively more dense compute. Here's one thing we've spoken about before. People talk about, okay, there is like worry about data centers, basically, or like AI data centers being massively more dense.Like the examples, I think I saw you share a link on LinkedIn, which kind of blew my mind. Like, some of these new racks from Dell can have like half a megawatt ofMark Bjornsgaard: half a megawatt per rack.Chris Adams: and like, I couldn't really kind of picture what that was. I know it's about 30, it's around 30 times minimum, or around 30, more than 30 times what you might have for an enterprise data center rack.So like, that's quite a lot of energy there. But like, can you maybe just like, what does half a megawatt even look like for most people, because it's really hard toMark Bjornsgaard: it's really, yeah, it is, it's really, it's sort of so vague, it's very hard to get your head around, isn't it? So, I always like to think of it in terms of your boiler on your wall at home. So that's going to be about 10 to 20 kilowatts, right? Your boiler at home. So that one Dell rack is, produces 50 times the amount of heat on the basis that on the basis that 97 percent of the electrons that go into it come out as heat.That 500 kilowatt rack is producing anywhere between 30, 40, 50 times more heat than the boiler on the wall of your house. And so, an unfathomable, you know, amount of kind of heat. Then if you look at it in the context of a normal data center, if you go into a conventional data center now, you might have rack densities of between 7 and 12 kilowatts a rack.So when you're talking about densities of again, kind of, you know, 20, 30 times. the density of compute in a single space. Now for us, we love that because we have the opposite problem of every other data center. We're space constrained, not power constrained. So if we can go to a swimming pool and we can heat a very large swimming pool with only two racks of gear, like a megawatt of, that for us is amazing because we spend much less money on building a data center, fencing, security, containers, all the other gubbins, fire suppressant systems, all the other gubbins that you'd have around a data center, when you compress them and you squidge them down, you make them much easier to deploy in the fabric of our communities and society. And then you get this really crazy kind of stats where I was in a data center in Sacramento, a couple of weeks ago, and you got this massive data hall,it's meant to be one and a half megawatts. It is one and a half megawatts of power, but the whole hall is empty. There are just three or four racks just at the end of the hall because those racks are 130 kilowatts a rack. And so they've built a data center. The physical shell of the data center is built for those rack densities, but they don't need all of that space.So actually what's going on at the moment in the data center industry is we believe is this sort of giant misallocation of capital where people are building data centers in the old way, when they actually should be building them for the world that's emerging, which is this really high dense, these rack densities that look nothing like conventional data centers.Chris Adams: So you, okay, that's interesting, and I'd like to come back to some of the things you said there about what the implications of massively more dense compute might actually be. But you also said a few things interesting about this idea of saying, you know, community involvement and things like that.Because one thing that I've never heard anyone else talk about in the data center industry or even the kind of like tech IT industry talk about was this idea of a, borrowing the idea of a social license to operate. This is an idea that people talk about in say fossil fuels and oil majors and stuff like that.And you said, well, this is one way that we can actually essentially keep that social license to operate by actually offering a much, much more kind of equitable deal with the communities we're kind of trying to integrate with rather than having this kind of like standoffish approach. Maybe you could like talk a little bit more about that, because I don't really hear people saying that much about data centers.They usually say, "well, you should be grateful because without us, you wouldn't have your cat pics without and and and..." It does feel like it's kind of missing a huge power of why people might push back against data centers or why they even talk about why they, you know, whatever the deal is when someone comes in and says, "Hey, can we build a bunch of digital infrastructure in your part of the world," for example.Mark Bjornsgaard: Yeah, I mean, as you say, we talk a lot about a social license to operate because, and we believe that in the future, you will get more and more pushback from communities around having data centers in their backyard, because you've got these huge sheds which are hogging and clogging transmission grids.So these transmission grids to be built by public money and then their commercial enterprise, yeah, dumps down there and says, "well, I want 100 megawatts" and then suddenly you realize that half the streets in the area can't put in heat pumps because there's no more grid capacity in the substages or they can't have electric cars. So, we think that social license to operate will be increasingly important in the future. No doubt. But the also the other, I guess the other on the other sort of flip side of this is that datacenters don't really employ anyone, right? I think the datacenter industry is a bit naughty when it says, "oh, you know, we're going to build a datacenter, we're going to employ 4,000 people."It's like, that's actually not true. You might employ 4,000 people while it's being built, but the reality is once a datacenter is up and running, the number of people who have to be employed in the actual vicinity are very low. But if you build a data center and then you say "I'm going to reuse the heat with a aquaculture park or a distillery or a laundry," suddenly then you then produce genuine net new jobs in a local area.So not only is the kind of the environmental bit of the social license talk very important, we think increasingly data centers are going to be looked on as having to be good citizens in terms of, you know, employment and doing the right thing with the community and we've already seen a lot of this, right?We've had moratoriums on data centers in the Netherlands and in Ireland and Singapore. We think we're in this sort of grace period in the transition. In the next 3 to 5 years electrons, then the amount, the number of electrons are going to become very constrained. We're not actually yet in the bottleneck, but in the next three to five years, we're going to start going to that period of time where they just genuinely are not enough electrons to go around.And we are going to have to make genuine choices about what we do with scarce electrons. And at that point, we believe, that if you're a data center and you're not doing the right thing, then, you know, you're the very least your operations going to be severely curtailed. Stroke, you're going to be in the midst of a full scale culture war, which you just don't want to go anywhere near.Right?Chris Adams: Okay, so you said a couple of things which I think might be worth exploring or kind of diving into there because a one of the key things I think I'm getting from you is that, yes, you might be able to kind of force some changes through quickly or you might say like, okay, well, I think one of the key things is that we need this transition itself to be sustainable and if you are able to kind of maybe push through some changes now you'll end up with so much pushback that you won't be able to sustain that state of changing as we end up like essentially moving away from fossil fuels a society based on electrification in many cases.Mark Bjornsgaard: That's exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I think what we see is that we see that. We are energy and software folk and we're venture capitalists by trade. We see, we don't see the data center industry as a, we don't take it as sort of face value. What we see is 70 percent of the UK's total energy budget being the heating of spaces.So what, we're looking at from the other end of the telescope, we're saying, well, how could we, how can we best, what's the fastest, quickest way of heating all our shops and offices and factories? And the reality is, the quickest, fastest way of doing that is using computers as electric heaters.The fact that they happen to be there as data centers is almost, you know, that's kind of just a happy circumstance for us. We're solving what we see as a, as the meta problem, if you like. And just seeing what tools and capabilities we have to be able to solve that problem.Chris Adams: Okay all right so this is actually one thing that you... Because I think this is the thing that some of us forget about when we just think about IT like okay there's other transition, other changes that need to take place and before we, before you came on to this, I remember I saw you did a talk about these kind of for the wicked problems related to climate.And I wonder if you might get a kind of maybe kind of expand on some of that because I think it's quite a useful context to help people who are thinking about their role as a technologist. But, okay, like, why would you even care about heat reuse, and why would you care about anything other than just the efficiency of your code directly, rather than this kind of wider, more systemic view, for example?Mark Bjornsgaard: Yeah. Of course, we are. We all see our worlds in kind of what's in front of us, and that's completely understandable. As you say, we frame heat reuse and the electrification of heat, as you say, in context of what we think of as four wicked problems. So and these wicked problems make out make up roughly about 50 percent of the entire transition.So if we solve these four problems, then we will be somewhere around 50% of the challenge of the transition take place and those problems are the heating of, of spaces, so all of our homes and offices, the industrial use of heat, so all industrial processes need to be de decarbonized and kind of electrified, and then we think of, controlled environment agricultureand what's going on with how we grow stuff, the sustainability movement is rapidly kind of moot, sort of casting its eye across agriculture is realizing that actually how we feed 8 billion people on this planet is actually kind of some like 70 to 80 percent of all of our food is intensively farmed and based on fossil fuels.And then the fourth wicked problem is carbon sequestration. So how do you, actually sequester carbon out of the atmosphere? That is also a problem around heating. If you take those four wicked problems, they can all be somewhat or completely solved with data center heat, with low grade heat on it. And so we're sitting there saying, well, look, if those datacenters are going to be built anyway, if we already need to spend between 10 and 20 percent of our entireelectricity budget for our country on data centers, then all logic says you build those data centers where you can use the electron twice. The electron can do its funky thing in the data center. We can have all that utility. And then so long as you've done in the right way, like we're doing it, you can just pass on 97 percent of that electron in the form of heat for it to then be used in those four wicked problems. So to us, that is, there's sort of a beautiful, immutable logic there, particularly in a world where you haven't got enough electrons. If you had bountiful, you know, fusion, fission, whichever the good nuclear bit is, if you had a bountiful electricity supply, then you might not be that bothered.But the reality is in the next 10, 20 years, we're going to be so constrained by the amount of electricity that we have, we're going to have to get really good at being as efficient as we can.Chris Adams: And I suppose it's actually, I mean, in the I mean, I'm calling you from in Germany, where most of our, almost all of our heating is still coming from basically combustion, burning like gas and stuff like that, for example, which is expensive. And even when you look at the UK gas again is one of the, what was the, I think it's the largest source of heating in the UK by quite a long way.And these are two things which are volatile and where you're exposed to all kinds of changes in prices and things like that. And this is one thing that we probably do need to move away from. So that seems to be one thing like you're kind of, this is one of the approaches that you're looking at doing here, I suppose.This is one thing I should ask you about then, because we spoke a little bit about this being a thing that we, that is valued and this is like a shift in how the role that digital infrastructure plays in kind of like the wider societal role. We've also spoken about in the UK, there is this goal to get entirely off, essentially have like some as close to as possible as a fossil free grid by 2030, which basically mean getting rid of a bunch of this heating from burning fossil fuels, right? Now that's a really ambitious goal. And like, as an as someone who grew up in London or grew up in the UK, I'm like, "wow, this is really cool."This is like, I'm really impressed by that kind of ambition. And it's also one thing we've seen where a number of larger providers have basically said, "well this 2030 goal, it was a nice idea, but the moon has moved," to quote president having Brad Smith at Microsoft saying, "Oh, yeah, we were not pushing for 2030 anymore."And I kind of feel like if there is this goal of 2030 in the UK, for example, and we have very similar goals in other parts of the world. Like what needs to happen at policy level to actually make this possible for the actual data center or the kind of digital infrastructure there because right now, I'm not aware of the kind of support or how policy kind of values this kind of different way of thinking about the role that digital infrastructure plays.But we have seen with new government, basically in the UK, they do seem to be very keen on having a massive rollout of infrastructure. So. what's the deal here? Is it gonna be, how do we make, how do we square this circle basically?Mark Bjornsgaard: It's not, the declaration of data centers as critical infrastructure isn't quite as good news as it looks. So the, so that is that predicated on regulatory capture and if you declare data centers as critical infrastructure, you can then basically run ride roughshod over any local objections.So the fact that the labor government announced that isn't necessarily a good thing. It's probably the opposite. In Europe, we've got the EED, we've got the European Energy Directive, I think it is, and by an Energy Efficiency Directive, which is, which effectively says that certainly in Germany by 2028, you won't be able to build a new data center without reusing 20 percent of the heat. So there is a, there is already a, some sort of regulatory framework out there that's saying "you've got to do the right thing.You've got to have, you've got to use green electrons. You've got to reuse the heat." So that's good. The reality is, as we all know, governments probably have to use carrot and stick. So you probably have to do a little bit more stick and a little bit more carrot. Those people who are being good citizens and reusing heat should get some brown points and should get some economic benefit from that.And those who aren't, increasingly should be penalised. I mean, now you'd expect us to say that because obviously we're on what we think of as the right side of history. So I think the short answer is the government does need to legislate. There is just not enough structure and there's not enough impetus for people to do the right thing. But the also, particularly in the UK, what the government needs to do is planning is a huge, huge hurdle.I never really understood that until we'd be working with DeDeep Greenor, you know, building data centers. It is breathtaking how Kafka-esque the planning system in the UK is. It's just, it's beyond insane. it's crazy. So you've got regulations like, because you're leased of a council on a district heating system means that you only got that lease because you said you'd use green energy.If you put a data center within the environment of your district heating system, because we've got generators that kick in if, you know, for redundancy and resiliency, that then means that you're in contravention of your lease. So instead of somebody just going, "yeah, that's a shit idea, let's not do that. Put across through that. That's an unfathomably complicated year long process."We've had to put one pool we're trying to qualify, we've had to resubmit planning seven times. So this is just, I mean it's beyond rank stupidity, it's just a madness in this country, in the UK at least, around, we hate success in this country. We just hate success. This will be the third business that we develop in the UK and then scale in the US because in this country it is, yeah, we just can't get out of our own way.It's really sad. And, you know, everyone says, "oh, we'll try and change." It's like, it's very simple. It's like, you either want people to do this or you don't. Do you know what I mean? Like no amount of meetings or nice coffees or platitudes or strongly worded emails. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's very fucking simple.Can I build a data center or not? If I can't, then I can't. You know what I mean? Like it is, yeah. So this country is, it's very difficult to do here. And I suspect in a lot of Europe it is. So we need government to get out of its own way and clear a path for us.Chris Adams: So you said a couple of things that I think maybe we could just go into a bit more detail before we move on from there. Because you said one of the things was, things like the, there is one like regulation, the energy efficiency directive, which is It's one of the ideally one of the drivers of transparency for organization for people operating digital infrastructure, like they'll, you know, as a result, you know, for you to comply with this, you need to be able to listen information like the carbon intensity of the power, how much your, you know, how clean the power is, for example, how much of it is coming from, say, fossil fuels, how much water you're using and things like this.And presumably, like, these are some of the metrics that you might be able to kind of look good on, as it were, or this kind of way of building infrastructure might look a bit better, for example, like, if you're reusing some of the heat, I suppose, then does that have an implication on maybe how much water might be used, for example, and things like that?Mark Bjornsgaard: Yes. And you've got to be very careful that it's not whack a mole that you don't, you know, you don't drop your PUE, but then you raise your, so you use evaporative cooling, you might drop your PUE or your, the energy use, you know, the Power Utilization Effectiveness of your data center, but then you massively increase the amount of water you use.So there is a balance. There is a balance to be struck across all of these metrics. That's why there isn't one perfect kind of measure, if you like. Certainly in our case, we don't use any water, so the way that we cool, the way that the direct chip cooling and, the types of cooling we use, we don't use any water and, you know, there really isn't, as far as I understand, and I'm not an expert in terms of a techie expert in this area, but, really using water is a question of just how much margin you're prepared to sacrifice, you know, it is perfectly possible to cool the data center without using any water.It's just you make a small amount more money on each data center if you use water and people again, the great and good of the data center industry are always be good environmental citizens. They could choose to use no water and just spend a little bit and make a little bit less money. Okay.Chris Adams: You, ah, so you said something quite interesting there about how So you're using essentially liquid cooling as one way we can, as I understand it, liquid cooling in cars is way more efficient than air cooling in cars, which is why we've moved over. Presumably it's the same kind of idea here. So that's, that would result in a more efficient system that you'd be looking at using here.Okay. And that, okay. That helps me understand how that might actually fit into heating a swimming pool or something like that. So if you've got an efficient way to move the heat from one place. to another place and like the whole point about you know people use water for heat storage and stuff like that it makes total sense I can see why you'd have like a nice chunky kind of like sink I suppose and if you if these are the things that you're doing then I suppose there's a chance to be more transparent, I suppose, with the kind of figures you're using for this.So this might be, okay, that's, okay, that's interesting. All right, so if I could, I'd like to ask you a little bit about this AI question, because the approach you're describing here, of having lots and lots of distributed, having series of smaller data centers, like, built into the kind of fabric around us, that seems quite a bit different to the massive, centralized, gigascale data center, kind of paradigm that people talk about so I want to ask like if this is, I've always assumed that you need to have massive centralized data centers to do some of the kind of. AI workload stuff because you need to have these things network with each other. The way you're describing it sounds like that might not be the case.You know, the things not being in the same building might not be the showstopper that people initially thought it was. Could you maybe talk a little bit about this? Because this suggests like a kind of post cloud way of thinking about computing, for example. And I want to ask, like, do you actually need a data, a mega cluster?Or is there a, an alternative that you're suggesting here?Mark Bjornsgaard: The truth is at the moment you need the mega clusters. So we, when we think of training large language models, those need to be done at the moment, those mega clusters need generally need to be all in one place. The trouble is, as data centers grow bigger and bigger, and as you build gigawatt data center campuses, and even larger, when we get, when we think of the trillion dollar cluster, the amount of compute we're going to need to, kind of enable artificial general intelligence, I think we're going to need something like 100 gigawatts of power, right?100 gigawatt data center, which is, now, when you build, start to build data centers in these sizes, You Actually start to have a distributed problem anyway because you physically can't each sort of node running a version of the model has, it's so far away from the other node. You've got a distribution problem almost by default by size.If that make if that makes any sense. So we've certainly got to be better at networking the architectures around large language models. And, there isn't very much academic research on this, there is a bit. We're doing a lot of work with NVIDIA and Nokia around this. The Chinese, we think, are doing a lot more work around this than other people, which is in itself interesting as we see a race to AGI emerging. So certainly the networking between data centers is going to become increasingly important. See, in the last six months, you've seen Microsoft spending billions laying massive fiber pipes between its AI data centers because it's trying to use these, you know, even 100 megawatt data center needs to be kind of physically clustered with another 100 megawatt data centers.But that's also all in the world of training. Now, of course, when that, and that's where the models are learning, and that's great, and that's going to go on. The world that will emerge is obviously mostly going to be inference. So when you think of a world of AI in 10 years time, actually 90 percent is going to be inference, 10 percent is going to be training.So we are, at DeepGreen, we're not necessarily trying to win the large language model, massive cluster game. What we're building is, the compute substrate for the future, where there will need to be thousands of megawatts of smaller data centers, smaller cluster sizes, much closer to where we all live and work.So we're, this substrate, this compute substrate will be required in the future.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So, so basically, what I think you're saying, or what I'm kind of taking away from that, is that it was almost like a typology of different kinds of digital infrastructure that you might think about. So rather than just being one model, which is inherently better than the other, you probably would need to have different setups, depending on the different kinds of roles that you might actually be having.And it's, you can kind of see people talking a little bit about this with the whole idea of like edge computing, but it sounds like for certain things you do need, you may, there may be a world where you do have big box Walmart-style out of town data centers doing certain things because, and you just, and you may have to accept that there's, you're not able to use some of the waste heat or you may need to like co locate things to use that and like have some kind of clusters and I guess China's, you can see some examples of people co-locating energy generation with industry and things like that.But then there's this other kind of like other end of the scale, which is a more distributed thing. And that's something that you're looking, that you're looking at building, like, the kind of data centers that might actually integrate with, say, cities and things where they're closer to where it's actually being used.But the, you're trying to go for a more kind of integrated approach by making as many of the outputs, the waste outputs, something that can be reused by other people for example because presumably there's a cost to like heating a swimming pool like it's non zero if you need to do that and if you've got the heat coming from what you're using then that's something economically benefit that's something that you might write into like currency benefits agreements and things like that. Mark Bjornsgaard: Yeah. If you think about some of the inference work use cases that are already emerging, whether that's, you know, you integrating, you interfacing or chatting, maybe your kids are talking to a chatbot and they're trying to learn about they've got some visualization, some rendering visualization, which takes a lot of GPU compute.That will be, those GPUs will be, it is better that they are co-located, or they're located somewhere closer to where the user is, particularly in the US, where they'll see, or other countries, and not just the US, but, you know, across Europe and other large continents, large land masses, you want the compute to be physically closer to people.So, you know, where they're living and working. So that that is very important. But of course that world is just emerging. So at the, but that said, there are already a, there's already a lot of refining training. There's already a lot of people who are taking the outputs of the very large language models and then applying their own data to them and then refining, training them.And then there's a whole bunch of other use cases around medical science and fluid dynamics and all the other stuff that the robots are gonna do for us. That world is now, as we know, emerging fast. That's the world that we're really building for smaller compute clusters, much closer to where people live and work.And then, as you say, then you start to change the economics about how society works. You know, in the UK, we're spending 1.5 billion pounds heating our swimming pools every year. Really, we shouldn't be spending anywhere near that. Because those, pools should be being heated by recaptured heat. If we allow ourselves to build the data center infrastructure in the right way, the interesting thing about the UK particularly and other countries is that there's lots of fiber in the ground.So when we first started building a data center, we talked about them following the fiber. Now, data centers don't really need to do that. There's plenty of fiber around. You can pretty much build a data center wherever you like. Now you have to, now people are saying they're following the heat, sorry, the power, but the third generation, the third phase of data center development, we see is people following the heat.So first of all, you went to where the fiber is, then you went to where the power is. that's the era we're in now, but very quickly you're then now going to build data centers where the heat's required.Chris Adams: i see where there's presumably like someone who like an offtaker who would use that and then be in favor of something being set up in their neighborhood or in as part of their project, they're getting a bit set up. Okay, so you said one thing that was, I think, quite interesting from there about, okay, there's loads of fiber, there's more fiber than we thought, like all this kind of dark fiber from 20 years ago, the last boom and bust, there's people might reuse some of that.And some of this has, this could feel a little bit kind of academic or maybe not, it might feel a little bit like, "okay, what's happening in the future?" But As I understand it, some of this stuff is like, what if I'm a, if I'm a developer, I think, "oh, this is kind of cool." I like the idea of actually being able to run infrastructure, run kind of the code or run my applications in somewhere like this, in this kind of environment, because I think it's maybe more interesting.Or, and if I can have the same convenience and same, the same kind of experience as a developer deploying code, as then why, you know, I might try this out. Is it something that people can use? Like, is there like. I mean, if I'm used to, like, deploying things into, like, virtual computers, I mean, virtual private servers or Kubernetes, is there something like that?How do I actually try out some of this or use some of this stuff, for example?Mark Bjornsgaard: Yes, it's because we're we are just a dumb datacenter operator. We are making our capacity of our datacenters available. Then that's the physical space in our datacenters for people like Amazon and Microsoft and Google and loads of other people to come and put their kit in our datacenters. So the minute you put your kids in our datacenter, then it will be doing something useful with the heat.So as you say that there are a few cloud providers who already partnering with our main partner who have been incredibly supportive to us for years is a platform called Civo. So yeah, again, a UK business paying UK tax. If you as a developer want to run, you want a cloud service that is every bit as good as AWS or Google or Amazon or Azure,and you want it to be green, then just go to Civo. And then you will be, Civo are using our data centers. So you as a developer, you shouldn't have to make any compromises at all, right? You shouldn't have to worry about any of this stuff. This should all be abstracted away. And in time will be where you can just be assured that when you're running code, it's running in the most environmentally, you know, it's being run in the most sustainable way possible. Now, part of the problem with the large clouds is that their reporting, their ESG reporting, their sustainability reporting is pretty shunky, stroke, complete bullshit. So I think that's part of the problem that I think a lot of cloud services at the moment aren't really taking this very seriously.And what is certainly very hard as a developer or as an end user of a cloud platform to know how green or not your cloud is. The reality is any cloud platform that's claimed to be green just by using green electrons is ignoring 90 percent of the problem, right? 90 percent of the carbon in a data center is in the kit itself.The scope, what's called scope three, the carbon that has been used to manufacture the computers themselves. So however much you jump up and down and say, "I'm doing really well because I'm buying green electricity or I'm buying" that's pretty much. I mean, it's notChris Adams: 10 percent rather than the other,Mark Bjornsgaard: exactly so really, as, we all get better at this and as reporting becomes better and as greenwashing gets, people start to come down on greenwashing, as developers, as a whole community, we will have much, much better visibility about how green our clouds really are, but the reality is a green cloud, it comes down to the carbon in the compute and what you're doing, what you're doing to mitigate and reduce and remove that carbon.Chris Adams: Okay. Alright, so maybe this is one thing that, so, there's one thing, there's one project that we work on in the Green Software Foundation that may be relevant for this. There's one project called the Realtime Cloud Project, where there is an effort to basically work out the carbon intensity for on a kind of per hour for every single region that we have.If this is something that, I mean, it would be wonderful to have groups like Civo or people like that share something like this. Because the whole effort is to have some standardized data sets, some standardized numbers that you can trust and you can optimize for. And if what you've described is basically saying that yeah, running stuff inside infrastructure here is essentially somewhat fungible compared to running in other infrastructure here.But if the number, if you're able to kind of reflect that in a lower carbon intensity or lower embodied energy or lower water usage then or any of the any other metrics that are available then that feels like a useful thing to actually allow people to be able to do and it sounds like that is something people can do today rather than having to this being a conversation about 2026 or 2027, by the sounds of things.Mark Bjornsgaard: Well, to be clear, we're still, we're bringing our capacity online now. So we'd be a year in sort of designing since raising the money from Octopus designing building and now getting shovels in the ground and actually getting our data set the first wave of data centers built. So we've not done, we deliberately not said anything about this because we didn't want to be kind of part of the problem.We want to be very much part of the solution. Whatever we will be reporting next year will be, you know, we'll be holding our hands up saying this is. This is as good as it gets the moment and we're going to improve it. But I think it's incumbent on all of us to be very transparent about that. I think that's it.No one's trying to be perfect. No one's going to get kind of shot down for not being perfect. I think it's much more about the attitude you bring to it as a business rather than being, you know, "this is the law and I'm telling you it's like this" when we all know that's not true. But I think it's much better to be more tentative about it and say, "look, we don't know everything, but, you know, we think our scope three is this, and we are removing it using these removals."And if somebody says, "I don't like those removals, I think they're nonsense." And whilst you say, "well, okay, but we are paying, you know, $250 a tonne for that carbon, so they're not complete bullshit." You know what I mean? I think it's in the, in this next phase, it's all about hopefully not giving each other too hard a time, but actually getting a bit more transparency and a bit more kind of clarity on where we are, because only then can we then start chipping away at it, right?Chris Adams: Yeah. And like in the UK, we have very, clear targets for the very least like 2030 to get there, for example.Mark Bjornsgaard: Quite, which is incredibly shortChris Adams: It's very, it's like, it's almost tomorrow, isn't it? Yeah.Mark Bjornsgaard: I'm so old that the years pass like days these days, but yeah, five years doesn't feel very long at all, frankly. Yeah.Chris Adams: I could definitely sympathize with that because we are a non profit focusing on a fossil free internet by 2030. So that is very, acute for us as well. All right, Mark, I've really enjoyed chatting with you. And I've learned a bunch from us, like wonder or wandering through the world of digital infrastructure and stuff, we're just coming to the end of the time.So I want to ask, like, is, I mean, if you, are there any projects or things you want to kind of point people's attention to, or people, if people want to find out more about the work you're doing, where should people be looking, for example?Mark Bjornsgaard: Yeah. If you're a developer, go to Civo. They're amazing people. It's an amazing platform, as I said. And the fastest, quickest way of supporting us is by using Civo. Buying Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard GreenLake AI. So we're landing whenever you buy HPE kit in the UK and hopefully the US, you will have the option to land it in a Deep Green data center now.So increasingly, developers and businesses can make green choices just by searching out our partners, you almost certainly never come to us directly. You're going to be consuming cloud services by a third party, but asking your cloud service providers to land that kit in our data center is the fastest, quickest way of helping us.Yeah.