Technologists want to lower
carbon emissions with even more code
Open-source tools designed to
spotlight the carbon footprints of cloud storage
author
Melanie Ehrenkranz
Much of our digital lives are in the cloud, a seemingly
abstract digital space.
But it’s not abstract—while the data is intangible, the
storage centers where
this data lives are very real in the physical world.
They have a carbon footprint,
a truth opening the door to new sustainability
solutions.
“So far a huge amount of effort has gone toward trying
to figure out how we design
better algorithms to predict who should get a loan, or
who should get bail, and
is it ethical to have machines making these decisions,”
Daniel Larremore, an
assistant professor in the Department of Computer
Science at the University
of Colorado Boulder,
told
me last year. “But there’s this other
ethical component
about the externality of computation itself: by doing so
many computations,
are we putting a lot of carbon into the atmosphere that
wouldn’t otherwise be there?”
Over the last few years, the leading providers have
taken steps toward cleaning up
their clouds.
It’s an ongoing contention—figuring out how to
efficiently house hoards of data
without radically fueling the global warming crisis—and
climate technologists are heeding the call.
“It should be a commodity to understand the footprint of
what our decisions are,
whether as humans or as companies,” Olivier Corradi, a
machine learning engineer
and data scientist that created
Electricity Map
and founded
Tomorrow , said.
Electricity Map is an open-source mapping tool that
color-codes regions based on their
carbon emissions, specifically in electricity
production. The map was built a few years
back with just a few countries on the map. Corradi said
they now have more than 200
unique contributors and thousands of contributions. “One
person says it feels like
taking a brush and painting over the world, turning gray
countries into brown or green.”
Over the last few years, the
leadings players have taken steps
toward cleaning up their clouds.
Google uses this project to optimize their data centers
worldwide, according to Corradi,
tapping into the
data when making
decisions on when to train energy-intensive artificial
intelligence models. (A paper
published in June of
last year by researchers at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that
training one AI model has the
same carbon footprint as the lifetime of five average
American cars.)
Google has some wiggle room when it comes to scheduling
their cloud computations,
and Corradi’s team provides them with the data-driven
insights needed to make
climate-friendly decisions. For instance, looking at a
24-hour forecast, Corradi’s
team might find that the least carbon-intensive time is
in two hours when the wind
is blowing more and the sun is shining. That’s because
wind and solar plants might
take over for coal-powered ones at that time. Google has
the flexibility to pick
the ideal time and data centers based on when dirty
fossil fuel plants are less
likely to run and when, in general, less people are
consuming electricity.
"I'm very bullish that all cloud
players should be offering this."
Olivier Corradi
“I’m very bullish that all cloud players should be
offering this as a service
to cloud users to make sure big companies can schedule
their workload at the
optimal time,” Corradi said, “not only Google, but
Google customers can help
reduce emissions.”
Ethics and sustainability are relatively new drivers
among idealists in Silicon Valley,
and hardly a mainstream principle yet among the likes of
manufacturing-heavy factories
and telecom infrastructures. Corradi said that they’re
seeing digital tech companies
like Google, Stripe, and other
small and medium-sized enterprises in the tech
industries focusing on sustainability because in general
you have younger
entrepreneurs in these spaces guided by ideals and that
know climate change
is an issue. These companies are also competing more
aggressively on talent,
Corardi notes, “and for those with the luxury of picking
the company they can
work for, it [climate change] becomes a more important
issue as time goes on.”
Austin Whitman, the CEO of Climate Neutral, noted that
not all companies have
a large (or any) budget to easily and cheaply measure
their carbon emissions—that
the alternative to these tools might be hiring a
consultant to spend months looking
at their operations and putting together a custom model
for more sustainable business practices.
“That process is prohibitive for many companies,”
Whitman said. “We thought if we could build
something that is useful to people, maybe we can
accelerate the rate at which companies
learn where their carbon emissions are coming from and
start to do something about them.”
Whitman said that if you get these tools into the right
hands, like a sustainability marketing
or operations person, it’s a powerful catalyst for
change. He specifically cited one of Climate
Neutral’s users, a sustainability manager from a large,
recognizable footwear brand.
“Her day-to-day is a little bit unstructured, she’s got
very little resources to hire
consultants or invest in software, so a lot of what she
does is just try to work internally
on building support for new initiatives,” he said. So
with access to a tool like this,
she can access the data she needs to come up with a
carbon emissions estimate, print out
some data visualizations, and talk to leadership about
what they can do better.
“Even simple observations like, most of your carbon is
coming from your supply chain,
that can be helpful and eye opening,” he said. “If a
company has no idea what their
impact on climate change is, they can’t take meaningful
steps toward doing anything
about it. A user that is engaged and under resourced is
pretty much the sweet spot.
“If a company has no idea what
their impact on climate change is,
they can’t take meaningful steps
toward doing anything about it.”
Austin Whitman,
CEO of Climate Neutral
Tristan Mallet, the associate director at BCG Gamma,
echoed that
adoption of these tools is powerful at the individual
level,
because at the end of the day, these engineers are the
ones structuring
the company’s code. “A corporation or organization is a
sum of its parts,” he said.
BCG Gamma along with a number of other AI experts just
deployed
CodeCarbon,
a software package that estimates the carbon emissions
from the computing
power needed to execute code. The tool helps developers
understand how to
make more energy efficient coding and cloud
infrastructure choices. Mallet
said that the tool can be implemented in about five
minutes.
It’s misleading, though, to imply that these
corporations are a closed loop when
it comes to creating more energy-efficient operations.
No single entity holds all
the power and influence. Corradi says they work with
three different types of actors.
“We have the citizens that are asking questions like,
what can I do to change the
world and behave in a better way? You have policy makers
and politicians in general,
they can pressure individuals and corporations to do the
right thing through regulations.
And the third factor is corporations. They are pressured
by regulation,
but also need to sell to their end users. In this
interconnected triangle,
there’s not a single one that really trumps the other.”
The tools of course are just one step one of these
entities can take toward building
systems that take into consideration their impact on the
environment. Simply using
the tool won’t automatically change a corporate strategy
or redirect infrastructure
choices or share with the public information they can
use to make sustainable purchasing
choices. The tool is just knowledge, it’s what companies
do with that knowledge
that matters. Knowledge precedes
action, and these tools
are banking on that.
Melanie Ehrenkranz
is a writer with a focus on tech, culture, power, and the
environment.
She has been featured in Gizmodo, Vice’s Motherboard,
Medium’s OneZero,
National Geographic, and more.
You can follow her work here.
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