Cloud

An updated look at the total electricity consumption and associated GHG emissions for the ICT sector in 2020. Paper notes on Malmodin et al. (2023).

Researchers need to be more careful about the inputs into their models. Overestimates undermine the goal of reducing the environmental impact of IT.

Will we ever be able to accurately assess the carbon footprint of IT? Could a relational footprint methodology be more useful? Paper notes on Pasek et al (2023).

The GHG Protocol needs to evolve to better represent the complexity of how energy markets work.

There is a correlation between the training time and energy consumption, but that doesn’t mean there is a correlation between training time and carbon emissions.

Data centers consuming too much energy at peak times - can’t we just turn them off?

Is it better to replace powerful developer laptops with cloud dev environments? What is the carbon cost of my software development – builds, tests, deploys, code hosting, dev environments?

Why isn’t carbon aware workload scheduling more common? Data center level scheduling is infeasible, so what are the opportunities for developers to implement more granular functionality?

Customers should now be asking their suppliers for the carbon footprint of the software services they buy.

The methodology is invalid, which the authors acknowledge but ignore. This means the results of this article aren’t particularly useful.