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Well, in that case, I'll speak to other friends to see if there's a way to filter any kind of like cloud providers for heat swimming pool as one of the kind of like features when I'm looking for my cloud computing in future. Mark, this has been fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for making the time, especially given like getting hit with COVID last week and everything like that.So once again, thank you again for this and yeah, this is great. Take care of yourself and have a lovely week. All right, Mark.Mark Bjornsgaard: Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams is joined by Tammy Sukprasert, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to dive deep into her research on carbon-aware computing. Tammy explores the concept of shifting computing workloads across time and space to reduce carbon emissions, focusing on the benefits and limitations of this approach. She explains how moving workloads to cleaner regions or delaying them until cleaner energy sources are available can help cut emissions, but also discusses the challenges that come with real-world constraints like server capacity and latency. Together they discuss the findings from her recent papers, including the differences between average and marginal carbon intensity signals and how they impact decision-making. The conversation highlights the complexity of achieving carbon savings and the need for better metrics and strategies in the world of software development.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteThanathorn (Tammy) Sukprasert: LinkedIn | GitHub | Google ScholarFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:On the Limitations of Carbon-Aware Temporal and Spatial Workload Shifting in the Cloud | Proceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems [03:25]On the Implications of Choosing Average versus Marginal Carbon Intensity Signals on Carbon-aware Optimizations | Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems [22:12] Resources:Tammy's GitHub [19:00]CarbonScaler: Leveraging Cloud Workload Elasticity for Optimizing Carbon-Efficiency | Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems [33:19]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPTION BELOW:Tammy Sukprasert: With that one hour job with perfect knowledge of one year, we can reduce the carbon emission of the whole world by 37%.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables. Where we bring you the latest insights and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. One of the oft repeated quotes when people talk about sustainability in software is that if you can't measure it, then you can't manage it.And when it comes to working out the carbon footprint of a software application, a significant portion of the footprint comes from what we refer to as the carbon intensity of the electricity in use, i.e., how green it is. And there are various steps you can take to make the same application using the same code, you can make it greener by running it where the grid is greener. So if you were to choose to run it in Iceland, that's one example. Or you can choose to run the grid, run the application at different times when the grid is greener, like when the sun is in the sky and your solar panels are wearing away. But how much greener can they get? And what else could we need to think about when trying to adopt a ways or ideas like this? Enter our guest for this episode today, Tammy Sukprasert, a PhD student at the Laboratory of Advanced Software Systems and Sustainable Computing Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.Tammy recently authored the paper on the limitations of carbon aware, temporal, and spatial workload shifting in the cloud, which examines how shifting computing workloads across time and space can help cut emissions. Tammy, we're going to spend a bit of time talking about why you chose to work in this field.But to begin with, can I give you a bit of space to introduce yourself and what you do?Tammy Sukprasert: Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me here. I'm Tammy Sukprasert. I'm a PhD student from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I work on cloud and edge computing with a specific focus of decarbonizing computing. I'm currently calling you from Amherst, Massachusetts, and it's nice out here.Chris Adams: Cool. That's nice. We've had a, it's snowing in Berlin, so I'm a little bit jealous, actually. Hi folks. If you are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the Director of Technology and Policy at the Green Web Foundation. And I'm also the, one of the chairs of the Green Software Foundation Policy Working Groups.And also, the host of this podcast. Now, before we dive into the conversation with Tammy, if you're listening to this for the first time, here's a quick reminder. We will try to link to all the papers and all the links and all the projects on GitHub in this, and there will be extensive show notes as well as a transcript if there's anything you particularly missed.And I think that's pretty much it. Tammy, are you sitting comfortable?Tammy Sukprasert: Yep. Nice.Chris Adams: In that case, I guess I'll begin. All right. We've linked to this in the show notes, but the paper title, On the Limitations of Carbon Aware Temporal and Spatial Workload Shifting in the Cloud, does kind of give a clue about what this research might actually be about.But for those who are new to this idea, would you mind bringing listeners up to speed about what workloads are, what workload shifting is, when we talk about carbon aware computing?Tammy Sukprasert: Sure. So to understand what workload shifting is, we need to have some idea of why we can shift the workload in the first place. So carbon intensity is based on the contributions of the different energy sources in the electric grid, right? So at different point in time, the demand changes. So there is different contribution of different sources.That's why there's variation in carbon emissions. So there will be a high carbon period and low carbon period. And because of that, instead of running the workload during the high carbon period, you can actually schedule the workload to the lower carbon period or lower carbon region. So some of the workload, you can delay the start time.The workload could be machine learning or some batch jobs. And instead of running right away when it was dispatched during the high carbon period, you can delay the start time and run it during the low current period. And at the same time, there are also, there is another type of workload that you can move or shift the workload around.That could be a web request or an inference request. And instead of running your workload at your own region, you can look into other locations that have lower carbon intensity and migrate the in it.Chris Adams: So if I, so let's say I'm using like maybe a chat bot or like, or I'm using something like maybe chat GPT and I am in, say, Germany, maybe it's dark, it's not very windy and it's not very sunny, for example, and most of the power is coming from coal being burned on the grid, for example, I might, rather than my request being served in Germany at the same time, it could plausibly be, say, forwarded to somewhere else in the world, as long as it's fast enough.So, it might get forwarded to, say, Denmark, which is super windy instead. And that would mean that it would be slightly greener, for example. That's what you were referring to when you spoke about the inference. And then the other thing you mentioned before was like a machine learning job or like a video encoding thing.That's something that I might not be seeing myself. But it's something that probably needs to happen within like a few days or something like that. So it's important, but it's not urgent. And because there's a bit of flexibility, I can choose when to do that to minimize the environmental impact of the extra amount of demand being put onto the grid.Is that what you're, I think that's what you're saying there, right?Tammy Sukprasert: Right. So it's just basically align your job schedule with low carbon period. Yeah. That's the key idea of the shifting.Chris Adams: Gotcha. And then, so you spoke about there's one, which is if I'm doing something through time, that's like the temporal thing. Like I either bring it forward or wait till later. And then there's a spatial idea, which is me just moving it somewhere else. It might be happening at the same time, but it might be happening in Denmark, for example, or Iceland rather than in Germany.Yeah?Tammy Sukprasert: Yes, that's correct.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. So, okay. We've got a good idea about what some of this might be. And a question I might ask is like, why is this interesting to you? Like what, how do you end up finding out or even kind of wanting to research this in the first place?Tammy Sukprasert: Yeah. So there are many works that look into the benefits of reducing carbon reduction based on time shifting or spatial shifting, but it happened in a limited setting. i.e., a small number of regions or specific type of jobs, so people only look into spatial shifting or people only look into temporal shifting, or maybe they only look into a few number of regions but we were wondering, what if we look into both spatial and temporal and with the big picture of the whole world. So instead of looking to into a few regions, we look into 123 regions that we have in our data set and we want to see what is the broad impact of temporal and spatial shifting as a whole.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. So thanks Tammy. So for this research paper, as I understand it, you decided to see how much, what kind of savings you really can achieve with things like Carbon Aware Computing. And a little bit about what kind of conditions might be necessary for these savings to be possible. So would you mind expanding on some of this?We can start simple, fast, simple first, and then we can work our way up. So yeah, let's see, what were the first things we started with? And what were the first, what was like the ideal scenario for the savings? And we can go from there.Tammy Sukprasert: All right. So with the current state of the world, right, the average carbon intensity is about 368 grams per kilowatt hour. And to achieve as much savings as possible in terms of carbon reduction, right, you will want to migrate your workload to Sweden, which is the region with the lowest carbon intensity in our data set. And migrating all the workload to Sweden, you can actually achieve 96 percent carbon reduction for the whole world.Chris Adams: Okay, so what you're talking about there is you've basically gone from an average figure for carbon intensity of electricity to much, much cleaner electricity. And that's in this kind of ideal scenario, that's what you've essentially done. You've moved all of the computing jobs to the cleanest possible electricity there.That's what we've done there. This is the ideal scenario. So where do we go from here then, for example, are there other constraints and things we know we need to take into account when doing this?Tammy Sukprasert: Great. So of course, Sweden cannot take all the workloads in the world, right? So we were like, okay, instead of just moving everything to Sweden, what if we have capacity constraints? So we look into the scenario where every region in the world has an idle capacity of 50%. We're trying to be generous here because we want to understand the impact of the idle capacity on carbon reduction, right? So with every region having 50 percent idle capacity to absorb the job from other regions, instead of achieving, so now no one can actually migrate. So now not everyone can migrate to Sweden, right? Some other regions have to migrate to somewhere else. So, with that, the savings from 96 percent global reduction.Drops to 51 percent.Chris Adams: Okay.Tammy Sukprasert: if not everyone can go to Sweden. Yeah,Chris Adams: All right. That's still not bad. And when you're talking about capacity, you're referring to the fact that say, maybe there's a, like you've used the word region here, and for region, I think that's like a cloud region, like say AWS West or something like that. That's what you're referring to there.And there's maybe a certain amount of reserve capacity they have to hold back. And that's what you're referring to there. So the idea that maybe different cloud places, different cloud data centers have a bunch of spare capacity and that's what they'd be using to move everything there, right? So, okay.Okay. Well we never actually talked about latency constrains Tammy Sukprasert: as well, right. So let's say for example, a web request, you need some service level objective or SLO to respect, to be respected, right. And so we look into that as well. And with, so now we have capacity constraints. So the scenario gets more and more realistic, right?So from 96% you added a capacity constraint, and now the saving drops from 96% to 51%. And we also look into a more realistic case where we think about web requests that have some latency constraint, where there's some service level objective that has to be respected. And so on top of the capacity constraints that we have, that we achieve 51%, we added a 50 milliseconds capacity constraint, and that further reduced the carbon savings to 31%. So in the real life scenario, we are really far from the 96% that we want to aim for, right.Chris Adams: So if I understand that correctly, basically there is a speed, the speed of light is fast, but it's not infinite. And therefore there are certain parts of the world where you definitely need to get a response back in time. And that's why you've introduced this kind of 50 millisecond kind of budget. So it has to be, your ping, your request has to come back in that kind of time budget.And that basically places a second constraint. And even with these two constraints, this is essentially talking about, okay, these are the carbon emissions that can be reduced. By moving things to the various regions that are available based on the capacity of all these other places, like Sweden and then the next cleanest one and the next cleanest one.That's what you're referring to there. All right. Okay. I think I understand that part there. And that honestly, 31 percent still sounds pretty good, to be honest. But if we look at the figures for what, 2%, if we're looking at maybe, A hundred million tons of CO2 each year, and 30 percent of that is 300, is 30 million tons.That's not bad. That's more than at Google, for example. So, okay. That's okay. So that is interesting, then. So this is one of the high level findings you found, assuming you could do this in this kind of decreasingly idealized scenarios. And eventually we get to a point where, okay, this is actually something that you might plausibly try adopting in, or you might be kind of advocating for in certain regions, for example.Tammy Sukprasert: Right. Yeah. The point that we're trying to make is that as you added more constraints, the gap between the ideal case of 96%. Your achievable goal widens. So that's what we're trying to show in this paper.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. And when you're talking about the regions here, these are largely the regions that are inside the electricity maps. Was it the electricity maps dataset or was it just the list of all of the regions for the biggest cloud hyperscalers? I wasn't quite sure when we were looking at this, cause there's a list of them, right?Tammy Sukprasert: Right. So we used a dataset from ElectricityMaps. Shout out to ElectricityMaps. Thank you for the dataset. The dataset has 123 regions worldwide, right? But on the dataset, we group them up, we filtered the regions that overlap with the cloud region, and look at all exclusively the results for the cloud regions. Chris Adams: Ah, I see. So you created this way to make these comparisons basically by saying, maybe there's one data center, which we see in the cloud, like say Amazon AWS West, which is a lot of people refer to as like Oregon West 1. And because we know that a data set of carbon intensity from electricity map says, yes, this is Oregon.You've been able to look at the numbers then in that way, right? That's where some of this is referring to.Tammy Sukprasert: Yeah, so we did a mapping between the electricity map data with the location of the cloud region.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So, and that, and when we're looking at those numbers there, so you mentioned this figure of 96%. Was that looking at just location or was that looking at anything to do with time as well? Because I wasn't quite sure about that part there.Tammy Sukprasert: So the 96 percent is just spatial shifting. So we have a separate result for temporal shifting where everyone in the world, every region in the world can schedule their workload based on one year ahead data. So everyone in the world can schedule their workload if they know aboutChris Adams: perfect forward knowledge. Yeah.Tammy Sukprasert: yeah, perfect, knowledge for one year ahead.And with that, we look at the extreme case, the most ideal case where the workload is a unit job, one hour job, to understand what is the best case scenario for temporal shifting, right? So with that one hour job with perfect knowledge of one year, we can reduce the carbon emission of the whole world by 37%.Chris Adams: That's just temporal, not looking at location as well, right?Tammy Sukprasert: Yes, so we have the results for temporal shifting that if we give every region a perfect knowledge of their carbon intensity a year ahead to plan their workload, what is going to be the best scheduling scenario for the future? Temporal shifting, right? So with everyone having the perfect knowledge for a year, you can reduce the carbon emission of the whole world by 37%.Chris Adams: Ah, okay. So you're looking around maybe 30 percent when we were looking at purely locational, and then we're looking at just purely time. It's around, it's relatively similar, basically, but these are relying on. A kind of visibility that people don't really have a lot of the time, but, and, okay. So the next question I'm kind of asked is, it possible to look at time and space for this to get an idea of what the savings might be next from that then? Tammy Sukprasert: Yeah. So we also look into that in our paper. So if you look at spatial and temporal shifting combined, the result actually shows that spatial shifting dominates the carbon reduction. This is simply because when you move the workload to the lowest region possible in your data set, right, to achieve the savings, that region is already low in carbon intensity, so time shifting doesn't make much of a difference.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay. So it's, basically the clean regions tend to be clean most of the time anyway, rather than being kind of spiking up and down for example. So that's what it seems like you're suggesting there, right?Tammy Sukprasert: Right. It still varies, but the variation between the high carbon period and low carbon period is relatively small.Chris Adams: Okay, well, that kind of makes sense. Cause I mean, now that when you lay out like that, I don't really think about it until you framed it that way, but like Iceland is usually green because it's running on geothermal, which is like pretty standard. Like it's steady. And even when you look at like, say Sweden, for example, there's like a wind and everything like that, but there's lots of hydro and stuff like that.So again, it's not nearly as spiky as, say, Germany, where we are the land of like wind is, we're land of coal and solar. We have lots of coal, which is high carbon intensity, and lots of solar, which is very, low intensity. And flicking back and forth between these things means that we might have big swings, but on average, it's not particularly low compared to Iceland or Sweden, for example.Huh.Tammy Sukprasert: Correct. Yeah.Chris Adams: Oh, right. Wow. I, that's, in retrospect, it kind of seems obvious when you, but things are only obvious with when you look at it like that. And one thing you shared with me before we spoke about this was that some of this stuff is actually like, if people wanted to kind of explore some of these calculations, is this online somewhere? Is it like a GitHub repo or something where you can like poke around at some of these things?Tammy Sukprasert: Yeah. So all the simulations in this paper, it's open source. So please check my lab website, my lab GitHub for the simulations.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. I think I've got the link here. So that's, this is from, so there's literally a repo called decarbonization potential. That's the one you're referring to here, right? On GitHub.Tammy Sukprasert: Yes, that's correct.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay. We'll definitely add that in the show notes because people who aren't like frantically exploring this themselves, it's where it's, right there.Okay. So that was one of the first pieces of research. Essentially that there are some savings that can be made. It's around like the 30 percent mark in a kind of perfect world with location and sort of about the same with temporal. And if I understood it correctly, combining the two doesn't deliver massively more savings than that, right?It's still never more than half this kind of intervention that you could possibly make, right?Tammy Sukprasert: Right, yeah, combining the two doesn't give you double the benefits, because the benefits are dominated by spatial migration, but not much of the temporal, if you combine them together.Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you. I'm really, glad you actually spoke about this because we can now have some of the numbers. To basically talk about the fact that, yeah, we still need to do other things. You can't just like leave your code and make no changes. That might get you some of the way. And if you're looking at Temporal, it'll get you 37 percent of the way in a perfect world.But you still need to make some other changes if you want to kind of reduce the environmental footprint further. Brilliant. Okay. Thank you for that. So we talked about some of the savings you can get in your previous paper. The fact that there's maybe around the 30 percent figure. And if you can move everything through space, you get around maybe 30 ish percent savings.If you look at, if you have perfect knowledge forward for the year, then it's maybe slightly higher than 30%, but it's in the same kind of ballpark. And if you were to look at moving all of your computing jobs through time and space, you can't just double this number. It's still going to be a meaning, it's going to be more than 30%, probably less than 50%.So that's one of the figures that we have. We'll share a link to the GitHub repo for people who are curious about this and want to see if they know what jobs they ran last year, they could see what kind of savings they could have achieved. So that's one thing. And we've spoken so far about some constraints that we have, but there's a few more constraints that we need to take into account.So for example, so far, we've been talking about how much, how many spare servers we have, like data center capacity inside this. But there are other constraints that we need to also think about, which are a little bit further down the stack, as it were. So there may be a certain limited amount of green energy, at which point when you have more demand than that, you might need to have some other forms of generation come on stream.And like, this is something that I think you explored in one of the other papers. So maybe we could talk about that. So, okay, this other paper that you spoke about, maybe we can just like, let us know the name and then we'll see where we go from there.Tammy Sukprasert: Right, so this paper, titled, On the Implications of Choosing Average vs marginal Carbon Intensity Signals on Carbon Aware Optimizations, basically, average vs marginal for carbon aware optimizations, right. So this paper came from the fact that, okay, People have been suggesting, let's shift the workload through time, let's shift the workload to different locations, but we never actually agree on which carbon intensity signal to use for carbon aware optimization, so as the title suggested, there are two types of carbon intensity signals that are mainly used, namely average carbon intensity signal and marginal carbon intensity signal.So for average carbon intensity signal, just think of it as a snapshot of the grid at that point in time, right? And the way it's calculated is the weighted average of carbon emissions weighted by their production,Chris Adams: Okay. So if I just check, I just want to start you there. So make sure I keep keeping up with you. So there's two ways you can measure carbon intensity, like how green electricity is. And this first one, this average one is basically saying, well, I've got maybe two coal fired power generators and one wind farm, so therefore I'll apply double the weighting of the coal versus one of the wind farm.That's kind of what, that's a simplified version, but that's essentially how you work out an average figure, right? Tammy Sukprasert: Right, right, but marginal carbon intensity signal is different. The way it's calculated is the carbon intensity with respect to the change in demand. So let's say just now you said you have two wind farms and one coal, but the next unit of demand is going to be served by gas generator. So then the marginal carbon intensity signal is the current intensity signal of that of the gas generator.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. So rather than looking at the average, it's almost like the kind of consequences of me doing a particular thing. That's what we're looking at there, right?Tammy Sukprasert: That's correct.Chris Adams: Okay. And this, so now we've got this. I hope if you're listening and you're struggling, this is really hard.So, thank you for staying with us so far. So this was the general, this is what we were looking into. And, as I understand it, this incentivizes different actions, or if you were looking at this, you might choose to move things to a different region or choose to run a computing job or do something at a different time.That's been my understanding of this. Is this is what you looked into then?Tammy Sukprasert: Right, so the paper look into the fact that if you follow one signal as a scheduling signal, you might end up in more carbon emission based on the perspective of the other signal. Yeah, so it turns out like you cannot just follow one signal and hoping that you will do well based on the other signals perspective as well.Chris Adams: Ah, okay. All right. So this adds another layer of complexity to this then. So if I understand it, I could be following one and that gives me some idea here, but there are certain places where they can be different. They can have different signals. So like some places might be the same, but there are certain parts of the world where I might have quite radically different signals between these two.That's what I think I'm hearing from that.Tammy Sukprasert: Right, because the two carbon intensity signals are calculated so differently, so in, within one region, the signals are generally not correlated. So when you schedule for one signal, let's say, for example, I use in the marginal carbon intensity signal as a scheduling signal, right? And I place a workload in this low carbon period based on marginal, but within the same time period, someone else is like, looking from the perspective of the average carbon intensity signal, they'll be like, "Hey, I wouldn't place my workload here because it's high carbon period right now."So it has some conflicting decision making.Chris Adams: And, presumably when you looked in the, when you're doing this research, were there particular parts of the world where you see wild spreads between these two places? Like there's some places that it's quite safe, right?Tammy Sukprasert: So in the paper, we look into, Arizona and Virginia for this kind of conflicting scheduling. So Arizona has fluctuating average carbon intensity signal, but really flat marginal and vice versa for Virginia. So let's just take Arizona, for example. Like if. You want to schedule based on marginal carbon intensity signal, you wouldn't do anything because it's flat.You can just place a workload wherever you want. But if you want to schedule the workload based on the average signal, you'll be like, I would place my workload at this particular time slot because it had the lowest carbon intensity signal during the day.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay. So this suggests that you're going to need to be really explicit about which kind of signal you're following. And, there are certain parts of the world where it, you're more exposed to the differences between this, for example. That's what I think I'm hearing there.Wow. that sounds, yeah. Sustainability in software does not get easy. Okay. So that's one of the things we were looking at here. And, it sounds like that you've spent quite a lot of time looking into this, looking at this whole field then, and, presumably when people are taking their first steps to trying to work out the environmental impact of software, for example, would you suggest, is there like an order of things you might start with this?Cause this feels like relatively advanced, high level, complicated, calculations here, and is it possible to kind of look at the environmental impact of software without this straight away? Like, can you add this a little bit later, perhaps? Maybe there's like some rules of thumb or some approaches you might suggest as a researcher who has looked into this and tried to understand the environmental footprint of some software and said, "well, okay, you might want to just look at the total amount of energy used or the total amount of resources used first, before you look at, say, this carbon aware stuff. And if you can look at carbon aware, then maybe look at location first" or something like that. Cause this feels like kind of exciting, but this also feels like it gets complicated very, very quickly.Tammy Sukprasert: So when I started working, on carbon intensity signals, I find that the average carbon intensity signal is easier to understand simply because you just look at the overall picture of the grid and you take the average of the energy sources, right? But for marginal carbon intensity, it was interesting concept for me.You look into the carbon emission based on the change in demand, but I was having a hard time understanding this because in a practical sense, I feel like it's going to be challenging of understanding which power plant is actually serving my compute workload. Like, it's not transparent enough.Chris Adams: I see. So there's almost like a counterfactual you're, comparing it against like a, how do you know if someone, I think you, we spoke about this sort of like there's a power stack, right? Like, yes, I've switched off, I've stopped pulling power from the grid, for example, but, how do I know that no one else has pulled power from the grid at the same time?Is that what you're kind of getting at there?Tammy Sukprasert: Right. For marginal carbon intensity for me, the concept is actually good. Like, you're responsible for the carbon emission that you triggered, right. But, In, reality, like you don't know which power source is serving your demand and whether in the next time it's to serve by the same force. So for example, like I plug in my laptop only, maybe I could, my laptop maybe is fulfilled by coal, but someone, let's say, Chris, you unplug your lab, right? Maybe now you left the, now your, the demand decreases is my laptop still, my laptop power is still fulfilled by coal? Like I don't have that. So...Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay. Alright. That makes, no, that makes a bit more sense. And I kind of, I think I understand why, I think I follow basically the reasoning between why you might start with one before starting with the other one. Because I think I agree with you on that. I found the average a bit easier for me to get my head around two as well.And, marginal does sound really cool, but I don't think I'm very confident explaining it to other people. And I think that, I think my experiences seem to echo yours, actually. I'm glad you said that because I did wonder if it was just me and that does make it a bit easier for me too.I feel a bit better about myself now, actually. Thanks for that, Tammy. Okay. So, this has basically been your day job for the last few months, diving into the world of carbon signals and things like that. Is this some of the continued research you're doing, or are you looking into other fields now beyond software carbon intensity and working out the differences of carbon, working out the, potentials of carbon aware computing here?Tammy Sukprasert: So I'm still working on carbon aware computing stuff. Currently I'm working on a web service that harnesses renewable energy and I have to think about how we should handle the workload when there is no renewable energy available.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So one thing this does seem to suggest is that if we're just looking at carbon in here, that's not showing us the whole picture. And even when we just look at carbon. We end up with quite a, we can end up with like difficult or conflicting signals for this. So it may be that we need to, we might need to expand the way we think about as software engineers, we think about the next layer down and say, like, are there other things we take into account beyond just looking at marginal or looking at average?Maybe there's something else we need to do or another way of thinking about the grid and how our interactions as software engineers kind of work with it and how that can have an impact there.Tammy Sukprasert: Right. So I think we need to move beyond the static signal and instead maybe look into other characteristics to take into consideration when doing carbon aware optimization, maybe in future direction, maybe we would agree on some other signal that captures the long term impact of the grid, like average carbon intensity signal and the current, like the instantaneous change in carbon intensity, like marginal. So yeah, apart from optimizing for carbon efficiency as a community, I think everyone should keep in mind about like, we need a better metric to capture this carbon emission.Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you for that. Tammy, this was a ride for me. Every single time I come to trying to understand the environmental footprint of software, I think I understand that there's a whole nother set for this. And you've really opened my eyes to this. Tammy, if people are interested in this field, are there any other projects or work that you've read about recently that you'd like to draw people's attention to?Tammy Sukprasert: Yeah, I think you should look at Carbon Scaler. I think that's one of the things IChris Adams: Oh.Tammy Sukprasert: recommend people to check it out.Chris Adams: Okay, we'll have to share a link to that because that's totally new to me. I've never... I'm not aware of that one actually.Tammy Sukprasert: So yeah, it's a system that reacts based on the available carbon intensity, and you scale the workload based on that. So you don't have to shift the workload.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. And if people want to find out more about the work that you're doing, where should people be following? Is there maybe, is there a website or are you on LinkedIn? Like what's the best place for people to direct people's attention if they wanted to follow up and read actually some of the work that you've been publishing and talking about here today?Tammy Sukprasert: Yeah, so, I'm on LinkedIn. You can search my name up, Tammy Sukprasert, or T Sukprasert for the link, yeah.Chris Adams: Brilliant. All right. Well, Tammy, thank you so much for giving us some of your time and sharing what you've learned from here. It's been absolutely fascinating. And we now finally have some numbers about what we can achieve with carbon aware computing. At least we have some numbers now to work with. So thank you once, again for this, and I hope you have a lovely week.Cheers, Tammy.Tammy Sukprasert: Chris, cheers.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode!

Environment Variables host Chris Adams is joined by Jo Lindsay Walton, a senior research fellow at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and co-author of the report The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures. They delve into the intersection of climate and AI, exploring the environmental impact of AI technologies and the challenges of decarbonizing the ICT sector. Jo discusses key takeaways from the report, including the importance of understanding AI's direct and indirect impacts, the nuanced roles of big tech companies, and strategies for critically assessing claims of AI-driven sustainability. This insightful conversation highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches and robust collaboration to navigate the complex relationship between technology and climate action.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteJo Lindsay Walton: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures [01:15]Microsoft files patents for carbon capture and grid-aware workload scheduler - DCD [07:54] Potential of artificial intelligence in reducing energy and carbon emissions of commercial buildings at scale | Nature Communications [16:30]Resources:Digital Humanities Climate Coalition | Data Culture & Society [02:08]Breakdown of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions by sector - Our World in Data [10:29]The climate impact of ICT: A review of estimates, trends and regulations [10:51]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Jo Lindsay Walton: There's this great metaphor that Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have in their book, AI Snake Oil. They say, "imagine we just talked about vehicles. We didn't talk about bicycles or cars or buses or trains. And we tried to talk about the climate impact of vehicles." It would be very difficult to do.And that's essentially what AI discourse does, right?Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Like seemingly everyone else in the industry, we've been talking about AI a fair amount recently, and earlier this year, in September, the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab published their report, The Cloud and the Climate, Navigating AI Powered Futures.It's not a small report, weighing in at around 190 pages, and it has a number of key messages we'll be exploring in this episode. Also, one of the previous guests from back in September, 2023, Jo Walton was one of the authors of this report, and he was a nice enough to make some time to join us today on the pod.So, Jo, thank you so much for coming onto the pod again. Can I give you a bit of time to introduce yourself and what you do in your day to day for people who missed the last episode back in September?Jo Lindsay Walton: Hello. Yes. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. So I'm a senior research fellow in arts, climate, and technology at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab. My day to day is 90 percent playing with my cat, but I am also part of the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition and the newly launched Climate Acuity Initiative, which does facilitation and CPD training around climate and tech in hopefully fun ways involving storytelling and games and things like that.And yeah, it's just, it's really nice to be back on this wonderful podcast. I feel like the host of SNL.Chris Adams: Thanks. So, just before I check, when you say CPD, CPD is continuous professional development. People who want to build understanding of climate into their professional life, right? Is that what it is?Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, that's it. Exactly. And it's, really I guess, part of my work is at the intersection of climate and technology, but I'm not personally super technical. Most of your listeners probably have a lot more technical knowledge than I do. What I am really interested in is communicating around these issues and education as well.So I'm raising them for all the stakeholders for whom they might be important.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay. And, on the subject of other three letter acronyms, I've just had my cat walking myself, so if it walks across the, when we're recording, please do forgive it. It's just, that's what he does sometimes. Okay. Folks, if you are listening and you've never heard my voice before, I am Chris Adams.I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, which is one of the members of the Green Software Foundation. The Green Web Foundation is a nonprofit based in the Netherlands, focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet. By 2030, I also work as one of the policy working group chairs inside the policy work in, inside the GSF, as well as being the host on this podcast as well.All right, then. So just before we dive in, if we speak about a particular paper or a report or a link, we will add these in the show notes. And if you, if there's something you're missing, please do send us an email or get in contact us because we do our best to keep these available and like useful resources for people.All right, then. Jo, are you sitting comfortably?Jo Lindsay Walton: Very comfortably. Thank you.Chris Adams: All right, then. I think I'll begin. All right, then. So before we dive into the report and some of the key takeaways, which we'll be going into more detail, can we talk a little bit about why you decided to put some time into this report in the first place and how this entire project came about, please?Because I know that you're, you said yourself, you're a researcher and in the Unix School of Media Arts and Humanities at Sussex University. And this came from the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition. Now, most software developers, when they think about AI and reports, it might be something that's within the industry.So I want to give you a bit of space to talk about why it's interesting or why it's relevant to have people who aren't inside technology, who aren't like practitioners per se, talking about some of this. Because I think there's a different, a couple of perspectives that you might have that is worth.Making clear for people, for example, or some techniques that humanities people might actually have that, the developers or techies might not be so cognizant of. Jo Lindsay Walton: Oh Yeah. Absolutely.So the report, as well as the kind of DHCC toolkit, which is an online resource, these are, they're very much community projects and they have an open source ethos and a part of that is an aspiration to interdisciplinarity. The report itself is a kind of stretch goal or spin off from a small innovate UK project that I was doing with GreenPixie, who are this fabulous cloud carbon data company.Yeah. And we were basically exploring how to talk to a wider set of stakeholders about the cloud and about the climate. So not just IT people, but also, for example, chief sustainability officers, people who need to know about this stuff. That might not be quite so up to speed on the technical detail.And over the course of that, it grew apparent to me that there was a gap really for an accessible resource that didn't oversimplify and that really tries to be a bit holistic. Can you really understand one bit of it without understanding the big picture? Can you, I don't know, understand how your little piece of software that you're trying to optimize is going to have an impact without thinking at least a little bit about carbon accounting and the greenhouse gas protocol and carbon offsetting? Can you really understand how green a data center is without understanding a little bit about how energy gets into the grid and then gets into a data center and the kind of energy procurement rules around that?Chris Adams: Okay. I hadn't actually realized that you've been working with GreenPixie and just for people who are new to that term, GreenPixie is a UK-based SaaS provider of essentially carbon accounting tooling for cloud, just like, so if you're using Amazon's or Microsoft's or Google's cloud carbon calculator, they provide something very similar, but with a more kind of open methodology that allows them to be comparable to each other.Really nice to know that there's, I didn't realize that you two would be working together on that. And that's cool, actually.Jo Lindsay Walton: So, I mean, they, particularly that collaboration informed the green ops section of the report. But as you allude to, there is this attempt throughout the report to also bring in DHCC type perspectives, that kind of humanities flavor, really drilling into the details of the cultural factors.So not just how we communicate things, but also how we imagine things, I guess. Big tech and tech communities don't just have direct impacts. They also shape the way that we imagine the future. So Google is not in the business of building kind of direct air capture, giant reverse hairdryers that are sucking carbon out of the sky. That's not something they do, but they do influence the way we think about technology and climate. And so they also influence the way that we think about things like greenhouse gas removal technologies.Chris Adams: Although, earlier on this year, we saw that Microsoft patented, actually, some of the use of some particular things around carbon capture in data centers to use some of the waste heat to actually separate captured carbon, so it can be actually stored in other places. So, there's maybe more links than we actually had, yeah, exactly.Jo Lindsay Walton: That's really interesting.Chris Adams: Yeah, I'll share, we'll share aJo Lindsay Walton: link in the show notes for sure.Chris Adams: Definitely. All right. Okay. So that gives me a good idea and then provides a bit of context to where this was and for people who are not used to the UK, Innovate UK is one of the government funding agencies that has provided some of the funding for some of this.So that's where that has come from. All right. And so maybe we should talk a little bit about the report. So there's a number of takeaways. In fact, I counted more than five when I was running through the report. So there was a lot there, right? And there are some things which probably don't need too much attention because we're, because of the listenership.So for example, we probably won't spend too much time dwelling on one of the takeaways being we're in a climate crisis or the other one bang, yeah, that digital has a physical basis. These are things that we can assume that people have internalized already, right? But there was actually some nuance to this because.While people do talk about that, the kind of magnitude of the numbers might not be something that people are quite so comfortable about. And also, it's an area of contention in many cases, many places. And as someone who's been looking at a lot of the literature, I figured it might be interesting to have a bit of space to talk about one of the other takeaways, which you shared was basically the ICT sector is not a leading contributor to global warming, but it still must decarbonize rapidly.Now, I think It'd be useful to unpack some of this because a lot of the time, a lot of the stories do talk about either data centers as like this new monster or new kind of like media baddie, for example. And it seems like there's, you've got a kind of more nuanced take on this and I wanted to give a bit of space for you to allow you to talk about some of that.Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, I mean, coverage of the drivers of global warming is totally out of proportion to what those drivers actually are. We've seen data centers be in the mainstream media quite a lot recently. So I think maybe that's falling victim to that a little bit. Where do most emissions come from? Food production, for example, is absolutely huge.And we hear a little bit about food miles. But food miles are not a massive part of it. A much bigger determinant of the impact is, "has the food come from a cow or from a nut?" Constructing and heating and lighting homes, road transport, fugitive emissions, fossil fuel companies basically being a little bit sloppy as they extract these fossil fuels and letting them escape.There's a good, a lovely breakdown on Our World In Data, which is maybe we can put in the show notes as well, although a little bit dated now. ICT? What is the impact of ICT on global warming? Would like to offer a provocation and hope that maybe one of your listeners can, prove me wrong. I think nobody knows.I think nobody knows ICT's impact on global warming. There's that 2021 Freitag et al. estimate that gets quoted quite a lot, but it's been a very, busy four or five years. I feel like I've lived through the AI singularity. And there's more complexity than that, right? When you factor in secondary and tertiary impacts, both good and bad, from the digital, then you're in the realm of deep uncertainty.There is unlikely to be any expert consensus. Even so, despite that complexity, it's not controversial that tech needs to decarbonize along with everything else. It's all hands on deck. Everybody's on board with that. All the big companies have these ambitious pledges. What's concerning me a little bit is how that discourse is shifting.So for example, Microsoft in 2020 sets out its pledge to achieve net zero. Chris Adams: Moonshot. The zero carbon moonshot you're referringJo Lindsay Walton: yeah, yes, And we talk about that term moonshot in, in the report, actually, cause it's a, it's an interesting metaphor. And the moon has, is now said to be Chris Adams: 5 years further away. Yeah. Jo Lindsay Walton: The moon has moved five times. So actually I think that's incorrect.I think the moon. The moon has been vaporized. The moon, as in Neil Stevenson's science fiction novel, Seveneves, the moon no longer exists. The target has already been missed. And that happened this year. "Okay, how is that possible?" you're asking. Does Microsoft have a time machine? How can they fail their net zero pledge of 2030 in 2024?Well, that's the way that net zero pledges work. They are about cumulative emissions. They're not about a snapshot of emissions at a particular date. They are about the pathway from the date of the pledge 2. 0 staying within a given emissions budget, right? So you could draw a descending line graph and it's about the area under that line, not about the point at which the line intersects the axis.And to their credit, Microsoft absolutely was transparent about this back in 2020. They showed the linear descent to zero. And by my estimates, that budget was burst sometime this year. maybe now, maybe as we are recording this podcast. And poverty is no effect. The concerning bit is that this isn't being talked about more openly.It's much more this discourse, as you say, of "okay, now we have AI." In 2020, we didn't know about that, but now we have AI and AI has these sustainability benefits. Okay, so if that's the argument, if that's the implied case for emissions increasing, let's be very clear about that. Are we saying that it is prudent to increase emissions from the tech sector for the next few years?Are we saying that the tech sector has been doing the right thing emissions-wise for the past few years, because those emissions on a robust methodology are shown to be more than offset by the sustainability benefits that they can provide on an appropriate timescale?Chris Adams: We'll be touching on that a little bit later, but, alright. Okay. Thank you that I appreciate you providing a bit of extra context on that. And just to check if I understand, you said one or two things about, okay there is, the way you could work out the environmental footprint of the ICT sector when people talk about the direct impact, you said there's like a primary, tertiary, sorry, secondary and tertiary, presumably you're talking about like there is a direct impact, but there's an impact from people, what you enable with that computing and stuff like that. Is that what you're referring to with that primary, secondary and tertiary stuff?Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, absolutely. So you and I are on a, Zoom call now. If we weren't on the Zoom call, I probably would have ridden to you on a giant lump of blazing coal. Or some more carbon intensive mode of transport. And those are very, complex calculations to do. You have rebound effects where, things look like they're providing efficiencies, but those efficiencies are mitigated or more than offset by increased volume, it's complicated stuff.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. Thank you for providing that extra kind of elucidation or like clarifying that part there. Okay. There's another thing I wanted to give a bit of time for actually was this one. You said, and given that we just spoke about kind of cloud giants and one of the takeaways, which was none of the cloud giants is a monolith.So this is a bit of a kind of more nuanced take on big tech bad, big tech good that we often see in the discourse, because it's very simple and attractive way to talk about that, but it sounds like you're trying to go for something a bit more sophisticated there, a bit more multidimensional there.Maybe we could spend a bit of time trying to see what you were trying to get at there or what the report was trying to really get across to people.Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah. I think climate invites us to really reflect on our roles in our professional lives and other aspects of our lives. And sometimes to challenge and push back on the parameters that are set for us in those roles. And that may mean that your company is pushing a particular line or your bosses is pushing a particular line, but there is a kind of, there's a practical incentive and there's, frankly, there's a kind of ethical duty to be critical about that and to step outside of the boxes that you're asked to perform in.And definitely these companies are huge companies. There's a great diversity of knowledge, a great diversity of kind of politics, really, within any particular industry. big tech company, nevermind between tech companies as well. So in the realm of the greenhouse gas protocol and how we do carbon accounting, there's a lot of disagreement within big tech between on the one hand, Amazon and Meta who want one kind of particular set of rules as the greenhouse gas protocol is revised and Google and perhaps Microsoft who would like to see it go another way.I think we look at this a little bit in the report. We look at a nature article that is largely authored by, Microsoft researchers. And spend a little bit of time in a hopefully good natured roast of the estimate of the carbon impact of AI, which the methodology there just isn't really fit for purpose.If you drill, really drill, drill, drill baby, drill down into the details, you find that it is based on one back of envelope kind of estimate by Vijay Rakesh, who is really a stock market analyst who said that he expected NVIDIA to deliver a hundred thousand AI servers in 2023.It's not a sufficient basis for estimating the global impact of AI, but that's hopefully not the main point because the bigger part of this article, which I think speaks to your question about companies not being monoliths and trying to build alliances for progressive and robust climate policy that cut across your loyalty to a particular company.The proposal of this article is that AI researchers should work more closely with climate, the climate modeling community, and that AI should be integrated into the IPCC's shared socioeconomic pathways and integrated assessment modeling. Which is, I have mixed feelings about that. Like the closer collaboration sounds really great. It does feel like in that particular article, there isn't yet a very deep understanding of how those climate models work. They're not really scenarios. They're more like building blocks for scenarios. And to some extent, they already do build in the possibility of technological change.So you could go down a rabbit hole as to whether or not AI is already priced into these models or not. I think what it speaks to is a certain kind of nervousness here, like, okay, so we are big tech, we are AI, we're presenting this AI powered future, and we're increasing our emissions, and we're doing this on the basis that we think, we believe, that AI is going to unlock all these fantastic sustainability benefits.But can somebody please check our working? We recognize that we may have conflict of interests. We need to do this in a more collaborative way. We need to have all kinds of expertise and we need to have more independent voices. I think that's what that article is ultimately calling for.Chris Adams: Okay. So there was one thing you said that you were getting at there was the idea that cloud giants not being a monolith isn't just within the cloud giant. If you think about it horizontally, like Meta and Amazon having one point of view. And I think you're referring to the emissions first versus the 24/7 kind bond fight about how do you count energy as green?Because the current process has a few significant issues with basically, there's people trying to work out a new approach and you have two camps. So that's one thing you were talking about. And then there's almost one within each company. Like there are different people who have different drivers inside that. If you just assume that someone's working for say Amazon, that ends up being a very lossy way of talking about, okay, what are they doing? And like, what might, the drivers be, for example?Jo Lindsay Walton: Absolutely. And some of those disagreements might not be so visible for obvious reasons. People have to be tactful and work in constructive ways with their colleagues. I mean, to respond to that, I think that I, share a bit of alarm about timescales and, solutions being proposed that aren't immediately referred back.If you've got any kind of plan to do with the climate, check it against IPCC timescales. We were supposed to, in the next six years, cut carbon emissions by more than half, four of which are going to be under a Trump administration. And I would definitely, I would celebrate that kind of all hands on deck approach where everybody's doing everything they can in their role and maybe rethinking their role in creating alliances.At the same time, I also think we need a little bit of reflection on actually which hands are on deck. Are there problems that aren't owned by anybody, risks that are not being addressed by anybody. And I think that we need a little bit, in the AI space, there has been talk of pauses and kind of moratoriums, not always for the best reasons, but I do think these are really important tools in our toolkit rather than, "okay, we're going to just keep doing what we're doing and, hope to sustainabilize it as quickly as we can,"actually, saying "maybe we need to pause this and maybe we can pick up where we left off, but we need to pause it while we're gathering more data or we're greening our energy supply or we're building capacity" or whatever it might be. I wrote an article about this in the Fantastic Branch magazine called Pause.I just realized this morning, I should have called it after Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I should have called it How to Blow Up an AI Pipeline. But yeah, I something else for that.Chris Adams: Yeah. All right. All right. Okay. Thank you for that. Let's move to the next one. Cause you spoke a little bit about AI and, in the report, you actually spend a bit of time talking about sustainability. Basically the sustainability of AI, but also AI for sustainability. Right. And these being two somewhat different things.Now we talk about sustainability of AI on this podcast quite a lot. So we talk about how to use like more efficient algorithms or how to clean the energy and some of the steps you might take. And obviously the report talks about that, but there's actually something that you speak about in terms of the claims about AI for sustainability goals that you spend some time talking about and like you also raised, like "these are some of the red flags you might be looking for." Could you maybe, are there any like specific messages you might use or anything you draw to people's attention to when they're trying to navigate claims about AI for sustainability and like, "yes, there's a massive energy footprint, but the upside is this, for example, and these are the upsides that we're delivering."Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, absolutely. And all that kind of sustainability of AI stuff is extremely exciting. And, as you say, we, touch on that in the report. AI for sustainability. There's this great metaphor that Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have in their book, AI Snake Oil, they say, "imagine we just talked about vehicles.We didn't talk about bicycles or cars or buses or trains. And we tried to talk about the climate impact of vehicles. It would be very difficult to do." And that's essentially what AI discourse does, right? We don't on a regular basis make these kinds of fine differentiations in public discourse, in journalism, in conversations with friends.So right before the show, actually, we were talking about acronyms and I tried to come up with an, acronym of the things that you might want to ask when you find a claim that AI is delivering some kind of sustainability benefit. So the first thing to consider is maturity. That might be technology readiness level whatever it may be.Often there is a claim is inflated. It says something is already happening when actually what we see is that there's been a study that says it might work. It could be rolled out commercially, scaled up in five, 10, 20 years, whatever it might be. So maturity is one. Then additionality. So AI is responsible for delivering this sustainability benefit.Well, do your best to identify which bit the AI is responsible for. Often an AI sustainability project will involve data collection and analysis, and then some kind of efficiency gains from that. What could have been delivered with the, with more kind of traditional data analytic methods? And then generative or discriminative or some other type of AI.What kind of AI are we talking about here? These are often conflated. Is it even machine learning at all? Is it something, some cool new thing like, I don't know if it's new, but active inference, for example. And how big is the model and so on? What kind of AI are we looking at? And then finally adaptation versus mitigation.So these are the two broad categories of climate action that most climate scientists will recognize. And they're interrelated and they overlap in various ways, but mitigation is really about decarbonizing,Chris Adams: Yeah. Green energy instead of fossil energy. And then the mitigation might be building the seawalls because the sea levels have risen. Stuff like that. Jo Lindsay Walton: otherChris Adams: I say, yeah. adaptation is building the seawalls because the sea levels have risen. Mitigation would be switching out of fossil fuels and burning, using greener energy, for example, whichJo Lindsay Walton: Absolutely.Chris Adams: theJo Lindsay Walton: As can imagine with AI, if the AI has a problematic carbon footprint, but delivers substantial adaptation benefits, that again is a very hard calculation to do. You, can't simply. Subtract one, one from the other. The acronym unfortunately came out as MAGA, which has already been taken. So, I'll keep working on on it.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. I don't know how far that's going to go. I'll be honest. But. All right then, so, so that's one of the things you're speaking about was this idea that these are two separate things and it's worth being aware that there's, there, there are different ways you can essentially critically engage with some of these claims.And I think I'm get where you're going with some of that now. And I've realized that I'm basically an Englishman in Germany, speaking to someone, to an Englishman who's also in the UK. And this was a report that came from a UK research unit. And obviously there's a UK research focus on this, but it's also, we're also in a scenario where there is new government in the UK who have very aggressive goals of like decarbonizing the entire grid by 2030.So we spoke about 2030 target before, and like, this is one where there is a goal to decarbonize the grid by 2030 and reduce nationally carbon emissions by more than 80 percent by 2035. So this is like, in many ways, this is like a similar kind of moonshot thing we have here, but there's also, it's the government is also very, Gung ho right now on the increased deployment of data centers around the UK as one of the kind of drivers for growth, for example. So I wanted to ask you, like, when you look at this, do you see these goals as complementary or compatible or are there any specific areas of attention for the UK that are like for policymakers should be thinking about if they want these goals to be possible, for example?Because yeah, there's, it sounds like it's, there's probably a lot of nuance to it, and this is something that you've been having to navigate or have to think about.Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah. And I mean, I don't know. I really don't know. And I wonder what guests we will need to assemble on your show to solve this question. It's definitely a, it's an interdisciplinary type question, right? We need people who can think about the counterfactuals, the opportunity costs. If data centers are not expanding at this particular rate in the UK, what's happening in that alternative universe?There's in the report, there's a quite upbeat section lead authored by my colleague, Benjamin Sovacool, which is all about the wonderful things data centers can do to be more efficient and environmentally friendly. And so from a UK perspective, you can see those things going together. Yes, we're going to, we're going to be a leader on net zero.We're also going to be a leader on data centers. And we're going to do that by having the greenest, the best, the most efficient data centers. Microsoft is shifting from concrete and steel to a special new timber. The new exciting innovations happening all the time. As a thought experiment. If we were building global data center infrastructure from scratch, knowing everything that we know, how would we design it?Maybe you can get some experts on your show and ask them this. I've heard it said that data centers are these kind of fabulous heat generators that just happen to be able to do computation as well. One of the reviewers of the report said that. And so we should really go in hard on small and medium data centers woven into the fabric of our urban environments.Anne Currie, who, we did that previous really fun episode about data centers on the moon and various things. Anne has said that a key consideration is that you really don't want to be competing with other local energy needs. So this is a contrasting view. You don't want to be displacing demand into carbon-intensive, generation then claiming that you have these wonderful green credentials.So then the question is really, where in the world would you locate a data center and the green energy to power that, data center where it otherwise wouldn't be used for, anything else? How will data center expansion in the UK affect data center expansion in the EU or in Trump's America? Who is doing all this?This is the real question for me. Who is thinking about these things? I mean, I'm here and glimpsing how huge and complicated a question it is. Who is doing this difficult holistic joined up thinking, including thinking through those second and third order effects? Are policymakers in the UK thinking in those terms?Is SECR reporting going to have any impact? The Environment Agency, they like the detail and the nuance, but their remit has tended to be a bit more narrow. Their budget has been absolutely slashed under the conservatives. Is the onus on civil society to, to work through consultations, local planning authorities on a kind of data center by data center basis?Is it maybe up to Environment Variables? Maybe it's on you.Chris Adams: Well, what I can share with you is that we've got someone who's leading one of the distributed data center companies to give their side of the story in a future one, precisely to talk about okay, just how you spoke about the idea of like you mentioned that quota of AI, and imagine if we only spoke about vehicles, I wonder if there's maybe a thing where we talk, there's a similar comparable way of thinking about data centers, right?Like if we only think about data centers as one thing, rather than being like, there's a typology of this giant, gigantic out of town hyperscale data centers, like gigawatt scale. And there's one at the other end, which are not the same, for example. Maybe there's a need for a kind of different strategy to think about what kinds of data centers make sense in what circumstances.So like, maybe that you want to have certain kinds of computation. Like you mentioned that word, like inside the urban fabric, and there's certain things where you don't want to have it because you might have a different use for this. This makes me think of actually China. So China does have something along these lines, where in China, there's a really aggressive target to A, get lots and lots of data center, lots and lots of computer computation out of relatively old data centers into much more advanced centralized hyperscale kind of facilities, which are being paired with the kind of energy bases where there are just significant amounts of clean generation being put together there.So you've got co-locating hyperscale data centers with the kind of generation that you have. So that you have different approaches and maybe there's something that you might see like that in the UK. I, don't know, but, I found maybe it's someone we should speak to. And if you're listening to this podcast and who is thinking about that.Please do suggest them because we'd like to cover that in a bit more detail. All right then, you've spoken about two of the things that I think we, I'd like to just, if I can, jump into. You mentioned SECR, I don't know, could you maybe expand on who that is or what that is for people who aren't familiar with that acronym?Jo Lindsay Walton: Oh, Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting regulations.Chris Adams: okay, all right, so that's basically UK government has that data centers above a certain size have to report, basically, right?Jo Lindsay Walton: Companies, yeah.Chris Adams: Oh, okay, got it, okay, thank you. All right then, okay, so we've touched on quite a few, we've gone into a number of different areas for this and we're coming up to time. So I guess to ask you, you've spent this time and you've put a labor of love into this report, for example, but that came out in September, in the last, in the kind of subsequent months.And are there any, is there any kind of, what work is exciting you? What things do you want to, are you looking at, you think, "this is really exciting, I wish more people would, who are interested in sustainable software, I wish they would look at this," for example. What's on your radar these days?Jo Lindsay Walton: Well, it's been a very kind of busy and strange couple of months. So just even as you say that, it just reminds me how quickly these things move. Basically, I feel like I'm a little bit behind and I need to listen to some podcasts and click on some LinkedIn links and, bring myself up to speed.I continue to be delighted by the work of the Green Software Foundation. I'm a big fan of your podcast. The GARP Climate Risk podcast is one that I like. Top three podcasts, the other one would be the Bunta Vista podcast, but that's not actually about climate and environment. That's just people getting high and reading news stories.I'm interested in further collaborative work at a smaller scale with individual kind of companies and organizations. We've been doing a little bit of work with kind of cultural heritage organizations, thinking about their carbon impact. The focus of that work is under the rubric of climate acuity.Which we've recently launched. It's connected to the DHCC in that we have a workshop that we do called the Digital Sustainability Game. So I'm, excited about continuing to iterate that work with all the constant barrage of developments that happen week by week in this space.Chris Adams: It's pretty exhausting. I could, I can definitely share that. I struggled to keep up myself and this is pretty much my job.Jo Lindsay Walton: I think, yeah, I think we do need to take a break every now and then. Pause, moratorium.Chris Adams: Okay. On that note, we're coming up to time actually. So Jo, thank you so much for coming onto this and providing extra context to the report. If people are curious, where should they be looking if they wanted to read this report themselves?Jo Lindsay Walton: It will be in the show notes, or if you type in The Cloud and The Climate AI powered or Navigating AI-Powered Futures, I think it should pop up.Chris Adams: As the first result in pretty all the search engines.Jo Lindsay Walton: I hope so anyway, otherwise something's very wrong.Chris Adams: Well, in that case, folks, that's what to look for then. All right then. Well, Jo, thank you so much for coming on to this. This has been really, fun. And let's do this again, maybe next year. Like continue this tradition of every 12 months, we have you come on and tell us what you've been up to.Jo Lindsay Walton: I would absolutely love that. Thanks so much for having me.Chris Adams: All right. Thanks, Jo. Have a lovely afternoon. All right. And take care of yourself. Bye! Hey everyone! Thanks for listening! Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing.It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Carlos Pignataro, a leader in sustainable network architecture with two decades at Cisco, shares his insights on energy-efficient networking. He discusses how to balance performance with ecological responsibilities through dynamic software and IoT technologies. The conversation highlights the role of content delivery networks in enhancing sustainability. Pignataro emphasizes integrating green practices within business models and the significance of collaboration in driving innovation for a greener future. Tune in for actionable strategies to make networks both efficient and eco-friendly.

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Anne Currie speaks to Wilco Burggraaf, a lead green practitioner and architect at HighTech Innovators, for an engaging discussion on integrating sustainability into software development. Wilco shares his journey into green software, the inspiration behind his innovative workshops, and his efforts to build a vibrant green tech community in the Netherlands. The conversation explores his articles on the Software Carbon Intensity standard, the complexities of balancing micro and macro sustainability goals, and the synergy between FinOps and green software. Tune in for actionable insights and strategies to make greener choices in tech while aligning sustainability with business goals.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteWilco Burggraaf: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Use of the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) and Impact Framework (IF) Tools [39:35]The Quantum Entanglement of Software Sustainability: Navigating the Micro and Macro Scales of Carbon Footprint Measurement [41:55]Is this Green IT / Green Software at its Core? [47:13]Events:Green Software - The Netherlands | Meetup [50:48]Resources:Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [41:14] Green Software Maturity Matrix [46:16]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript below:Wilco: At some point I came to the conclusion, like, okay, we can measure a lot of things, we can have all these metrics but at some point the numbers are not going to change outcomes. Decisions do.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field, who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Anne: Welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host today, Anne Currie. And joining us is Wilco Burggraaf, lead green practitioner and green architect at HighTech Innovators. Wilco brings a wealth of experience in software development, been over 20 years in the industry, and is an active Green Software Foundation champion, and we'll be talking a lot about that today.So he cares a great deal about integrating sustainable practices directly into the code and architecture of software, helping to make greener choices not only possible, but essential in tech. And in this episode, well, this episode really is the Wilco show. We will be talking about three articles that he's written on LinkedInand what they mean and what people should learn from them, what he's learned on his journey in becoming a Green Software Foundation champion, a green software practitioner. So yes, he has a lot of interesting thoughts on integrating software sustainability at the lowest, the deepest level, the lowest micro scale, the code level scale, and the macro scale.Bizarrely today, we're going to be talking about those in the reverse order, focusing on his articles on the micro scale first, and then moving over to the macro scale, which I, and I'm a big fan of macro scale. So that'll be interesting when we get there. Actually, I'm a fan of all the things, but I'm a big fan of starting at the macro scale.So yeah. So Wilco's going to be talking about his articles. And he'll also be talking about his experience using the SCI, the Software Carbon Intensity standard and the Impact Framework, because I'm very keen on his thoughts about whether they're useful or not, why they're useful and what they add to the software development process. So, welcome, Wilco. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?Wilco: Yeah. Hi, Anne. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Big fan, by the way. I love the book you worked on, Building Green Software. So I'm Wilco. 41, married with no kids and I live in the Netherlands. We have an Airedale Terrier named Iron. And although the country I live in is small with only 18 million inhabitants, I grew up in the South near the coast on a factory plant tied to the coal industry in the eighties. And my dad was a night guard. So we lived in the factory plant and yeah, when you come out of the bed and you smell the stench of chemical processes in the air and when the wash was hanging out to dry, but beautiful weather, but, the coal dust came on the clothes.Yeah, that was, but yeah, if I look now back on it, that was kind of weird, but that was normal. That was, home for us. So I deeply love nature. I spend a lot of my time on hikes of two or three hours in the forests and the heat lands, and that's only 10 minutes from my home. So, yeah, I love to live here in the South and what we call the nature.Anne: That's great. That's lovely. And a really interesting backstory that your first, coal was your nemesis was your laundry's nemesis from a very early age.Wilco: Yeah. It's always a story that my mom tells people because yeah, a lot of people who didn't experience that can not have a understanding of how it must been.Anne: That is really interesting. That is a very interesting backstory. So my backstory is not quite so interesting. So my name is Anne Currie. I am, as I mentioned, one of the co-authors of the new O'Reilly book, Building Green Software. And I said that in the last podcast, and I'll say it again, if you care about this kind of stuff, if you're listening to this podcast, Building Green Software from O'Reilly is a really good book to read to get cracking. And it doesn't, it's not particularly techie, it is useful for everybody. So if you're a product manager, if you're a marketing person, you can read that and understand it. And it's a good, place for you to kick off because I think a lot of the changes that we're going to need to make to build green software actually start with product managers, not necessarily with techies, but that's an interesting other point. I'm also the CEO of the learning and development company, Strategically green.And we do workshops as Wilco also does workshops. We'll be talking a little bit about that later, but we do workshops to kind of get your company started on getting people understanding what it is to be great and kicking off some interest and excitement, as well as helping you build some internal expertise in that.So if you want to do any of those things, hit me up on LinkedIn. Before we dive in, I want to make a quick reminder that everything we talk about in this podcast today will be linked to in the show notes below the episode. So you can go and you can read it and you can follow along as you listen to the podcast.So back to you, Wilco. I think the place for us to start is what started this off for you? What kicked it off? What led you to transition into green IT and how has your journey evolved over time?Wilco: Well, only 10 months ago, it's not even that long ago, I dived into green IT and sustainable coding, starting with no background in green. In IT, of course, with 20 years of experience. And. Now I'm progressing to discuss things with university professors. So it went kind of quickly. And also since March this year, I'm a co-founder and co-host alongside Pini Reznik, I think a familiar person for you, of Green Software Meetups in the Netherlands.Anne: And you've had a lot of success with meetups in the Netherlands, which is really good. So, what, role do you see your current work playing in the larger mission of sustainability?Wilco: Well, maybe a fun detail. I work in secondment, for some countries that is not a familiar thing, but it's meaning I'm contracted by various companies. And this year I'm working with the National Databank for Flora and Fauna as a solution architect and together with a fantastic team, we're making hundreds of million biodiversity observations publicly accessible to everyone in the Netherlands.And that is kind of something really cool. And we're on track to reach our first major release in the new year.Anne: That is very cool. That's very good. And that quite interests me, links back to something you said on LinkedIn when I was talking about the last environment variables, where I was talking to Stefana Sopco, who also lives in the Netherlands. And you pointed out another Dutchie. Which, you're quite right.We have a, there's a lot of interest in this in the Netherlands. Do you have a feeling for why that is?Wilco: I hope I helped a bit with that the last half year. But no, of course, no, that's a, just a joke. But when I started like at the beginning of this year, I was looking on Google, searching for information and information was hard to come by. And at some point I was thinking, yeah, of course, books and podcasts, the GreenIO and Environmental Variables.That is a place where I find a lot of that information that I needed. But at some point I was like, okay, so maybe I need to talk to people to gather more information. And when I was searching on LinkedIn for people who knew more about green IT and green coding and green software, I found out that there were all these kind of bubbles, yeah, in the Netherlands we call them bubbles, like you have 20, 30 people working on a certain topic.And I was like, also at the same time, we were thinking, okay, how can we build a community for the meetups? And I was like, yeah, the only thing that I can do is connect to these people and make aware that the other bubbles exist and to keep on doing that. And when I was finding out, and I found the other group and another group and eventually there are, I think, right now, yeah, I think a small 2000 people in the Netherlands busy with this topic.But a lot of those people are not aware of each other. So you have to think about people working on CSRD and monitoring, people on FinOps, but are really that are interested in sustainability, people who are like, "yeah, we, need to measure not only emissions, but also nitrogen and other things and PFAS," is it how we call it in Netherlands?So yeah, I don't know if it's because of a trend or because of a lot of people now with CSRD are looking, "okay, how do we need to do this?" But yeah, there's a lot of activity in the Netherlands.Anne: That's, that is really interesting and there's a lesson there for anybody who wants to grow a community is that you went out and found all the small communities and hook them together. That's an incredibly valuable thing to be doing.Wilco: And it's also cool that there are also, there's an organization, the National Coalition of Digital Sustainability, and it's a little bit different, the acronym in the Netherlands, but they are already busy with this topic for more than 10 years. And then when I was doing my thing on LinkedIn, and then I found out that there was an other meetup group from a bank and a consultancy company, and then we're already busy with doing meetups in the year before.And, but they weren't aware of even sometimes other organizations and also like a Green Software Foundation, but there's also of course the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where you have a sustainability group. And I'm not even talking about things like Climate Action Tech and, that kind of organizations of groups.Anne: And of course actually trying to link together these groups is incredibly, so we have actually met in person, we met at a Green IO conference in London in September, which was great. And that was very good. That was a very good way of getting a whole load of people in Western Europe basically to all connect together and have a drink and see one another face to face.Very effective. So..Wilco: Yeah, it's very inspiring to see other practitioners and also other perspectives from UX to Green Ops to yeah, all the different, because that is something that is so clear. And this is also maybe eventually, if we go to macro, why it's hard to implement is because sustainability, it hits so many fronts within a company or an organization, there are so many roles.Where if you start thinking about, "okay, what am I, actually doing?" So the impact, what we're doing from boardroom to eventually DevOps teams or members of DevOps teams. And it's cool to see that all those people come then together in such a conference. Yeah.Anne: Yes, it is true. And I've said this many times before that it's, everybody's being bonded together by having the same goal, which is reducing carbon in the atmosphere. An intrinsic goal that's, you know, it's doing good. It's improving the world. And it does mean that you can share common ground with people you wouldn't necessarily previously have shared much common ground with.Wilco: Yes.Anne: So, I mean, you, said you've only been interested in green software for about 10 months and you've certainly done an awful lot during that time. How did you get started? How did you get started organizing meetups particularly?Wilco: Well, in January, my former boss introduced me to the Green Software Foundation website, and I immediately noticed two things. So CarbonHack24 was on the website, the Hackathon and the company I work for, they really love Hackathons. So I formed a group of volunteers together. And beside that, I will come back to that later.There was also a lag. I saw the website of meetups in the Netherlands. So I reached out to Asim for advice and he connected me with a group of Green Software Foundation employees and the Green Software members in the Netherlands. And including with Pini Reznik and together, we started planning. And by April, we had our first meetup.And my team even won the CarbonHack24 Best Contribution, which is crazy if I think about it, which was such an incredible motivator. And each step I took from organizing meetups to winning the hackathon felt like a chance to make a meaningful impact.Anne: Which is fantastically good. That is good. So, but you didn't stop there, did you? You became a green software champion, which is a new Green Software Foundation kind of a project to build up people who know more and can go out and shout about green software. How did that happen?Wilco: So by May, after hosting two meetups and writing over 10 articles on green software, I felt certain that this was my calling, right? I felt so much passion and fire. So, I mean, I think through all the content I create and all the conversations, that was kind of clear. And I discovered the Green Software Champion program on the Green Software Web Foundation website.And I knew it was the right path to amplify my impact because I believe that if you have a recognition of a certain organizations that especially like multinationals and big organizations are like, "Hey. This is something that we maybe need to take more seriously." Not because of me, because of the, "Hey, this is, there's something going on here."And yeah, forward four months and we've organized five meetups in just over seven months. And with the sixth one on the way on the 22nd of November, with the Green Waves Hackathon at the TU Delft, that's a university in Delft. And I now written over 150 articles on LinkedIn, collaborated with professors to bring green theory into practice.And we're still, I'm still doing that and have given six talks so far. So, with more plans and each step has deepened my commitment to building a sustainable tech community.Anne: Which is absolutely fascinating. It is amazing how much you've done in 10 months. So, but what next for Wilco and the green IT community?Wilco: Yeah, what is next? That is a good question. So what I really try to do is to follow this certain path. So when I started gathering the information, I found kind of out, okay, there is already a decennia of research done and a lot of information, but to some degree, we have a hard time transferring this information to other developers and we are kind of stuck.So for me personally, I was really invested. "Okay. How can I make this first stepping stone on making this a thing that other people can understand?" And that's why I started to invest what I now call EQUAL, Energy, Quality, Utilization, and Load. So the idea that you have an application that has a certain algorithm or a certain logic that everyone understands.So kind of a loop. And if you have this loop, so a few important things in, in, in green coding and green software is, okay, how can we, based on utilization, can we estimate and not exact utilization, but can we estimate the energy and then eventually related to emissions? So if I started understanding, hey, wait, utilization to some degree is like the amount of threads that the CPU is running.Also, of course, based on the cores. So 50%. You would maybe expect, like, if you have like 12 cores that with 50%, six cores are running, but it is not necessary at the truth because frequencies, of course, can be higher and lower and there are some things going on, but if you start, okay, so the amount of threads, so let's say the 12 cores.So you can have then most easiest for a clock, 24 threads. So if you have a loop that you can start playing around with two threads, four threads, eight threads, 12 threads. So that's a first parameter you can give to this loop that I placed in the API. Then the next one is the amount of iterations. So do I want to do a small test?And the funny thing is one line, one normal line of code, because I can make a line of code that just can gas pedal the CPU 200 percent for an hour for one line of code. If you take an average line of code, it's most of the time so insignificant for a CPU that like, if you have a loop that is running within this very small time, then 10 million iterations is quickly over that's very fast.So my EQUAL starts with 10 million and it goes eventually to in the billions of iterations. And then the third parameter of equal is the use case. So you can place in the iteration just an I++ or just any use case you kind of want. And then what I kind of start doing when the loop is running, I start asynchronically, I start measuring the utilization of the cores in a very high time resolution. Like 10ms, 20ms, 30ms, so very small. And then after the whole loop is done, what I then do is I can place, those samples, I can eventually connect them back again to the traces of the code. And then you can see a certain few things happening here. So what you can see happening is if you will reduce the amount of operations happening on the CPU, yeah, of course you probably,your, utilization will be lower and your energy use. But there's also another thing is because CPU, how CPU works, that sometimes you will see unexpected behavior. So although you start to play around with these use cases and you think, "Hey, this should be more efficient" and you start rerunning it and then you're seeing things happening like, "Hey, wait a minute, if I run this on 18 threads, this use case works more efficient energy-wise on 12 threads.How does that make sense?" Well, that is something I tried to figure out, but this is what I place in a demonstration style, because if you demo this and you show us this loop and everybody understands the loop and you show this in the user interface, and then with Prometheus, with eventually graph set that you show to everyone,then it's makes more clear for, "Oh, okay. Wait a minute. There is beside time efficiency, compute, power, and there's also this third dimension, energy consumption. And it has sometimes another effect than we sometimes expect." And I started, okay, so if I can eventually use this in talks, if I can start using this in eventually a use case for blogs.And eventually this is also where the workshop that I'm going to give from January is built on. So this is for me is like the future. And then my estimation model that I just created on Prox. Which is kind of built in, of course, in your Linux kernel with just a dumps is now not the most perfect model, but this is the reason why I work where I have contact with, especially University of Groningen to make this model eventually better with socket management of measurements and real kind of measurements.And yeah,Anne: So that so the all sounds very, so basically you're working on a tool that helps people measure, at least proxy measure, their carbon emissions through energy use,then tune it and improve it. And I'm guessing that there's kind of several advantages to that tool. If you work on that tool to deliver the same functionality using less energy, the product, your application will run faster.As you say, CPU cycles are another proxy for energy use. So is that commonly what happens? It improves the performance of the application?Wilco: Well, if you say performance in time, well, this is a funny question. So if your focus is on performance in time, sometimes if you say I make my code quicker, it sometimes start using more energy. So, and then the question is, I have this value, "is it okay for a user to wait on it or does it need to have this very fast?"And there's also a difference between the performance if, and this isn't on the, on the, in the cloud, on a server, almost impossible. If you on A CPU only use a few cores, it has often a very higher CPU frequency, so it probably will be with this exact same code will, be quicker than if the complete CPU has 80% of the cores or a hundred percent of the cores active because the higher, especially with a hundred percent because of heat, the frequency goes down and it kind of becomes slower.And this is what I say, you can, of course, if you lower the amount of code or operations to the CPU, it will eventually be more efficient. But there is also this thing going on that the CPU has sometimes 20, 30, 40 percent influence based on the state of the CPU it's in. And yeah, your code can have some influence on it, but it's more in a different way.So how many threads am I spinning up? Or how many things are going on this server that I'm running my code on? And yeah.Anne: So yeah, I see now why you, and when we go over onto your next, onto your second article, talking about trying to balance these micro line level changes with a more macro perspective. That's yeah, it gets quite complicated and you don't always know what's going to work until you try it. So obviously, you know, the whole point of running this tool will be to make a more energy efficient application within your kind of high level goals of your SLAs. But I'm imagining it's also quite fun, that it's quite a good thing for a hackathon, it's quite a fun thing developers to play with.Wilco: Yeah. Yeah. That. And also you can just replace, that's what I every time keep saying. The loop is just for demonstration purposes that people understand it. But I use this whole logic in an API and you can just put your own code in there. That's the whole thing that we're, with the workshop, going to do.So people will build their own API. And then with the same process of asynchronically measure when you run this code, what's happening, because you will see funny things going on when you're waiting or things are connecting to a database or connecting to another API. And based on how things are programmed.So are you waiting with a loop that is pushing your CPU high? Or are you using smarter mechanics so that there is a drop, but is a drop sometimes something you want because if you want to be very efficient with your resource, you kind of want to maximize it around 80%. Well, I don't want to be come too fast to conclusions yet, because I think we still need to figure out what the patterns are and what are good patterns and bad patterns, but yeah.Anne: Yes, because as you say, and again, this leads back to the kind of macro micro picture. It's definitely.. In certain circumstances is definitely the right thing to do to if you're waiting on an API call or something to kind of say, "right, I yield all the threads and everything running on the machine to somebody else to use the machine while I'm waiting" so that the machine is still highly utilized whilst I'm waiting for my API call, but that relies on you having a design or an architecture, which might be within your application, but it might be within your operational decisions. You know, are you multi tenant? Is there somebody else or some other company or some other application that is going to be able to pick up and use the machine while you're yielded?But if you're just waiting around. then that's less good. So then the machine is just going to waste during the time that you're waiting. So you're, right in saying that there's so much context to this.Wilco: Yeah. Yeah. And, okay, so, okay, I'm really getting excited about this topic. So, because I instantly thinking like, yeah, of course in the cloud, in the server, you maybe they have not full control, but one thing we know the grid is getting fuller, the electricity grid. And one of the things is that some university have research done is how can we optimize the devices that we have better?And one of the things that we in the Netherlands have, we have a lot of people with solar panels. We're not using optimally the, electricity that is generated by the solar panel. So if you think about the following, so what are the devices that you can easiest, how do you say, charge based on the solar panels, then it's mobile devices or tablets, or maybe a laptop with maybe a good battery lifetime.So now we're from originally, we always been like, "okay, we need to move logic to the server because it's more secure and you can not manipulate it." But if you start thinking about, "Hey, we need to optimize the devices better." What if we start using a WebAssembly in a better way? So things in your browser or on IOT device, or in this case, then on mobile or tablet, and use that green energy, especially if someone is as smart that like not charging it at night,but more than the day when the solar panels are active, that is always like an important catch. And of course the solar panels have some embodied carbon, but yeah, but still, so there are so many cool things you can go on in this.Anne: It is really interesting that renewables, unlike, you know, you aren't going to run your own coal fired power station. You say, nobody apart from Wilco has ever lived on a coal fired power station, but particularly solar, it's a very distributed technology. There are lots of people, I've got solar panels, and when they're running and the sun's shining, I've got more power than I know what to do with.When I had, when I got it installed, I said to the, chap who was installing it, "what should I do with this? You know, and he said, "Oh, well, you will have, there are times when you are going to have more power than you know what to do with." So make sure that you, it might seem historically, it's always been very inefficient to heat, your water with an immersion heater rather than using, a gas burner or something like that. So it's a very inefficient way to do that, to heat the water. But if you've got free energy and it's just otherwise going to go to waste, heat your water with an immersion heater. He said, "get a swimming pool." Not that I did get a swimming pool, but get a swimming pool and heat that up because some of that has changed the way we need to think about, we still talk about green software very much from the perspective of efficiency and improving efficiency and reducing waste.But I would say even more importantly than that, it's about doing more when the sun's shining. You know, don't forget efficiency when the sun's shining. You might want to write applications that are very efficient, that operate in totally different ways at night and while the sun's shining.Yes. Wilco: Yeah. I would even dare to challenge the following. So. If the sun is very shining in the day, what I see in the Netherlands a lot is if you look to the electrical grid, especially also on windy days, that's, or somehow, and I don't see the relation yet, is that the industry seems to be working harder in the general.So you still see the gas turbines in the Netherlands emit a lot of emissions. So it's very sunny. And if you go to electricitymaps.com, to the Netherlands. And you look there, you will see then the solar panels, generating a lot of energy. And sometimes of course, also the wind turbines, but that's also the gas turbines.And that is mainly because there's a higher demand or there's instability on the net. And so you could even start. And that's why I think that carbon-aware is a very complex topic, because are you gonna do a weather forecast and then run, but then find out that maybe the grid was emitting more than you expected?And lately, the last days, we had a lot of emissions in the Netherlands. Or are you more going to try to indeed optimize the devices we already have that maybe run on green electricity? There's no perfect answer in this, but we need more data, we need more access, but I understand from security standpoint, even with electricity grids, I mean, they want us to give us the information, but they're scared for terrorist attacks or for things that the information that we want to do for good that can be used for bad.But yeah..Anne: I mean, and quite often, grids just don't have the information yet. I mean, there is, for carbon awareness, we were a long way from having really good data on that. So I always tend to say, don't start, well, you could pick proxies, perfectly reasonable to pick a proxy because actually the difficult thing is designing systems that can respond.That's going to take years to do. So you can, in many ways, pick a proxy now, even if it isn't great. Design a system that is responsive to that proxy. And then as that proxy gets better, your system will get better. So you might be going, " actually that proxy's terrible" now, but the difficulty is, well, getting the data is often somebody else's problem.It is put pressure on, you know, suppliers and energy grids and everything to provide good data to us. But in the meantime, the big job for us, the thing that's going to take us a long time is redesigning our systems to be able to respond to that data. So that's things like thinking about what your graceful downgrade options are for when the grids are very dirty. You might have to move big, having big latency-insensitive tasks that you can move to when the sun's shiny. The Texan grid is doing a lot of good work on that. And I talk, again, I'm sorry, I talk endlessly about large, flexible loads. So the Texan grid is putting out a call to industry for large, flexible loads, which you can run, which are latency intensive, don't matter when they run.But they can run when the grid is full of solar because Texas is quite rightly putting a whole load of solar panels because it's very hot in Texas, it's very sunny in Texas and there's a lot of desert. So they want something to run on that, solar power. It's very sad at the moment that the people who are really responding to it are the Bitcoin miners, but AI is another potential customer who have large flexible loads.So very CPU intensive loads.Wilco: Yeah. Oh, but this is perfect because, okay, you kind of influenced me when we had talked in London. So to think more about, okay, if you can better react to renewables in a more flexible way, because I started thinking about it, especially if you put it in the following perspective. So most front-ends have a lifetime of two, three years.There is of course always shorter and longer. Back-end systems often have like a longer lifetime span. So if you build something today in 2024, and it runs five to six years, that means that it still runs in 2030 when we have our big first milestone that we should have reached. So if you're not building your software today that it can adapt, that it can be flexible, you have to refactor things in the future, or you're getting in a stuck position because most of the time, especially with big systems, the more you build, the more dependencies you get, the harder it becomes to eventually change things when that foundation is set.So, yeah, I really like that idea that, although we maybe not have all the right answers now, and maybe the situations are not always perfect, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't start thinking and implement in this way.Anne: Absolutely, I think it's going to take ages to do this, it's a completely different way of thinking about it. I mean, there are tools out there that already exist, that can help you get into this way of thinking. So I'm a huge fan of spot instances on AWS and, or Azure or, preemptible instances on GCP, because they're, a kind of mini version of Texas's large flexible loads.You say it's a small flexible load. You say. What you're saying is "I've got this load, it's flexible, run it. I don't really mind where it runs. I don't have any particular SLA associated with it." And you can use it for, the clouds use it to improve operational efficiency, which is good for green as well. But in the future, I can see those loads absolutely match to what we're going to need in order to shift work forward in time or later in time or forward in time.Wilco: Yeah, I really believe to be, to some degree as much in control as possible because it's easy to let some other company or SaaS solution fix things for you, but especially from a board perspective, it's a good idea. Like, okay, we're working together with hyperscalers and we're doing things serverless.And especially if you're a big organization. And then mainly like if we do serverless, they are kind of responsible to fix if the utilization on the background is well organized. And I find this always very interesting because yeah, to some degree that's true. So for consumers, normally, if you go to Azure, you're probably, if you're using serverless, I think they can really optimize it very well.But if you have a very big multinational where kind of, they already reserve a certain space for you in the data center and you're running serverless. I'm very curious because we don't have the information now. So do they reach indeed that more utilization because you work serverless or do you have virtual machines where often in a while some function comes by and it runs and it's done?So that's why, and you mentioned spot, that's why I like, and not because I have stocks in them, because it's not possible, I think, but I, that's why I love Kubernetes and Cloud Native thinking so much. That's also why I really like to check out also every time what's happening in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation environment, because course that is where Kubernetes is very active, because I strongly believe that if you are in control as far as possible, you have, not only you can better measure what's happening to some degree, although you're doing some estimates, I think it's also from a security perspective, it's a good idea. And I think also from just the willing, yeah, the willing to be responsible because nine of the time you're also responsible of the value that's running in your cluster.And I think just outsourcing the company's core values or the product values outsourcing to somewhere else, it's possible, but you're giving them also some control away. Yeah. And this is something that I think a lot about, but not having all the, I think I will never have all the answers, but, yeah..Anne: I think you're very right to be skeptical about serverless running on prem rather than in the cloud. Cause it does feel to me like, I touched a little bit earlier about multi tenancy. When you're not doing something, what's somebody else doing on the same machine? A lot of these tools like serverless work really well because you're in a multi tenant environment.So the classic example is with, if you're in the cloud and you're, you might be sharing physical resources with a company that has very different demand profile to you. So if all of your, if you are, say a retailer, I used to be head of IT for an online retailer, then all of your resources are assigned to your demand.So if there's a peak, then you have provision for your peak. And that means that a lot of the time, so say Christmas might be your peak. You have a provision for Christmas. And then most of the year, the machines are underutilized because you had to provision for Christmas. If you move into a multi tenant environment, one of the root things that the hyperscalers attempt to do is to pair up, or not just pair up, but group users on machines in such a way that they have different demand profiles. So everybody has a correlated demand at Christmas. Maybe if you're a retailer, you might be sharing a machine with a training company. And the retailer is very busy at Christmas and the training company is very quiet at Christmas.So you kind of, you, rather than needing to provision for the peak, you are getting better utilization of those machines over time. And serverless is a little bit of an example of that. It's, the win is with multi tenancy and multi tenancy is easier in the cloud than it is on prem.Now, having said that there are some multinationals that are so big and have such complicated systems internally that they are effectively their own multi tenant. I mean, Google is a hyperscaler, but forgetting GCP for the moment and looking at Google's internal tools and applications, they are their own multi tenants, they have enough variability in what individual tools are doing that they can act to keep their machines fully utilized all the time. They're kind of designed for that, but most companies are not at that level and quite haven't quite designed for that yet. But I agree serverless internally on prem for a small enterprise probably doesn't buy you that much.Wilco: And there's also an other perspective on this. And I heard this in a conversation with a bank and that was also very inspiring for me. So. The fun thing is everything we just talked about can also work in harmony. So if you always have a baseline utilization, you could do that on prem where you know, "okay, with these applications, we always have activity.So we have a certain utilization." And what they say is what then a big, they have done in control. They know exactly the energy usage and because of adventure, the energy uses also the negative impact and emissions and avoid carbon. But when they have peaks, they overload to the cloud. So they're like, "okay, so if we have, then we go there." And you could kind of also do sometimes maybe do the same if you want to save costs to maybe the devices to some degree that using your application.So there are ways, and this is complex, but I think that is a way. And also there is a topic that we had in the past and nobody's really talking about anymore because it's complex. It's distributed computing, of course. And that's also another pattern that could, have a play in this. So, yeah..Anne: Yeah. I mean, distributed computing is very potentially well aligned with this whole thing of demand shifting and shaping and saying, you know, "actually I've got a, thing here. We need to treat it as essentially asynchronous." And of course, asynchronousness is, or asynchronicity, is a really key part of distributed systems, designing distributed systems well.Completely synchronous distributed systems are often a little bit of a distributed monolith. You don't, you often don't get the same breadth view ofWilco: a funny thing. I heard, yeah, if you're YouTube, you can indeed see, like serverless monolith, microservice monolith, there are the.. So sometimes you think, "okay, this is a good start, if we design it that way," but if you create so much dependencies and then you're still, on an abstract level, creating a monolith.Yeah.. Anne: Yeah, except a more difficult one. Because a monolith, the value of monolith is, quite simple and, well, it's, yeah.. Monoliths and microservices and distributor systems all have their place. It's always a matter of choose the right tool for the job. That is efficiency 101 is choose the right tool for the job.Wilco: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah.Anne: So we have chatted so long, we've got hardly any time to actually go over your articles. So do you? Let's see, we were going to talk about three articles. One was about your using the, SCI and the impact framework.Wilco: The thing that I would like to say on that one is that sometimes maybe people think that I'm only interested in energy and that is absolutely not the case. The only thing that I came to the conclusion, not that you have to do it that way, but to some degree, because we're still also figuring out how to best measure emissions based on the grid.And the other thing is embodied carbon. So we can do a lot of stuff with lifecycle access data of assessments and hopefully also the correct information we get from our scope three suppliers, but to some degree, if you know, and this is what I always keep saying, and maybe it's, if you know, at what moment, at what location your software was running on what kind of resource type on what kind of hardware, and you log that down, the most important thing is energy you cannot historically get back. It's you compute it and it's gone. So, and we have still with hardware disproportionality, but we have still things to figure out, okay, how do we really measure it? And I really strongly believe if I can help to get it down somehow, we to some degree can historically get back. Okay, we, knew that in that moment in time, even with electricity maps, with historical data, we can get the emissions from that moment, that location.And also with the information we gathered with past procurement information or supplier information, we can get the embodied carbon right and that kind of stuff. So that is the main reason why I really focus on that E of energy and the SCI, the Software Carbon Intensity, you know.Anne: The thing I like about the E is it's something that software developers can have effect, you know, it's not like we're, we don't care about the other things. We're just trying to focus on where we can have, make a material impact. And there is somewhere where we can really make an enormous impact. Our ability to change things in other areas is more limited and that's why we started the Green Software Foundation, was to find ways that software engineers can improve things and people related to software development.So product managers, testers, that kind of thing. It doesn't mean that we don't care. It means that we're looking at where we can have the an impact.Wilco: Oh and the quantum entanglement. That came from the idea, I'm a big nerd and I, like to know things, a lot of things, and it's also counts for physics. And I'm watching a lot of YouTube videos, also science videos, and a lot of videos every time came back on the concept of, okay, we have Einstein's, real, real, Anne: Relativity. Yeah. Yeah. Wilco: Relatable.I'm still going wrong here, like, like about the, eventually can calculate things going on in a black hole. And we have quantum mechanics with quarks and all cool stuff. And when they try to bring this theories together, they have all these kinds of issues that doesn't really match up. And that's what I've found really interesting because I started before my journey, I had some information from the holistic view perspective.So from boardroom perspective, from more top, if you think from top to bottom. And they are more interested in compliant data. So they, their data that they're using has to be valid, has to be compliant and also streamlined. So eventually they can report and also use it to create internally policies on it and that kind of stuff.But if you talk like the software engineers, we're really like, "yeah, we're missing data on calculating the correct energy consumption. If we run software on this CPU or this GPU and we're still figuring things out," but very on the lower level, but I think on a boardroom level, they are probably not that interested in how correct the CPU or GPU was, as long as it is correct enough to make it right for the reporting.So, and then the other thing where it really aligns to is at some point I came to the conclusion, like, okay, we can measure a lot of things. We can have all these metrics. But at some point the numbers are not going to change outcomes, decisions do. That was kind of a big moment for me. So there has to be at some point the sustainable decision making process going on from bottom to top or the other way around where those worlds connect to each other.And that's what I really, with this article for the first time, it was also a few months back. That I was thinking, "okay, how can I connect this worlds together?" So what would the steps be? And the main, I think outcome for me from this whole thought experiment was, is that based on certain levels in the organization, you have different requirements for the data you want, different tools you probably want to use, and also different reasons you want to use this. And yeah, that is still a thing that I'm working on. One thing where I think that everything in comes together is a simple concept that if you set up an organization, a big IT resource list, or even resource less in general. And you have this resource list where you have like your mobile phones, your laptops, but also your cloud resource.We have the infrastructure as code. We could generate those resources. And you have all these resources in this list. And if it's a multiple of the same resources, you just do a count after it. And then you would say to each resource, you would say you're using so much kilowatt hour a year. This is the footprint estimated benchmark or real time.But also this is the security need because the security people are in the same thing as us. They really want more information. And that would be a great starting point because from that perspective, you can eventually bring that to information that is more on the higher level of the organization and you also can connect it to the really nitty gritty things on the bottom.But yeah.Anne: I was very interested in your, quantum versus relativity. I also, I have, my degrees in theoretical physics, but I will say, it kind of, when I read it, I thought, ah, now this, I find this quite an interesting analogy because I was, there's two. I was the fan, I was a particularly fan girl of neither.I was always a fan girl of classical physics. I like you remember that enterprises operate at the level of classical physics. I think it's actually a really good analogy that enterprises are thinking about, "is my data compliance, you know, are my bills ridiculous, are my system staying up?"And I think that actually, and only once that's, you know, in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs or the Maturity Matrix that the green software maturity matrix from the Green Software Foundation that Pini and I run together, the first thing you need to do is get your operations right. And that is classical physics.You know, it's kind of like, are you paying too much? Are you over provisioned? Do you have a whole load of machines that you're not properly monitoring and using anymore? Maybe they are security holes. So you've got security problems there, you've got financial problems there, and you've got waste there as well.You've got loads of carbon as a result of, Wilco: yeah. That's the one I forgot on my list. Waste that also needs to be Yeah on there. But yeah..Anne: I love relativity, I love quantum physics. But for most enterprises, I would say start with classical physics, really just focus on getting your basic ops good, do those thrift a thons. Your last article, which you're not going to have time to go over, but I would strongly recommend people read, is about the alignment of FinOps and green software.And I would say that the alignment of FinOps and green software is your classical physics. Oh, that's awesome. It works for every single enterprise. Nothing fancy is required. It's totally aligned with the business, with the desires and the goals of your business. No one is going to complain that you saved the money.Wilco: But I think that is,Anne: once.Wilco: yeah, I think that's very important because sometimes, I mean, a lot of people, they say, "why are our companies not starting?" Or "I have this idea, why is no one picking it up?" And I think we also have to be honest to ourself. If you invest money in something, you want it to be, have a certain maturity level and also, especially if we buy something, we want to know that it's going to work and that's, yeah, it's going to have the value that you expect it to be.And so together, I really believe together that we can, and the whole, or the whole line of field can bring it to a certain maturity level. So with the maturity matrix, that's a different story. Yeah. But because I think that a lot of people always focusing on, "yeah, but if you do this, you have lower of cost," I think the most important thing for a company to be more interested in how can we solve the things we need to do for sustainability is to make it more frictionless implementation and have it less risk, because I think that if you can do it in a way and it doesn't have to be perfect, but that it's easy to implement and to use, I think companies will start doing more.I strongly believe in that.Anne: I do. I think there's a huge, people really care about being green. People do really care about the environment. They don't know that there are changes they can make through their work as software engineers, that will make a huge difference. And if they do think that there are changes, they have a tendency to think those changes are misaligned with their company goals, which quite often they are because people think, "Oh, I'll just rewrite everything in Rust."And that would generally be misaligned with the company's goals. But going through and making sure that you're not over-provisioned in your data centers and you turn off stuff that's not in use, that you're being cost-minded, that's totally aligned with your business goals. And it's also aligned with being green.On that, I think we really need to raise awareness of that.Wilco: Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I really can bring back to the fact, like if you.. And like, Hey, the mention of time efficiency, something has to be fast, but you want to do it in the most low energy consumption, but then the most important thing to, so what is the value, what you're doing is going to bring. And it's something that we struggling in for a while because we really tried with agile, define like the customer value, business value.But I think those three together, if we figure that one out in sustainability in a better way, we really can make some jumps.Anne: And with that, I think we'll need to end because we have been talking for ages and it's been absolutely fascinating and I've really enjoyed it. So thank you very much indeed, Wilco, for this. So where can people find you and get involved in your meta communities?Wilco: Well, mainly I'm active on LinkedIn on my name, Wilco Burggraaf. I try to post every two days, a new content. And yeah, you can also, if you look up meetup.com, you can find the meetup group under the green software meetup Netherlands. And another thing is of course, from January, I'm starting with my workshops.So if you're located in the Netherlands and you're interested in that, yeah, reach out to me.Anne: Excellent. Thank you very much for coming on this episode. It's been really fun. And if anybody wants to contact me or chat to me about my, I also do workshops, which are not the same as Wilco's. So we are, I would say we run a complimentary workshops, then you can also take me through LinkedIn. And this is a final reminder that all the, well, we didn't really talk through the resources for this episode, but they are good background resources for our discussion.They're quite easy and pleasant to read. So have a look at the links to Wilco's posts, follow Wilco on LinkedIn and read his articles. They're very, very good. So thank you very much. And I will see you all in the next episode. Goodbye for now.Wilco: Bye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

TWiGS host Anne Currie is joined by Stefana Sopco, Marketing Manager at PortXchange and a passionate climate activist, for an insightful discussion on the intersection of AI, sustainability, and the maritime industry's decarbonization journey. Stefana shares how PortXchange leverages green technology to help ports achieve net-zero emissions through innovations like just-in-time arrival and emissions tracking. They also dive into the challenges posed by AI's growing energy demand and explore nuclear power as a potential ally in the climate fight. Throughout the conversation, Stefana emphasizes the importance of mindful technology use and the urgency of adopting sustainable solutions.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteStefana Sopco: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:The role of power in unlocking the European AI revolution [11:17]AI Power Demand Might Actually Turn Out to Be Good for Climate [27:55]Opinion: The Irony of Powering AI on Atomic Energy [44:34]Resources:PortXchange If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIOT BELOW:Stefana: Is ChatGPT going to decarbonize the maritime sector? No freaking way! I haven't heard of anyone saying how they plan to use ChatGPT to decarbonize or to help ports account for their emissions.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Anne: Hello and welcome to The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustAInable software development. I'm your host today, Anne Currie. And today we're going to be joined by Stefana Sopco, Marketing Manager at PortXchange, a leader in driving ports towards a net zero future.Stefana's work centers on using digital solutions to reduce emissions in the shipping industry. So a bit, a little bit different from our normal guests who are mostly directly programmers or very programmer related. So Stefana's vision extends beyond ports to broader decarbonization goals across the tech industry and the maritime industry.She's also passionate about D&I, diversity and inclusion. And hopefully we'll talk a little bit about that today as well. So in this episode, we're going to talk about three articles that are all about AI, and the effects AI and the demand for AI is having on grids, particularly in Europe. We'll be talking a little bit about the power requirements of AI and the, grid capacity requirements.And we'll be talking a little bit about whether or not it's always going to be a bad thing, or will actually could potentially be a very good thing for grids. And I'm quite a positive person. I think that there are massive advantages that come from the extension of the grid to support AI. So that'll be an interesting thing to talk about.I'm also really interested in talking to Stefana about this because a lot of the issues around AI are effectively logistical issues. And logistics is something that we don't think enough about in the tech industry. But in the maritime industry, they think about it a very great deal, so I'll be very keen to hear Stefana's thoughts.So, on that note, welcome Stefana. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?Stefana: Thank you so much, Anne, and thank you for the invitation. I'm really honored to be here and super nervous, to be honest, because it is a heavy subject, and I really hope I will do it honours. My name is Stefana Sopco. I'm the marketing manager at PortXchange. I've been working in the energy and maritime industry now for five years.And for the past two years, I've also been a core member of Women in Tech, Netherlands, an NGO striving for diversity and inclusion, as you beautifully mentioned. Here I act as the marketing manager and spokesperson as well for our Dutch chapter. I'm an active member of WISTA NL and for those who don't know, WISTA stands for Women in Shipping and Trading Association.And like I like to say about myself, I declare myself a climate activist next to my proud feminist tag, which I've learnt to embrace completely, especially in the past couple of years, and one fun thing about me, you will always find me mitigating for a cause. Either diversity in the industries that I work with, or animal rights, animals are my life. And of course, climate change. And next to my professional activity, I try my best to act as a role model for the younger generation.I mentor and guide young professionals who either want to start their career in marketing and come into these industries that are very intimidating for some, or might want to switch careers. And I also dedicate a big bunch of my time to guiding expats, me being an expat as well in the Netherlands, and I try my best to help them navigate their journey here the way I wished someone would have guided me back when I moved here six years ago.Anne: That's great. That all sounds very good. Interestingly, this isn't even our first all female Environment Variables podcast, but normally that's because I have one of my two co-authors from Building Green Software, the new O'Reilly book, Sara, or Sarah on with me. So I think this is the first one. I'm going to guess this might be the first one,all women, that doesn't involve Sara or Sarah, so it'll be an interesting change. So say a little bit about me, because I'm not the normal host. I'm quite a common host, but I'm not the usual host of Environment Variables. My name is Anne Currie. I am, as I've said, one of the co-authors of the new O'Reilly book, Building Green Software.And if anybody who's listening to this podcast, you really should be reading that book. It's suitable for everyone. You don't have to be a techie, you'll enjoy it. It'll be useful. I'm also the CEO of a learning and development company, Strategically Green. So my focus there, our focus is trying to get companies to build up enthusiasm and internal expertise on how to make these changes happen.So we do workshops and training, things like that. So if you want to talk to me about any of that, then you can find me on LinkedIn. So what we're gonna be doing today is we're gonna be deep diving into three really interesting articles about AI and their impact on the grid. But before we do that, Stefana, do you want to talk to us a little bit about your work decarbonizing the shipping industry through Green Tech?'Cause that's something that we have never heard about before, so I think it would be very interesting.Stefana: Now, I feel even more stressed that I have to do the honors about talking about green tech in shipping. But before we dive into the goodies, I really want to take the chance to thank three of my colleagues, Eugene, Abhishek, and Sjoerd, because they helped me prepare for this session. I was a little bit nervous. I really wanted to put our technology in really a beautiful light and also talk mindfully about technology. And they've been extraordinary. They've been very, very supportive and I wanted to thank them. So maybe I should start by mentioning that PortXchange is a B Corp organization.For those who don't know, B Corp by definition means impact before profit. And you see now a trend of more and more companies being B Corp certified, which is in direct relation with the Green Software Foundation's principles in a way or another when I looked into it. And in addition to striving towards sustAInability within the maritime sector, we also consider socially responsible and ethical ways foreverything throughout our business, so our entire value chAIn. Our mAIn mission at PortXchange, like you said, is to help port authorities, predominantly, worldwide to achieve net zero emissions. We help them by measuring their emissions throughout the entire port, and not only track them, but also analyze them and report them and take proactive steps to reduce them because that's the ultimate thing that we want in the end.But I'm really proud to say that our green tech ecosystem is larger than that. We have developed many other products within the shipping ecosystem. So we address organisations beyond port authorities. We have tackled just-in-time arrival, I'm not sure if you are familiar with that, it's a solution that is now quite trendy, but a little bit more difficult to implement because of data sharing fears and thoughts from these organizations. But basically, just-in-time arrival helps limiting the fuel consumption of the vessels, because ships tend to rush through the sea to arrive to the port, like there's no tomorrow, but then, they arrive too early, and what does that mean?It means that they will stay there, stranded, and the emissions that will go around the proximity of the port population will be higher because they are just sitting there wasting time and emitting more emissions. So our organization acts as a partner in the decarbonization journey of the maritime industry, players like port authorities and shipping companies.But I really wanted to make a point here is that, as a technology provider ourselves, the computing power that we need also has a carbon footprint of its own. So what do we do to make sure that we are mindful and we remAIn mindful of that? Well, for example, we are extremely careful of using only energy providers that provide the majority of the power sourced through green channels.We are very transparent with our emissions. We use all kinds of solutions like Goodwings, for example, to make sure that all our traveling is as green as possible. We account for our scope 3 emissions as well. And there's a saying that I really like to attach to PortXchange. How I envision it is business as a force for good.Anne: That sounds fantastic. So there's loads of things that you've mentioned there, which we could talk about. The changes that you're making within the industry to make shipping more efficient, that's very analogous to something we often talk about in tech around operational efficiency, kind of not using, not being wasteful, not using more resources than you need to, in order to achieve the same goal.So, and while ships are powered by fossil fuels, then everything that you are wasting is, it results in carbon emissions. So that's really good. But you're also balancing that with thinking about how your tech itself is going to be greener. So yeah, so very interesting things there, which I'm sure we'll focus in a little bit, a bit more on as we go along. But let me zoom in.I'll get started now with talking about some of the articles that we're going to be talking about So we're going talk about three articles. And to kick us off, the first one is a McKinsey article entitled, The Role of Power in Unlocking the European AI Revolution. So it's an interesting paper and it's all about the fact that at the moment, and it's, there are some very interesting numbers in it.They are estimated numbers, but they're useful and interesting in and of themselves. So McKinsey estimates that as a result of AI and the desire for AI, data centers in Europe are going to expand from using about 2 percent of Europe's total power consumption to around 5 percent by the end of the decade, which seems quite plausible to me.And they point out that there are several challenges associated with that for the European power infrastructure. And the article is entirely about Europe, but I think that the issues also apply elsewhere. The first is that we're going to need a lot more green power. I mean, the good thing, the thing that it does say in the article is that the hyperscalers are saying that the power that they're going to want to use to power this new AI revolution will be green.So that's good. And that was not the case 10 years ago. So I think it's really good that they're now all singing from our hymn sheets on that, they want the power to be green, but they need more green power. They need the ability to get it from where it's generated to the data centers. So they need better infrastructure, better grid infrastructure.And we need ways to handle the fact that renewable power is not always guaranteed to be avAIlable in the same way that fossil fuels are. So they're gonna need to make changes to, well, we're all gonna need to make changes to handle that. So generally, I thought it was a pretty interesting article.What was, what were your thoughts?Stefana: Well, first of all, with any change, we will inevitably feel uncomfortable. But in order to achieve the great outcome that we are all hoping for, we must collectively feel uncomfortable. It should even hurt. And it's okay to hurt because we have to think beyond that. So how does that apply to my world, to the world of maritime and ports?And do I believe that decarbonization within the port ecosystem is more or less following the same path? Definitely different worlds. Completely different worlds. We are here, within the port world, we are looking at a traditional sector that has been known and popular for having ways of following from back in time.But we start our presentations at PortXchange whenever we are invited to an event with "ports as battlegrounds for decarbonization." Because if you look in a more simplistic way, ports are the puppeteers, but let's not put a negative connotation there. Let's put a good connotation, as in, it's where the good fight can start for real.But, as in any other sector, you need proven and robust sustAInability practices. Everything should be backed by verifiable data. I think it's very important here, not verified data, verifiable data. And one thing that is very important and maybe one of the biggest differences between other sectors or other industries is that ports benefit directly from community relations, from public perception, which inevitably leads to public and private partnerships and policy support.For example, if you look at Norwegian ports, which have declared themselves as the employee of the people. Their ports have managed to not only super digitalize their operations, but they are almost net zero. And it's all purely because of the change in mindset. And I actually talked about this earlier today with someone from Climate Pledge, how your mission and your intrinsically motives can make the difference in this fight for decarbonization. And one good thing to mention is that earlier this month, European Seaports Association launched their environmental report. In this report, it has been made a point that climate change is our top one priority for ports. So what does that mean? That means that we should also expect full transparency and full accountability because being at the forefront means you have probably the biggest impact in terms of carbon emissions, et cetera, et cetera.So ports have the authority in my world. Ports have the authority and influence to move the need. And what I would like to mention is that in my world, I keep saying in my world, it's almost funny because while I'm saying it, I'm envisioning how we're moving from a world to another. We are quite dependent on regulations here, and we have plenty of them.We have the IMO, I'm not sure if you know about IMO, that AIms to achieve net zero in emissions from international shipping by 2050. And, while we are doing that, we also have checkpoints, 2030 and 2040. Do I think that we will start seeing real progress by 2030? No, I don't think that, unfortunately. But then we also have, since 2023, other mandatory regulations, like in energy efficiency existing ship index.And then we have the Carbon Intensity Indicator. We have the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification from EUMRV. We have the Emissions Trading System. And more recently, we have the CSRD, which is more predominant for Europe. And CSRD is actually one of our allies in green tech for green tech providers, because it somehow pushes these organizations to report, especially their emissions and their impact.But now there is a question here that remAIns constantly. We have all of these things and the industry is being pushed from the left, from the right, et cetera. But we ask ourselves, how do we use technology to help us be compliant with all of this? And meet the requirements, of course. And we ask, is AI the answer?Is, I don't know, well, large language models the answer? Is blockchAIn the answer? What is the answer? We don't know yet.Anne: So your potential, I mean, obviously when you talk about increasing the efficiency of journeys, making sure people get to just-in-time, making sure that people aren't hanging around getting places early, getting places late, going too fast, optimally using their fuel and being as minimally wasteful as possible whilst delivering the service. So operational efficiency. The obvious thing that springs to mind is can AI help with that? Do you think it can, or do you?Stefana: Yeah, absolutely. So, AI is not the enemy. Like, It can be. It can be the enemy, but not when used for this purpose. We use AI in our technology as well. We have a couple of case studies about that on our website, but we don't need AI for everything, Anne. That's another thing, because sometimes I ask myself, "do I even need AI in this situation?"Last year I was nominated for an award by Women in AI, Netherlands. It was Responsible AI Leaders. And the nomination really made me think, what if instead of chasing unicorns, we grab the low hanging fruit and start implementing and bringing into operations the technology that is already avAIlable and viable.Because we have so much, we have great technology already and we have the skills for it. So I would like to see, because I'm working in an industry that moves slower by default, because there are many stakeholders and many people and many other third parties involved, I would like to see what we have finally being implemented.And meanwhile, we train and we upscale. But focus should be on scaling what's already there, instead of maybe continuously developing new tech that needs to go through the adoption curve anyway. One of our core specializations, sorry English is not my first language, like I mentioned is to provide optimization models.And we also provide estimates based on data. Our technology might not be the fancy, super large language models, which everybody seems to be either an expert or an advocate or something nowadays, but statistical algorithms built for the goal that we want to help ports decarbonize by emissions monitoring or by just-in-time or more sAIling, et cetera.It might not sound fancy. A couple of years ago, it sounded super fancy before GenAI popped, but it's doing the job and it's doing the job very well.So sometimes I'm in doubt. Are we really that stubborn to think that we need AI for everything? Especially in sectors like the maritime sector, where there's still so much legacy that needs to be erased and so many things that need to be relearned,forgotten and then learned. We are, the industry is still working with traditional professionals that are very good at their job, but in order for them to embrace AI, they need to embrace technology.Anne: Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, we find the same in just pure tech as well, outside of the maritime industry. And that's. The lowest hanging fruit is usually very simple. It's turning things off that are no longer in use. It's right sizing. It's just minimizing waste in the same way that you're looking at minimizing basic waste.The basic waste minimization is where you usually get your biggest reduction in carbon emissions. There's a French philosopher once said that, the perfect is the enemy of the good, that the pursuit of a perfect solution makes you step over a very good solution that you already have in your hand.And that's true of, it sounds like it's true of your industry. It's certain true of our industry. Manual thriftathons, turning things off, right sizing, you don't have to do anything clever to really start cutting your carbon emissions quite significantly. Yeah, no, we're all the same, really.Stefana: Yeah. And we also have to understand I had quite an aha moment last year. I went back to my home country, Romania, and was right after I was nominated for this award. And my mom is a teacher at a school in a small village. And people came to me, they asked me, okay, what's up? How's your life? All that. And it was a really big boom with AI and all that, and they asked me, so what is your opinion on AI?What is AI? And I realized that the majority of the population needs a more simplistic understanding of artificial intelligence. It's not the fancy super professional profile that everyone is putting on LinkedIn or on their blogs and all that. And in order to see adoption, day to day adoption in our lives and in our employees' work lives, we need to make it simpler.We need to... again, do we really need AI for everything? I keep getting, I keep coming back to this.Anne: It's interesting you say that. So I read it, I think it was an article in The Economist, last week. It was talking about how AI, the companies are really struggling to work out what they're going to do with AI. Because interestingly, the people who are finding uses for AI are more likely to be individuals because making ChatGPT a live service that anybody could access for free really did kind of open it up to people could just go on, play with it, talk to it, use it to rewrite their essays at school, all the things, good or bad, that you can do with ChatGPT. There it's, interestingly, it's an interestingly accessible technology, isn't it? But businesses are really struggling to work out what they're going to do with it.Stefana: Yeah, and is Chad GPT going to decarbonize the maritime sector? No freaking way. I haven't heard of anyone saying how they plan to use ChatGPT to decarbonize or to help ports account for their emissions. And another thing that I experienced actually in my close circle is that when they are, when ChatGPT is being taken from them, like for example, their companies blocked the ChatGPT server, et cetera.They don't know how to do their job anymore, or they are panicked that they will not be as efficient as before. And it's just, for me, it's quite concerning because as a responsible AI advocate, it's scary to see that. Last year or two years ago, nobody have ever thought "I cannot do my job if I don't have this little chat to support me."But now we see more and more. In marketing, I've been quite active in testing all kinds of AI solutions up to the point that I hit burnout because I was so afrAId that I will be left behind and I will not be employable anymore and companies will not see me as the next gen thing anymore, that I worked myself to burnout and I don't want to see that massively in all industries because there's, there are still many good things that we can do before we rush into something that might be a little bit over the top.Anne: Yeah, it is quite sophisticated. It's still very early days. I'm very ambivalent about AI, but I think there are some amazing things about it. There's some bad things about it, but there are some amazing things about and I really want to see it. So what I'm going to do is talk about the next, because we're chatting a lot, we're running behind. So let's talk about the next thing, because I want to talk about the final one as well.And the next one, I will put in some of my thoughts in there. So the next article was AI power demand might actually turn out to be good for climate. And it is an article in Energy Connects. And it's talking about what the last article talks about, which is the massively increasing electricity consumption driven by data centers, particularly those supporting AI, but it's, it, has a more positive take on it, which is that data centers are actually a pretty good potential consumer of renewables. We have a lot more ability to shift and shape our work. We're a lot more aware. There's a lot more demand for green, particularly from the hyperscalers, which, as I said before, is great news.And we want to see it happen more to make sure that it's not just them saying it, but them actually doing it. And one of the things that's coming out of, what's happening at the moment is that AI is quite early in a, massive boost in electricity demand, which we know is coming because the, energy transition is going to drive a massive increase in electricity demand, so we are going to have to get grids ready for that.And AI is, to a certAIn extent, giving us a little early exposure to that. There's a really interesting stat in the article about likening the demands to the biggest demand surge in electricity since World War II, which made me think, oh, I didn't realize there had been a massive electricity demand surge in World War II, but there was right at the beginning of World War II, there was a 60 percent increase in demand for, I went and looked this up on Wikipedia after reading this quote in there, 60 percent increase in electricity demand that came from the fact that actually there were a lot of new electrified factories that had to be built, but also an awful lot of Aluminium smelting. They needed a lot more aluminium to build ships, as you know yourself, and planes and aluminium smelting is very energy intensive, very electricity intensive.So I thought this was, it was quite, it was a really quite interesting article that I would strongly recommend people have a read through. And it did make me think there were a few things in here. Yes, we do need an awful lot of additional, not just the ability to generate power, but we really need to upgrade grids all over Europe to get that power to where it's going to be used.We are all going to need to learn to love the pylon is what I'm thinking. What were your thoughts on the article?Stefana: So I think I have a little bit of understanding of where we are heading or where we should be heading but I'm definitely not an expert on this so more from the sideline. But also as a consumer I want to be very mindful. And PortXchange as well as a green tech provider needs to be mindful of that because we have to live by what we preach.So from what we know right now, nuclear power does not have a large profile in emissions. So that's green, that's a green check.Anne: Yeah, indeed.Stefana: What we also know is that nuclear waste can be catastrophic. And it needs to be handled very carefully and also they are expensive as hell. Solar requires a lot of space.Windmills produce lots of noise pollution. Also super expensive. And you cannot live nearby, so any communities or There's so many considerates there. Hydro requires a lot of space, and it's super expensive, dangerous as well if it breaks, and it has a direct impact on local climate and ecosystem.And the one that should not be named, or the one that can't be named, it's fossil fuels.The nastiest in terms of emissions profile, it's what we all want to leave behind. But unfortunately, as you already know, Anne, and all these articles mention it, with so much demand in AI, the question is, do we have enough time to test all these alternatives? Do we have enough bandwidth to keep looking into solutions and all that?Or the demand is so high that we go drill, baby, drill, codes with codes, or even worse, we go back to coal, which is one of my recurrent nightmares, to be honest. And that's why I keep getting back to the question, do we really need AI for everything? Do you really need to have ChatGPT giving you that image with cats and dogs and whatever?Because I don't know if you know, but the carbon footprint of Dall-E 2, similar with ChatGPTs, is at 2.2g CO2 emissions per query. Which is, sounds little,but if you start doing the math, Jesus Christ... And then the CEO of MidJourney, David Holtz, said a while back that image generation requires about 1,000 trillion operations, which suggests a carbon footprint of about 1.9g CO2 emissions using NVIDIA, A100 GPUs, which consumes, only for that, right, for one image, 400 watts of power. For one image. And I, you probably did this, Anne, you went on ChatGPT, you said "create an image," blah blah, and then it gives you an image, and it sucks, it's horrible, it's... "Jesus Christ, what is this?"" And then you say "no, another," blah blah blah blah, and it gives you, and it sucks even more, because now it's something completely different, and you are stuck in that loophole for 15 minutes, and nine images later, you finally have something, but it's still not good enough, so you go on Google and you find an image that, but you just wasted God knows how much emissions, correct?Anne: Well, yes. But we were at the beginning on AI. I mean, I, they're good and bad and sometimes, and, there's an awful lot of waste associated with AI, but I think we have to kind of say, "look, it's coming and we need to make the best of it." It's, people want it, it's useful. It's really at an early stage.We will definitely get better at it, and we will get more efficient at it.Stefana: What we need to get is a little bit more environmentally conscious. So I want it because it's shiny and cute and it helps me. But what do I do to compensate for the carbon footprint? Educate myself first of all, right? And then compensate with that.Anne: So there was something in the article that wasn't what they meant it for me to take away from the article, but I took away article, from this article, which is that when they talked about the massive increase in electricity demand in World War II, and then I looked on Wikipedia and a lot of it was from aluminium smelting.So aluminium smelting, really, we still do tons of that because we all want aluminum for everything. It's an incredibly useful metal part of our day to day lives. Nowadays, we don't do, we don't tend to do aluminum smelting off a national grid anymore, because it's a very expensive way of doing it. A lot of aluminum smelting, take it for Europe, takes place in Greenland, because Greenland has 24/7 carbon-free electricity from hydro, from water running off glaciers. It's another source of energy that we don't often think about, but should think about more these days. Water running, melt water running off glaciers is a potentially a really good source of cheap carbon-free electricity.And so a lot of aluminum smelting moved to Greenland where it's done in a very low carbon way compared to doing it on a grid. And I talk about this with AI, I've talked about this with AI many times before in that, there's a lesson to be learned there. Sometimes you need to take the very electricity-heavy load to where there's a load of low carbon power to do it.And yeah, I'd love to see. We've had this conversation on Environment Variables loads. I'd love some, a lot more AI going on in Greenland. Stefana: 100 percent sure that with this increase in demand, especially, we are putting more pressure on the ones that move the needle and can really do a change. And we also need to keep in mind that when we push for more green alternatives, there will be more pressure to invest in that. And with the conscious use of AI,the same as there are activists that, fight against Shell or fight against the shipping industry because that happens as well. There are also now climate change activists that militate for green or conscious use of data, of technology, of AI, so on and so forth. So every trend creates different ecosystems and different communities. And communities and individuals have the power to push for more things like you mentioned.The moment we become conscious of how we use them and the moment we become conscious of how they impact the global matters of things and not only us per se.Anne: Yeah. You're quite right that we have more power than we realize. If we actually shout for things, if we shout for green AI, if we demand that hyperscalers are running off green power, if we demand that the growth, that things are running on smaller models, running on local devices, rather than over egging it and not thinking about these things.Think green AI all the time. And so these articles have been quite useful because they suggest that the hyperscalers are pushing for green AI. And they're only doing that as well. They're doing that partly because they're not idiots. It'sStefana: Exactly. That's what I wanted to say. Anne: That's, we know in the future that, renewable power is where all the growth is.If you look on our, I always recommend people have a look on our world in data, excellent source of all graphs on anything you might want to have a graph on, but they have some excellent graphs on, global solar power generation, global wind generation, but mostly global solar power generation. It's going up exponentially.And you kind of think, well, that is the future. Fossil fuels are not going up exponentially. Solar power is going up exponentially, so we need to be ready to use it. And then the hyperscalers know that, but at the same time, they feel the pressure from customers constantly saying, what is your green story?Stefana: Absolutely.I put my hopes into that.Anne: Yeah, absolutely.Because, need like you,Stefana: and there was that ad right at the beginning of generative AI trend, where a construction company said, "Hey, ChatGPT, come and finish this building." It was a brilliant ad. Now, if you think a little bit at the environmental situation that is happening in Europe, and not only in Europe, but also the geopolitical situation that is happening, and one of our closest and one of the saddest examples that I will give right now is what happened in Spain,Anne: Oh, yeah.Stefana: And the floods that they've experienced.And one thing that you will ask now is, how is AI fixing that? How is AI helping those people right now get their lives back together? Is it helping or is it contributing to their catastrophe? And that's a question that I ask myself constantly when I think of mindfulness in using technology and AI and so on and so forth.If AI can make the world a better place. God, please do it. God, please save us. AI, artificial intelligence, robots, please save us from ourselves. But until they have that power, if they will have it, you never know, we need to consider our Shorter impact on that. The little step.Anne: Well, actually, I think that is a, that's a really good question to be asking ourselves, it's like AI is just code. It's just technology. It's just another aspect of technology. But for all technology, what are we doing? Are we making the situation worse or are we making the situation better? If we're running systems that are over provisioned and we're just, we're being wasteful, we are making the situation worse.We're not making situation better and, even if us, the tool that we're developing will help build it, absolutely fantastic. But then go back and make sure that it's not being wasteful. There's really no downside to going back later and just cutting waste, just trying to improve.That doesn't mean we have to stop using technology. It doesn't mean we have to stop using AI. Use it in a mindful way. All good. In fact, we shouldn't stop using it. All these tools are fantastic and will be required for us almost certain to solve these problems. Quite possibly, AI will help with these problems in the future.Predicting when storms are going to happen, predicting what the result of that is going to be, telling people where to go and what to do and how to survive it. Actually, AI can really potentially help with that, quite a lot of it, but yeah, but we just need to be mindful, as you say, mindful.Stefana: And we need to be in balance. And like you said, AI has tremendous capabilities to improve operations too. We saw that AI has finally managed to understand how whales are speaking and what they are saying. We use AI in our methodology to track emissions and to identify the hotspots at ports. But remember what I said at the beginning of our conversation, business for good use.Use it to make the world a better place, as cliche as it sounds, and if your organization desperately wants to use AI, work with technology specialists, but also with sustainability and environmental specialists in understanding the impact and the long term strategy that you want to follow in order to see feasible results from that.And I think we are in a position right now where we need to be accountable for our footprint, for our carbon footprint. So whatever we do, track, monitor, analyze, keep an eye on it, because otherwise we're walking blindly without the data that is out there for us to see. Either it's AI, either it's electric cars, either it's whatever, it doesn't matter.Anything can be used for a good cause.Anne: That is an excellent point. And I realized we have, we've chatted way too long and we've completely used up our time to talk about the final article, which actually I thought was a bit of a, it was a bit of a weak article. So I'm not too worried. It was a very good article, but it was a, it was about Three Mile Island by somebody who had, it was written in their PhD about three mile island, which, and, it's about anti nuclear and the dangers of nuclear. And it felt a little bit like, well, because something bad happened in the seventies, doesn't necessarily mean... I would rather that we're focusing on what's France's experience of nuclear been for the past, since then?What have they learned? Is it now a safe technology? How can we use it? We just, because there was a massive accident 40, 50 years ago doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing to do. We've learned a lot of lessons since then. If we'd given up flying in 1979, 'cause there were loads of plane crashes in the seventies, we would have given up flying and we would know, we would, we'd have missed out on the enormous improvements in safety that went on in flying and bizarrely that the improvements in safety that went on in the aviation industry had a huge positive impact on safety in all other industries, including the maritime industry and the nuclear industry. So sometimes you can't just stop. Sometimes you can't just stop. Hey, what did you, think of that article?Stefana: You mentioned that if we stopped using planes to fly when we know how many accidents there have been, well, what would have happened if we stopped using vessels when Titanic sank? The titanic example like many aviation example, was a striking point for safety and for many other things, right? It was a breaking point, like we like to say nowadays.I think Anne, unfortunately, I think the Hollywood, and it will sound weird that I say this, but the Hollywood and the media and all that have romanticized the catastrophe that have been happening at Chernobyl, at Fukushima, and all that. There have been so many collateral parties that have gained a lot from that.And it was just very easy to constantly. It's very easy to rule by fear, right? And we have been brainwashed. Maybe it's harsh to say that, "oh my God, that's the enemy." But I will look at the facts here that I know from my research. Nuclear is stable. AI needs stability. If we really want output there, and if we really want to use AI for the greater use in any industry, it needs stability.If I look at nuclear, I look at it more as an ally in the fight for climate change, because, like I said previously, it's emissions profile is close to zero. And of course, yeah, we are still scared because of what I've just said. We have romanticized in a very negative way the incidents that happened in the past.But like you said, I really hope that we learned from those disasters. I really hope that there are people out there, super smart people, that know how to tackle this. In Romania, we have such a nuclear plant, and it's been staying there, doing nothing, and it has tremendous potential.If I'm not mistaken, it might, we might have more than one, actually, but I don't want to say things that I'm not sure about here. Everyone was scared when they threatened to bomb the nuclear plant in Ukraine, right? For obvious reasons. But if we look at the facts, nuclear power is, it's emissions profile is very low, close to zero, so it's an ally for climate change, for environmentalists.And an optimist would say "let's learn from the mistakes that we've done in the past with this alternative and make sure that we don't repeat those mistakes for the greater good." We can.Yeah, we can't continue, we cannot by any chance continue with fossil fuels and I'm saying this from the bottom of my heart.At PortXchange we can see the data, we have the data in front of our eyes and the emissions that we see on a daily basis are very concerning, extremely concerning. In the ports ecosystem, especially city ports, Anne, there have been studies that are quite, they are not, the media does not take them, the media does not shine a light on them, but the data shows and the research shows people living in city ports have a 3 percent higher increase, if not up to 7 percent higher increase in lung cancer.Anne: Gosh.Stefana: Yes! Fertility rates are heavily impacted in city ports. The closer you live to the port, the more you are affected. There are all kinds of health impacts that have been studied. I can send you a couple. We have quite some good studies in our database.Anne: Send us that, and Chris will put links to that in the show notes. In fact, all the articles today are in the show notes, just as a reminder.Stefana: So are there risks? Well, plenty, as with any other alternative. The same risks that we look at nuclear power, there is in solar panels, etc. Risks for everything, but we need to look, what are our ambitions for the future? And AI is very ambitious. And it will require a lot of power. But the Earth doesn't have the resources to power it anymore.Not the way we've been doing it up until now. So I might sound like a nuclear advocate here, I think I might be, but from the analysis that I've read, it seems like the best solution for us. But of course it needs lots of financial investments because it's super expensive, lots of people to be trained and prepared and all that, and most of our nuclear plants are shut down, so I can only imagine the whole thing that will involve to start them again.Do we have enough time? That's my worry. Do we have enough time? I don't know.Anne: It's true. I love nuclear. I really wish we'd started 20 years ago. But, like France. We've done amazingly well on that.Stefana: Yeah.Anne: In the Maritime, on the high seas, loads of big stuff driven by nuclear engines. Obviously loads of the aircraft carriers, really heavy stuff driven by nuclear engines, ice breakers, lots of the Russian ice breakers have nuclear engines.And we've got loads of experience in that. So it's interesting. Are we still about to have the nuclear future that we thought we were going to have back in the eighties? It's, very interesting, but I agree with you that Hollywood had really caused us a major problem there. It's too, it's terrible.Anyway...Stefana: sometimes, you sound lunatic when you say that, and I'm often being told, but let's just look at the facts. Why fear, why do you fear nuclear? When you ask a normal person. "Oh, because Chernobyl." Okay. Well, Chernobyl had very corrupt people working there, first of all. The whole system was corrupt, and the incompetency was at a high level, etc. So, yeah, I need to speak from I wear many hats when I talk to you, but right now I'm wearing my climate activist hat as well as a green tech advocate.We must, not we should or we need, we must look into alternatives because we are running out of time.Anne: And on that fantastic note, we will close our podcast for today. We must look at alternatives because we are running out of time. Absolutely the correct thing to be saying. So Stefana, before we go, where should listeners go to find out more about you?Stefana: You can find me on LinkedIn under my name exactly as it is here, Stefana Sopco. I'm the only Stefana Sopco on LinkedIn. I pride myself with that. So it will be very easy to find me there.Anne: Excellent. So that's very good. I'm also on LinkedIn, as I mentioned before. I don't know if I'm the only Anne Currie, but I'm sure you'll find me. So thank you very much for being on the episode, Stefana. It's been a really fun episode. I really liked that bit at the end where we talked about nuclear.That was excellent. A final reminder that all the resources for this episode are in the show description below, and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. Goodbye for now.Stefana: Thank you, Anne. Bye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening! Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

This Week in Green Software, host Chris Adams and Asim Hussain, Executive Director of the GSF discuss the latest developments in sustainable software, exploring topics like Microsoft's innovative use of cross-laminated timber in data centers to reduce embodied carbon, the environmental challenges of generative AI hardware, and the groundbreaking Real Time Cloud dataset. They delve into the impact of new international energy efficiency directives, the interplay between geopolitics and sustainability, and surprising developments in China's approach to sustainable technology. Packed with insights, this episode offers an in-depth look at the intersection of technology and climate action.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAsim Hussain: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Microsoft tests hybrid timber datacenters to cut emissions • The Register [04:37]Microsoft Employs Wood Products to Help Decarbonize New Data Center Construction [09:50]Karl Rabe – WoodenDataCenter | LinkedIn [12:03]E-waste challenges of generative artificial intelligence | Nature [15:02]E-waste Challenges of Generative Artificial Intelligence | NetworkDEEWhat now? Trump, data centers, and the next four years [38:53]Nuclear? Perhaps! | Volts | Fanfare 数据中心绿色低碳发展专项行动计划 [48:08]Small datacenters face the axe under China's new energy policy [51:51]Resources:Listening notes: zero carbon cement on the Volts podcast [10:39]We are closing in on zero-carbon cement - by David Roberts [11:01]Wooden DataCenter | YouTube Dalston Works | Waugh Thistleton Architects REVEALED: Google's GINORMOUS £650m London Choc Factory • The Register [12:37]The AI datacenter, Nvidia's integrated AI factory vs Broadcom's open fabric [21:21]Computational Power and AI - AI Now Institute [22:37]Chip Production’s Ecological Footprint: Mapping Climate and Environmental Impact $2 H100s: How the GPU Rental Bubble Burst [25:12]GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud [26:28]Happy E.E.D. day to those who celebrate - Green Web Foundation [33:16]Tweet from David Fishman | X [47:39]Tweet from David Fishman | X [47:45]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW: Asim Hussain: We do not know how much electricity data centers are using. And the amounts, and I've spoken to researchers who are doing kind of research for the US department of energy, and they're like, "look, we've just had to... it's guesswork." Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Hello, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Green Software. And I probably should say welcome to Environment Variables, too, the parent name for this podcast, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Today, we're doing a quick check in with my friend and Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation, Asim Hussain.Hi, Asim. Asim Hussain: Hi, how are you doing Chris? Chris Adams: And if you haven't heard this kind of format before, we are So, we are pretty much doing a roundup of interesting news or news that has caught our interest in the last few weeks in the world of sustainable software to basically share some of our takes and provide a bit of analysis or the things that we've seen, basically.So that's pretty much it. We'll be sharing links to all the stories and all of the follow on links that we do from this. And I think that's it. That's pretty much it. Asim, before we start though, I know I've just said you're my friend and you work at the ED, but can I just give you a bit of space to introduce yourself about why you have something to do with Green Software?Because I've just mentioned Executive Director, Green Software Foundation, but I suspect it might be a bit more useful to share a bit of background about where you came from in terms of professionally and where some of that credentials might be. And then I'll do mine and then we can dive into the story together.Asim Hussain: Yeah. So Asim Hussain, based in the UK. Background and career throughout all the way to this point has been software engineering and about, six, seven years ago, really started to look at kind of sustainability space. That's when we met Chris, did a bunch of things, then launched the Green Software Foundation, helped co-found it three and a half years ago.And I describe my job as, very luckily and very boringly being able to focus on answering one question and one question alone, which is "how can we have a future where software has zero harmful environmental impacts?" So I'm very excited to get on this call with Chris. 'Cause I get, I love getting wonky and there's not many people as refined in their thinking as Chris.So we can really dive deep into some topics.Chris Adams: That's very nice of you to say, and I assure you, I didn't put him up to that. Folks, if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams, I am the Director of Technology and Policy at the Green Web Foundation, which is not the same as the Green Software Foundation, but we're fellow travellers, we're a small Dutch non-profit focused on a fossil free, entirely fossil free internet, and we are members of the Green Software Foundation along with companies like Microsoft, GitHub, and Accenture, and so on.I'm also the host of this podcast, and I actually met Asim in person for the first time ever at an unconference called OMG Climate back in 2019. So the connection is. Asim Hussain: I love that Chris Adams: I work at the Green Web Foundation. We publish open source software very similar to how the Green software Foundation publishes some open source software, but we also push out like reports and things like that. And I also work as one of the chairs of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation, because it makes sense to be working with other organizations with shared goals here.If you are new to the format of this, it's literally a news roundup, so it should be, expect, hopefully some light entertainment and some interesting takes on this. We'll share links to all the stories that we discuss, and I think that's pretty much the general plan. Everything we share will be listed in these show notes.So if you are listening using something like Spotify or YouTube, please remember to go to podcast.greensoftware.foundation to actually find the links that we start talking about. Alright then, I think that's pretty much it. Asim, are you sitting comfortably? Asim Hussain: Ah, yesss. Chris Adams: Okay, you look pretty happy, so I'm assuming we're going to go ahead with this.Alright then, let's look at the first story. Does that sound okay? Asim Hussain: Yeah. Sounds good. Chris Adams: All right, the first story is, this is from the register, talking about Microsoft testing wooden data centers. So the headline for this is that Microsoft is starting to move into the world of what you might refer to as CLT, which is cross laminated timber.This is a new building material that's used for construction in general. But because a significant chunk of Microsoft's emissions, their reported carbon emissions the last year or two actually came from the construction of data centers and the actual pouring of concrete.This is, in my view, this is actually quite an interesting one because it's one potential lever for talking about the embodied carbon associated with using the kind of software that runs in these data centers. And there are some, honestly, quite impressive savings because the thing about wood compared to concrete is that wood can be a sink of CO2 rather than a source of CO2 emissions.Asim, I'm pretty sure you've had a look at this and given that you used to work at Microsoft, you might have some kind of perspectives on this one, especially last time we spoke about data centers, we nerded out about the use of mushrooms in data center building materials as well, and you had some thoughts there.So I'll hand over to you. When you read this, what kind of crossed your mind and was there anything you'd people's attention to on this one?Asim Hussain: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I thought when I was reading it was, I don't think they did as good a job as they should have in communicating what the overall reason for using timber is. So basically this is all about mass timber and why is building things wood even a good thing when we're talking about actually growing trees is a good thing? Surely like chopping the tree down that you've just grown to sequester the carbon is a bad thing. And the rationale behind mass timber is that, that's basically the problem is that, when the durability of a tree I think is considered to be about a hundred years. I can't remember, don't quote me on that, I believe there is an official figure, which is when you grow a tree, like how long have you sequestered that carbon? And I think we've all agreed it's like a hundred years, whereas if you, and what happens, that tree then collapses, it goes to the ground, it decomposes, and it goes back into the atmosphere again.So it's only sequestered it for a hundred years. Whereas the argument around mass timber is, well, let's take the tree before it's, So, let's take a carbon that's already dead and fallen to the ground and let's turn it into something else. It's a building, it's called mass timber. And through this process, we're effectively delaying the release of that carbon back into the atmosphere.And I think some of the things I read in the past were like 300 years. So, it kind of goes that way.Now the theory there is it only really makes sense if you're building a building that is going to last for 300 years. I hope this data center is going to last for 300 years. That's a question in my mind. But Yeah, that is ultimately the argument on mass timber.I think the argument here though is slightly different also because it's a relative difference between concrete versus timber as well, there's that aspect to it also, which as we know, concrete is a significant emitter of emissions, irrespective of the fact that, that tree just got felled. I mean, the relative difference is significant enough that the durability I don't think comes into play that much.So it's an interesting direction. Just, I don't know if you saw this as well, Chris, but also OCP, Open Compute Project. Did you see they're doing, yeah, they're exploring, is it carbon negative concrete? I can't remember, it was, at the very least, it was less carbon intensive concrete, or it might be the kind of concrete which actually, as it cures, sucks carbon from the atmosphere.Chris Adams: Yeah, few different ways you can make a cut or you can essentially use concrete or/and in particular, cement, which is a big source of emissions to reduce those ones there, because, for the story we're, linking to right now, when we look, talk about the wooden part, one of the things that's touted is, the use of timber instead of concrete can reduce the emissions associated something like two thirds lower emissions compared to steel, for example. That's one of the reasons why it actually is useful and if you're swapping, say, steel out for wood, there's also a saving around 30% around, is what is cited here. And that's largely because creating steel and creating concrete is incredibly energy intensive, but also just the actual process when you make concrete, for example, if you're using cement. If you're going to create cement when you're taking calcium carbonate, which is essentially limestone, there's a clue in the name, carbonate, you basically, you end up separating the carbon from the rest of it to actually make some of the materials, and that ends up being just emitted as part of the process, even if the cost of energy was entirely free, for example.If you had entirely zero carbon heat, you'd still have that. So there's a few things that are problematic about using cement, but there is actually a lot of new work going into either creating low carbon cement or even using non different processes like using electrolysis, which isn't even relying on calcium carbonate, but using things like calcium silicate to basically precipitate out the necessary, essentially like compounds you would need it to actually create cement.There's lots of things that are place right It's really interesting. And Microsoft is actually spending quite a lot of money in this field as well. We can share a few links to this because Microsoft is actually in many ways a complicated player in this role, because there's lots of things they're doing in terms of enabling emissions.But when it comes to the actual construction of this, yes, they're building masses and masses of infrastructure, like in the order of tens of billions of dollars each quarter. But they're also one of the few organizations that's spending significant amounts on the different clean kinds of cement that we had inside this.And that's the kind of thing I would respond to when you hand it over to me there.Asim Hussain: Yeah. No, I think I'd also know that Bill Gates is also investing heavily, kind know he's not, officially leading the organization, "officially," he's not leading the organization anymore, but obviously there must be some influence there as well. So I didn't realize the carbon, so I actually assumed the carbon was from curing of the concrete, but you're saying it's from the construction, it's from actually generating the raw materials. Chris Adams: Yes, I'm very quickly leaving my domain of expertise, so I'll share a blog post that I wrote when I learned a bit about this, because there's a really interesting podcast by, okay, about as interesting as talking about cement actually gets, I suppose, that actually dives into this by a guy called David Roberts on the Volts podcast, where he does an interview about how this is made, how there are different approaches that you can use for doing this, how you can do it entirely fossil free.so there are some options that you have here, but there's also, it brings up, raises all these other queries about, okay, if you are going to do this, how do you move cement around? Because in many cases, cement has a very, it sets in 90 minutes, right? So just like electricity is hard to store, things like cement can be very difficult to store.So there is a whole question about, "okay, if someone wants to purchase this, how do they go about doing that?" And that is how some of this gets a bit more complicated. Complicated. So that's one of the options, and I think we should, if there's sufficient interest, it might be worth actually talking a little bit about reducing the embodied carbon and what levers are available, because this story is about wood, and we've gone down a kind of cementitious kind of sidebar, I suppose.But there's a lot of interesting stuff happening with wood. For example, you mentioned the OCP, which that's the Open Compute Project. There're actually 3d models of wooden data center designs. There's one chap called Karl Rabe, who has been running the Wooden Data Center company for years, who's been doing this kind of work, and, they, I find it quite interesting and endearing at the same time, there's something pleasing about this, and you realize that this idea of cross laminated mass timber ends up being, it's getting increasing amounts of mindshare because it's one of the ways that you can build relatively large structures for a lower carbon footprint and the, for example, if you're in the UK and you ever go through London King's Cross, Google's shiny new headquarters uses all this kinds of CLT, this cross laminated timber well as one of their ways of reducing it. So it's very much seen as one of the trendy materials that you might actually use because it, aesthetically, is actually quite pleasing.The thing, the elephant in the room when we talk about using wood for construction is "doesn't it burn down?" We had the Great Fire of London, which kind of redesigned London, as it were, right? And it turns out that the actual tooling that you have, the actual kind of material like CLT, it actually is surprisingly fire resistant.It smoulders rather than burning in other ways. And this is actually one reason that there's actually something that you might initially worry about, but is actually not such a concern actually. So yeah, there's, I think we've come up with a bunch of links that we should add to this for people who are interested in this, because it's one of the levers.And we know that this is increasingly, when you have organizations doing a massive build out of infrastructure, if they're going to build new buildings, Then This is one of the tools in the toolbox for reducing the embodied carbon, and Asim, what's the letter in the SCI that we have for this then?Asim Hussain: I, intensity Chris Adams: yeah, so it'd be Asim Hussain: Oh no, it'd be the embodied. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Chris Adams: So that would be one, one lever you have for embodied intensity that is sometimes included.Asim Hussain: And also I think we should probably like, correct me if I'm wrong, but just cement is, I believe, the last time I looked, 7 percent of global emissions. so yeah. So that's why this is such a.So why are we talking about cement? It's 7 percent of global emissions, just cement. So it's a finding alternatives is not just an edge case. It's one of the main things that we need to do. Chris Adams: Absolutely. Yeah. So for context, that's about three to five times people's estimates of the digital sector. So this is one of the big ones that we need to be aware of. And it's essentially one of the most used materials in the world, basically, as well. We'll share some links to that because it's, when you start looking into it, it's surprisingly interesting if you care about reducing the emissions associated with digital, and you accept that a lot of these things take place in buildings, basically.Alright, thanks for that, Asim! Shall we look at the next story? Asim Hussain: Yeah, let's do it. Chris Adams: The next one is, this is about the other part of embodied emissions actually. So this is a paper that was published, that initially published in Nature, but a preprint of it is available also on another website called NetworkDEE.Org. This was actually talking about the e-waste challenges associated with generative AI.And essentially one of the things that comes up with AI. is that when you're using different kinds of hardware, while you can use existing hardware, like typical CPUs and things like that, a lot of the large providers and a lot of the kind of interest has gone into building new machines, or new kinds of specialized infrastructure, or specialized tooling, like NVIDIA's chips and stuff like that.And this paper does a kind of material flow analysis of what this might look like if you project this forward over the next 5 to 10 years, for example. And this is actually, in my view, I think it's quite interesting because we often talk about the energy impact of AI and one of the reasons that it's quite difficult to actually even get a figure for the embodied impact of actually creating chips.And when you move, if you're going to talk about, say, onshoring, moving the construction of chips to, say, the EU or in America, that has knock on implications on where the carbon emissions go and how visible they become, actually. Asim, I'll hand over to you for some Asim Hussain: I've, Chris Adams: here, actually.Asim Hussain: I've not actually.read this paper, so I can do what I normally do, which is to ato wing, off the cuff. Yeah, it's interesting. A, you're right. The embodied carbon is still like the most stunningly hard thing to get. There's still only a couple of examples everybody kind of interpolates from to apply to everything else.Sorry, just, so what this article is saying is that there is a faster, or should we say, what's the term in the cloud space? Not turnover, but the length of time.Chris Adams: life ofAsim Hussain: Yeah. The life, is it saying that the useful life of AI chips is lower? Chris Adams: I think there's two things at work here. So one of them is just the fact that people are using this particular kind of hardware, which may be more energy intensive. That's one of the issues. And there are basically, I think there's two arguments being made here. One of them is that because the, because things are moving relatively quickly, a chip doesn't have the same kind of useful life cycle in the same data center, for example, so if you want to keep up, you're incentivized to buy the next chip because it's that much more efficient than the previous chips, right?So, there's this idea that by doing that, because you have this kind of compressed hardware cycle in order to keep up with other providers, particularly in the kind of given space, then that is actually a driver of creation of much more in the way of electronics, particularly because there isn't much, this isn't a very circular sector right now.So it's not like those chips are basically being broken down and then remanufactured into new feedstock for super efficient new chips. That's one of the things that is actually being, that's the argument that's being made here. And that has implications here. I think the figures that are used in the abstract is something in the region of 16 millions of cumulative waste by 2030, specifically for the tooling used for generative AI.So that's like a, that's a non zero figure, that is something significant. I think when you look at this though, one thing it's worth actually, and one thing that I actually thought was, oh, this, if you've got this kind of endless treadmill. Does that mean that these chips are being thrown away?And I'm actually, when I spoke to some people, I think it was, I actually asked Boris about this. Boris Gormazaychikov, who's the AI lead at Salesforce. Yeah, I asked him about this, and he said that is one of the factors. But one thing we're actually seeing is that given that there's, in the last couple of years, because it was just so hard to actually get hands on any of these chips, even things which were not the latest and greatest, they still were being used.So it may be, it's not like these things are being thrown away entirely, right? It's not like they're going straight to landfill. But one of the problems we find is that there's almost, there's very little data on the circularity of these chips to see if they are being put to use, or if they are just going to essentially like landfill or not, basically.This is one of the big problems that we do have and I would love to actually have some meaningful data on this because it's one of the big, it's one of the kind of generational shifts we're seeing in the sector right now. We've never seen so much money spent so quickly in this field with so little data being disclosed about what the knock on effects of this might actually be.Asim Hussain: Two thoughts popped into my head as I was reading this, well, the abstract and what you said. And from other conversations I've had, especially in some of the places I've worked. The latest chips. Like, why do people want to use, why do Gen AI and AI startups and AI companies want to use the latest chips?It's because dollar for dollar, it's cheaper for them from their perspective. They, it might cost more to rent those chips, but the AI job gets done sooner, so overall, it's just cheaper for them to use the latest generation of chips. And therefore it's more profitable for organizations.But I wonder if there's this, almost this, and I don't know if this is because again, there's no data, but I wonder if there's this kind of constant battle then to get the latest chips. Is somebody left holding the bag with kind of slightly older chips, which aren't as profitable anymore, no one wants to use? And then that's just, know, it's not this perfectly free market where everything, all the information flows and the prices of the older chips, maybe it's just a mad battle for everybody to get the latest chips because that's the only thing anybody wants. And we're decommissioning, maybe we'll decommission these older chips sooner than the necessary just because of the incentives in the market.That's one thought I had, and again, based off of nothing, so there's no data, so take that with the usual pinch of salt. But the other thought I had was just looking at some of the stuff that's happening in the space right now, like moving forward. I've forgotten the name of the project.I will find it and I will get in the show notes, but there's, NVIDIA is now, they don't sell the boards, they don't sell like graphics cards, they sell entire vertically integrated units that you just like slot into a data center with everything baked in, the cooling baked in all these kinds of, because that's the only way you can get, The true levels of efficiency is if you, it's like the Apple ecosystem.It's the only way to do it is everything is just owned by one company and it just does everything the way that product does it. so that I think will, A, make things more efficient, but B, potentially make things more complicated when it comes to e-waste, you know what I mean? if there's like a load of graphics cards.Maybe I was thinking in my head, maybe in the future, everybody's going to have really great gaming experiences. Cause you'll have five year old, everybody's going to have a really amazing graphics card secondhand on their computer. But with these vertically integrated units, maybe that'll be a lot harder to do.I don't know. I don't know what they look like inside. I don't know if it's a bunch of boards that you just unplug, or whether they're soldered together.Chris Adams: so there are, you're right. So this is, maybe there's a couple of links that may be relevant for sharing this. So there's actually a really interesting piece by, I think the folks, the AI Now Institute actually spoke about the supply chains associated and where the concentration is for the creation of these chips.Because when you have one or two extremely dominant players, then they're very much incentivized to not have too much stuff which is interoperable because that forces that, that means they end up being the people who get to set the prices, and we've seen NVIDIA, for example, briefly become the most valued, valuable company in the world, eclipsing both Amazon and Microsoft briefly over the summer before falling down to being in the top five position, for example.So you do see that, and there is, that is one of the Issues that we do see is that you have this kind of vertical integration increasingly being pushed by this, but you also do see various other kind of pushes for this. For example, we know that like various hyperscalers have been looking to break this reliance on a single provider by having their own chips.So Amazon has Published there, there's a, they have announced Trainium as an example. Google have been building their own chips, for example. Microsoft, I forget the name that they have for theirs as well, but set that you have and you do have AMD being in the kind of like low, far lower down compared to these other providers as well in terms of like sales and usage, I suppose.'Cause they do have some options out there as well now, but yes, you're right. It's...Asim Hussain: But the other argument, mean, you could argue it from that. I mean, I think that the thing to understand is like everything has 15 different arguments for it. So, you vertically alignment could be more efficient, but then you're right, it could be also vendor lock in.It could be a bunch of these things all at same time. And the arguments for different like Amazon, everybody having their own chips is also pretty decent argument app I'm running on a MacBook, which has its own chip because once you vertically align, the efficiencies increase. And so the argument from Amazon, at least was like, "we build chips that are optimized for the exact workloads that we run.And that's how we gain efficiencies." So there's multiple things in this, but you're right. That makes it much harder from an e-waste perspective, because then instead of having the same, even just, I don't even know if they're all x86, they must all be x86. actually, no, they're not now, not sure, but anyway, there's more, it's much more complicated when you come into e-waste when there's different protocols and different architectures. Chris Adams: About this whole idea of the cost of compute going down beneath a certain figure. There's a link that I've added to the show notes from the, actually, the publication, Latent Space, called the GPU Bubble, which does explicitly talk about how the cost of rented GPU compute has changed over the last few months, and what might happen as you have new clouds being available,and what the introduction of new chips does to the cost of some of the other kinds of compute available, like you mentioned here, that's probably, in my view, I think that's one of the most interesting pieces of analysis about where the cost of this might actually go. And it may be the case that just how, in the 2000s, we end up with loads of dark fiber left around that we're still using now, as a result, when everyone had this massive build out for the initial dot com bubble.You might see something comparable with AI, where we do have massively fast chips available for all this usage. So that could be the case, but yeah, it's a bit early now, we're not quite sure. I think there's a bunch we've got there. Well, we've added a few links, so if this, any of this is If this has been interesting to you, a listener, then there should be a bonanza of links available for you.Thanks for that, Asim. Shall we move to the next one then? Asim Hussain: Yeah. Go on. Chris Adams: All right. So this one is, this is actually referring to the Green Software Foundation's, one of their projects called Real Time Cloud. This, I think sometime in October, the steering committee inside the Green Software Foundation pretty much merged in or approved the merging in of the yeah, ratified, the most recent work on Realtime Cloud.Asim, you're in the steering committee, right? So maybe it might be useful for some of this to be explained a little bit to you, or like maybe you might talk about what this process looked like at your end, because I've been joining these meetings, but it's very much been the work of Adrian Cockcroft and Pindy Bhullar really pushing this to essentially create a datacenter-level list of all the carbon intensity figures for the three biggest clouds. So if you run a workload on Microsoft or Google or Amazon, you basically have, in my view, the most complete open data set available and where there has been information about the efficiency of a data center in the public domain, it's included.Where there's information about water usage, it's also included. And this is, I'm really happy to actually finally see this kind of ratified because there is now something approaching a shared consensus view on what this data set, what this data should look like. And I think this is the thing I would.Point people to, because I think this is actually used by some of the other software like Impact Framework and some tools like that actually. Maybe Asim, if I hand over to you to let you talk about what the process is when the steering committee inside the GSF ratify this and then maybe talk a little bit about the impact framework thing because there's some follow on things that I might talk about after that but I suspect that might be useful for people who are trying to figure out how they might use some of this information themselves when they're trying to quantify the environmental impact of the services they're operating.Asim Hussain: Maybe I'll just start off with that. Actually. I'll just start off talking about how the Impact Framework team got involved. I think it was during the hackathon this year and we needed, what we wanted to do was a mechanism where we could help people like compute the carbon emissions of their cloud usage.And so, the real time cloud was a data set at that point where it gave you regional information. So I forget all of it, but it was, PUE, power usage effectiveness. I think CFE was in there as well. It's. Chris Adams: Carbon free energy. Yeah.Asim Hussain: Yeah, actually, it's for some reason, it's dropping from my head, which actual point of that data was needed for the carbon, for the hackathon.But the impact framework team went, "wow, this is the data set that we need." And so they ended up building, I think all, the only thing we needed to add to actually was the geo location of the data center region so that then you could do good queries with Watttime and Electricity Maps and things like that.So we ended up building a plugin for Real Time Cloud. We actually then turned into a baked in generic kind of CSV plugin, which was a good call. And so now you can use, now you can use this data set as one of the inputs to a computation, an end computation for your cloud usage and or, other end-to-end usage.That's how the impact framework team got involved, which is, yeah, I think a really great example of kind of cross pollination of work inside the GSF. And just in terms of like how the process is here, I mean, this is driven through the standards working group. The RTC project is a standards working group project.There, again, you've been part of it, Chris. It's a consensus-driven process. So the RTC group got together and said, we're happy with this dataset. We're happy with the specification associated with the columns. And that's the way we see it. This is a project which is not just data, but the specification for what the column should mean.And this is our version of the data that we've published. Now, the goal, ultimately, is to get this into ISO, that if you wanted to disclose a dataset, similar dataset, and you were a different cloud provider, you could. As long as you exposed it with exactly the same columns, with exactly the same meanings. And that's the kind of power of standardization, is getting everybody to talk the same language. Right now I believe, Chris, that it's been ratified, but the process is that we're leaving it out there for six months for public feedback and broader review with an aim that in six months time, we'll take all the feedback, package it all together, and that's what we're going to publish into ISO, which will be another process. ISO is a process where you get reviewed by 175 country bodies, and then you've got to respond to their feedback and make adjustments, and if you have, and once you make those adjustments it gets accepted and you get into ISO.Chris Adams: And when you say ISO, you're referring to the International Standards Organization, essentially the place where people standardize on stuff, basically, right?Asim Hussain: One of the main ones, yeah. And one of the things we've noticed, as soon as, I mean, what does it mean? Why, is it important to get into ISO? It's important to get into ISO because what all that everybody's really looking for is, "oh, should I use this? God, is this the right thing to use?Should I trust this?" And as soon you, the reason why people are really keen to use kind of ISO standards is they know it's going through an incredible consensus and review process, both internally at the GSF and then not only did the RTC team had to agree, then the whole standards work group had to agree, then we send it out to all of our members to see if they agree.And if they don't, if they don't reject it, then it goes to the steering committee who have this ratification process. And in all honesty, I get very nervous at that process. Cause I'm like, yes, it is their right. And they do ratify things and they've never abused it. But it is kind of... I want people to have the conversation as part of the RTC team, rather than right at the end of that whole journey as a ratification process, but we see is more like ratification typically in the physical world is the actual process of everybody getting together and celebrating and signing a contract. It's actually more of a celebratory thing. It's ratified. So that's the way I think people should view kind of the ratification processes, the celebration from the steering committee that, "yeah, we signed this. We love it. We want it go ahead." So that's that.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for providing the extra context, because I work on one side where we're trying to figure out how to get the data into a dataset like this, but I wasn't so aware of okay, who gets to shoot this dataset down before it gets actually used in various places? And the thing I might share with you that What is probably of interest now is that given that we know there are various laws around the world that are, there's for example, in Europe, we have this law called the Energy Efficiency Directive.I'll share a link to a post that we have published at the Green Web Foundation called Happy EE Day to those who celebrate. This is specifically about the fact that there's data that's been collected at a data center level, which is actually higher resolution than this kind of regional level that you might see here, which in my view, basically sets out a way for all the other, the providers who aren't just Microsoft, Google and Amazon to have a way of sharing the same kind of figures so that you actually start making comparable, you can start making comparisons between running a workload in one data center with one provider versus another one, for example, so that's some of the work that's going into this right now. And hopefully we'll see some more data come out because we now have this data being published. Or there are laws to get this data published in various places. And there should be a data set coming out, I think, early in 2025 for all of Europe, which is very extensive.This will be any data center that uses, I think, more than half a megawatt of power. And given that most of the hyperscalers use tens of megawatts, that's going to be thousands upon thousands of data centers. So it'll be interesting to see what actually comes out from this. And what we'll find over the next month or two is what data has actually been shared by providers already, basically, because we are starting to get glimpses of this.For example, in the Netherlands, we're seeing some submissions come to the public into the light of day. And I believe there's some stuff in Germany coming as well. So we will see, so you get some advance notice, and this might be stuff that can come into this. So we can start creating essentially an open resource of this information, so that if you're a operator of infrastructure, you've got an idea of what can actually measurably reduce some of the emissions on this. Asim Hussain: And did you say it's definitely going to be a public dataset? Chris Adams: I'll share a link to, again, a little bit of a kind of like wonkish thing, basically. With the Energy Efficiency Directive in Europe, which is, all of Europe, basically, that's 27 countries.There's two things. If you operate your data center, you're mandated to publish a bunch of data points, like how much energy have you used? How clean is the power? How much of the power came from certificates versus on site generation and stuff like that? It's quite detailed. And...Asim Hussain: When you say, sorry to interrupt, but when you say 'published', do you mean like in terms of a CDP where you have to publish to an authority who will then keep it secret? Or, Chris Adams: make available. Publicly, make publicly available. However, there is a kind of caveat which basically says, "if you're going to do this, you need to do this, except in the case where something is considered a trade secret." So what we've seen is that some providers are sharing this information, and some providers are not sharing this information.This is the thing that we're seeing now. AndAsim Hussain: So, now we know which data centers MI6 uses. Chris Adams: Basically, or we're saying which companies are being, when companies talk about being really transparent, we have a way of seeing which one, which companies are walking the walk when it comes to talking about transparency and which ones are not being as transparent as their comms are saying so, basically.That's one thing we're seeing. However, even if you don't publish the stuff, you still need to report to essentially the European Commission, and they will be creating an aggregated data set that they're publishing next year. So that won't be like "this data set run by Equinix is used this much energy last year," they'll have some figures so that we've got an idea of what how big this problem actually is, because it's 2024, we've been using computers and data centers for decades, but we have no real meaningful numbers at this level of detail. And even half a megawatt, 500 kilowatts of power, that's still quite a, that's a few racks at least, right? So that's still a bunch of data centers which aren't being included.But this will give us an idea of, for the first time, just how much power is actually being used. And given that in Europe, they have binding legal targets to reduce emissions, they do need to know this because they said we need to halve emissions, more than halve emissions by 2030. And if you don't know how much power you're using and you don't know how clean that power is, it's very hard for you to tell if you're on track or off track. So that's one of the things that will be coming out next year and that's, I'll share a link to me diving into this, because I ended up having to make sense of it myself, and I found it quite difficult to read a bunch of these laws, but I've shared my understanding as I do this, and hopefully that should be useful to other people now, because, yeah, it turns out this data is actually being published, it's just, it's the first time people have done it, just like with other laws, where people are figuring out how to report on sustainability with legal teeth for the first time, and, yeah, it's a bit of a mess in certain countries right now.Asim Hussain: I think the takeaway for people who might not understand is we do not know how much electricity data centers are using. And the amounts, and I've spoken to researchers who are doing kind of research for the US department of Energy and they're like, "look, we've just had to... It's guesswork. We've sent questionnaires and a bunch of people responded, a bunch of people didn't.We inferred the rest and there's massive error bars." I mean, that's where we are. We don't even know, we can't project forward. So I think that's a really good thing just to have some solid data to even know where we will be in two, three years time. Yeah.Chris Adams: And we're going to continue on this thread to come to the next story. So, that's what's happening in Europe, and that's, well, that's what we're seeing right now. But we know that the wind can change in politics all the time. And we've just seen a significant change in America. This is a story from Data Center Dynamics.That's literally called Trump Won, Now What? And this is a bit of analysis about what we might see as a result with a new administration in the US because in the US we did see some things were looking actually quite positive in the world of AI. There was actually legislation around reporting on AI, just like Asim mentioned.And there was unparalleled investment in cleaner forms of energy. And now we've got a new set of people who are in power who take more of a dim view on climate change and are unabashedly in favour of fossil fuels. Asim, I'll hand over to you because you said that you've got, there's a few things that caught your eye that to talk about here.Asim Hussain: I think, I mean, I don't want to get too political and I'll try and keep it more to, I don't know if the facts is the right word. But yes. Okay. Look, when Trump came into power last time, it was quite a challenge for our community. He pulled out the Paris climate agreement. There's a lot of kind of negative rhetoric, which I don't know if he led or he was just, it gave a voice to, about climate change and the work that was being done. I think this time round though, the reason I'm a little bit more positive and it might be, I'll probably preface for this to everybody saying that I'm neither left nor right. I don't identify with a particular side. I identify with the side of the fight that we're fighting.That's it. And so, like, I see Trump as somebody who is somewhat influenced by the people he hangs around with. and what he watches and what he hears and even though these are two people that I think the left are particularly critical of let's just look at it factually. There's Elon Musk which is part of the, we don't know how he's related to the place but he's going to be somewhat, he has a voice with Trump. And I mean this is a guy who, whether or not he, what his personal beliefs are in this space, he has a solar power company, he has an EV company, and we've seen Trump's rhetoric change to be more pro EV, at least up until, the election completed, so my hope is there's going to be a little bit of influence in that direction.I mean, one of the things about Elon is he was part of the government committee on sustainability, I think it was. And he dropped in protest of Trump leaving the Paris commitment. So he was very against that whole process, and he is very pro climate, so there is some positivity there. I'm hoping that there'll be some influence to him in this.This is all what I was thinking before yesterday. I'll tell what happened yesterday. This is what I was thinking before yesterday. That might be more of a positive influence there. And RFK, I think a lot of people know him for one aspect, but maybe people aren't aware of the fact that his entire career is as a environmental lawyer.So that's what he spent his entire career at. He was a professor at I think Pace University teaching environmental law. He has litigated against many companies on a pollution perspective, including a big case against Monsanto. And he has been a big supporter of not just climate, but kind of environmentalism and caring for our planet for a while.And I know he's got other opinions which are of a different spectrum as well. Chris Adams: Who needs vaccines? Asim Hussain: But let's just focus on what we want to focus on. So my hope was that Trump would listen, be influenced by this space. That was until yesterday when Trump announced some of his first appointments, which now turn out to be quite Warhawk-ish.And so the whole story of "I'm going to, I'm the peacemaker. I'm going to bring peace to the world" is I think a little bit more up in question, but there's still some hope there. He has the other middle as appointments. So we'll see what happens. That's for me, what I'm looking at right now, is I'm looking to see what actual appointments he makes.And I think that'll be the judge of what his tenancy is going to be like. And I think we're going to know pretty shortly in the next couple of weeks. Is it all, is what I'm saying nonsense and he just took advantage of these people and then will do whatever he wants now he's in power and listen to the people he used to listen to?Or can it be swayed somewhat? So I'm probably not as depressed than most people. I'm still a little bit hopeful, but, yeah, that's just my very pragmatic viewpoint on this. That's where I'm thinking. Chris Adams: Or the environmental impact of digital services. So there's one thing. It looks, given the, you mentioned things like nuclear, for example, you have, and you actually mentioned specifically, Robert F. Kennedy, who's, one of his achievements, essentially, or policy achievements that he's touted before is being able to stop nuclear, or to get nuclear plants closed down.That is at odds with some of the other work, or the other kind of commensive where there seems to be a lot of interest in nuclear as one of the ways to have a lower carbon form of energy. And I'm actually not sure which way this is going to go, to be honest, because one thing we've seen is that in the current like laws right now, which were passed under the previous administration, or the current administration, things like the Inflation Reduction Act, they work out to be really good for tech companies right now.So if you, for example, right now, it's not actually that well known but let's say you see these announcements by Google or Microsoft and Amazon talking about "we're going to deploy a bunch of new data centers and they will be powered by renewable, by nuclear power" for example. If you look at how that's being paid you'll see that essentially half the cost of that is coming from the government themselves, right?So you've got essentially your 50 percent subsidy to the largest companies in the world and you can imagine that there's going to be a lot of pressure to hold on to those particular, that kind of policy set up, because that is worth literally billions and billions to existing tech firms. So that might have some impact on like the environmental impact of the energy that we use, but you also have this thing where you've got someone who's very keen on expanding America's role as the largest producer of fossil gas right now.So that has a flip side. I'm not quite sure which direction it's going to go in, but it does look like it's going to be bad news for, if nothing else, wind. It doesn't look like it's going to be great. So the idea that One of the knock on effects of this might be Asim Hussain: Yeah. Elon doesn't own a wind company, so I don't Chris Adams: but I said one thing that might bring up from a kind of operational point of view is do you end up with a slightly less volatile grid because you've got a bunch of huge amounts of money being thrown at stuff which is either fuel based so it can be dispatched internal all the time or nuclear regardless of your feelings of that which is a kind of a steady thing. That might have some implications of what you end up building as a result Because I could start talking about all the other kind of all the justice themes around that but we're coming to time and I don't want start on that because...Asim Hussain: This is a rabbit hole. But yeah, I think probably you and I agree the next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting and we're going to, I think it's going to affect the next four or five years in quite meaningful ways Chris Adams: And the other thing the other flip side of this might be if you now have this scenario where you have tariffs which massively we've seen stories we'll share a link to some stories inside this where It looks like assume under this kind of tariff regime you would have basically laptops and electronics doubling in price. If you suddenly just doubled the cost of embodied stuff like of hardware that's going to create other drivers of what you actually then choose to do. For example you might hold on to hardware for longer because it's so expensive to replace now It's twice as expensive to replace. So that might change the steps that people end up being incentivized to do under this kind of regime for example. So there's some stuff there and it's also worth bearing in mind that's just America is obviously where one of the largest sectors but it's not the only one in the world. There's also China and there's all kinds of stuff happening in China for example as well. I'm gonna give you the last word actually if that's okay Asim because you were literally in China talking about green software and I wonder if there's any things that caught your eye that you might point people to or if there's any kind of things you saw there? Asim Hussain: I think you're talking about, I've got a few more minutes, I think you're talking about this, think, I can comment on that, but I think you've got to comment first on the actual, yeah, Chris Adams: it's a lot of the time when we talk about green software we talk about stuff that's happening either in Europe or North America because that's where the majority of the money is being spent in Western markets like Western markets right but China is also like the second largest source of emissions. Second largest economy in the world right now. There's a huge amount happening there and we tend not to see so much of that but there's actually someone who I've been starting to follow an analyst called David Fishman He's been showing some really interesting stuff because you basically see some in my view quite radical decisions being made in China to actually impact the environmental like consequences of using digital services. There was a thing published in May Basically this Energy Efficiency and Carbon Reduction Action Plan. And the short version of this is basically by the end of 2025 the goal is to have I think 80 percent of all the new data centers that are being created 80 percent of their energy has to be coming from fossil free sources, renewable energy which is, when China gets something done they move incredibly quickly and there's massive human rights consequences as a result of that, but in this one here this is something which is something that a lot of us are sleeping on. Like we talk about say my organization talks about fossil free internet by 2030 and we might see the UK government saying "we can achieve a carbon free grid by 2030." And in Germany there is a target for 80 percent renewable energy by 2030. And then in China for data centers they're talking about, yeah, 80 percent by the end of 2025. The caveats I need to share, this is stuff which is translated from the actual Chinese documentation, so it's going to be hard if you don't speak Chinese and that's why I'm pointing to the analysts who operate in this field and share some of this, but it's just so much more, moving so much faster than we are. And it's something that we don't really have that much visibility on. I think it's worth actually being aware of if we think about the kind of global picture for this because you can come away with the idea that "okay there's an election take place and that means there's never going to there's not going to be anything happening in green software." But yeah, the world is larger than just North America, for example, there's stuff happening in other parts of the world And in many ways they are being more aggressive and more ambitious on climate than we've seen before basically. Asim Hussain: So So my kind of one addition to this, and I want to acknowledge this is like an anecdotal single experience of a human being who went to China, but I went and I was part of an IEEE conference and there was a specific track, a specific room focused on, sustainable software. And so there were a number of players there who, you know, obviously in China actively involved in Tech sustainability in China, some data center operators, smaller data center operators, we didn't see Alibaba. Actually no, Alibaba were there. So we saw some like data center operators there. And I remember being part of a panel and the various questions. I remember just turning around, I think the, EU AI Act had just come into force or just, yeah, just come into force at that time.And everybody was talking, in Europe, everybody's talking about the EU AI Act. If I was on panel and I was talking to a bunch of people in the tech sustainability sector, they might not have details of the EU AI Act to speak hand. But if I asked them, "what are some of the policies that the EU is instantiating which is driving some of this momentum?"They'd be able to rattle off like EU AI Act CSRD, CSDDD, maybe they won't be able to double, triple click into kind of the nuance of it, but they'll be able to rattle it out. I remember being part of this panel and I asked, "what is the policies," I was thinking about the EU AI Act. I said, "what are the policies the Chinese government is enacting, which is driving all of your amazing work that you're all doing?" Nobody could mention one. It was silence across the panel. And so that one anecdotal state, and I did some Googling as well, and I couldn't find much, maybe that's my problem, I'm Googling in English, maybe it's all in Chinese, I will acknowledge that. But I think from the takeaway for me, that is, there does seem to be a disconnect between what is being stated at kind of the state level and what is being understood at the operator level. If this was Europe, and if this was the kind of my world, our world, soon as there's a hint of a regulation in this space, we're all talking about it, every person in this space is like using that as a reason for why you should invest more in the green space and you know this and that and the other, but that I didn't see that over there.Could be a cultural difference, could be something else, or it could just be that maybe, and again, I don't know, and if someone's listening to this and actually has better information, I would love for you to reach out and to help educate me, but is, I mean, this could just be something that's said on the state level, which hasn't operationalized down to lower level. I don't know how it works over there, but what needs to happen for this kind of thing to operationalize? So we can have a conversation with Alibaba and all these other cloud players. I mean, what, where's their page on their websites talking about how they're going to help meet this thing?There's some, there's something missing here and I don't quite know what it is, but it could be cultural. It could be anything. And I want somebody to educate me on this. Chris Adams: Do you know what, that reminds me of a piece of work we did last year with an organization called Wikirate, where we to track the top ten domains in the world which were, by traffic. Do they have sustainability policies, what are they doing there? And some Chinese providers did come up, and they do actually have something inside that.I'll share a link to that, because it wasn't particularly easy for us to find this, but that was some information there, and they were some targets that were, they, it's weird. Like the thing you see in China is there's an idea very much of "do more before you say, rather than say before you do it." So inversion of what we often see in the West, for example, are like, this is the thing, like you, China can be referred to as a totalitarian state in many ways, but that means that when you see a policy decision taking place quickly, what do you want?Do you want green neoliberalism? Do you want green totalitarianism? There's like a whole, you can have all these kinds of.Asim Hussain: Maybe it's just the way, because of the way Europe's different. So I would expect the conversations, and I want to just, I want to make sure I add to this, the panel I was on and the people I was speaking to were doing amazing stuff. They wereChris Adams: Was this the ACM one that you were referring to or Asim Hussain: IEEE Chris Adams: IEEE. So you were doing the talk for that.Asim Hussain: There was great, there was some great, even some data center operators.And I was like, "you need to talk more publicly about the work that you're doing." But yeah, there's some great work happening over there. Chris Adams: Well, maybe we'll see some stuff come out of COP 29, because COP 28, digital and green digital came on the radar for the first time, really, because when I, when Green Software Foundation sent me to COP 27 in Egypt, it was basically not on the radar in the slightest, no one was really talking about it.So maybe we'll see something come out of COP 29 as a result from this, because there were some initial movements inside that. All right, Asim, I think we've gone over a little bit on time, but this has been fun to catch up and I hope the kind of takes here, or the links were at least maybe useful for people.I guess what we'll normally do is we'll just make sure that the things we did speak about, we've got some links to follow up so that people who were curious can follow on from this. And yeah, mate, really lovely catching up again. Let's do this again next month or something like that, all right? Take of yourself, Asim Hussain: All right. Cheers, Chris. Chris Adams: Ta ra! Asim Hussain: Bye. Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening! Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!