Measuring IT Carbon Footprint: What is the Current Status Actually?

What is sustainable IT

Sustainable IT focuses on the sustainability of IT itself. The emissions, the water usage, the equipment and the devices. As such, it looks at the actual “greeness” of IT, rather than IT making the world more green (which is not always the case by the way). That makes the topic also quite broad, but in reality there really is a clear divide between hardware- and cloud-providers and its users. Hardware- and cloud-providers will focus more on actual physical components: computer design, datacenter design, heatwaste re-usage and PUE values. And its users tend to focus more on those components they control, namely the software that runs on those components and the data that flows through it. Being a Cloud Architect, I focus mostly on the latter.

Why this paper?

When you step back and have a look at the progression of the field of Sustainable IT, it is almost as if the field is in some sort of perpetual reinvention. For the last 15 or so years, the same ideas published and the same sort of tools have been made proposed. This has to stop. If IT is to become more sustainable, and not just more effective at Greenwashing, we need to start improving our current overall capability of doing IT in a sustainable manner and much of in the end comes back to measuring the current level.

Even though the field seems very active, with cloud-providers publishing statements and dashboards for their customers, and consultancy firms offering more and more sustainable IT advisory services, the numbers they put out don’t lie. If they are transparent about their methodologies (mostly not), it tends to come down to the same tools for direct measurements and/or estimations.

So, I wrote the paper to establish some sort of knowledge baseline, as well as to inform the community about our current ability in measuring the footprint of IT. At the same time, I would like to draw attention on those individuals and companies that are really advancing this baseline. Those that are actually pushing the envelope rather than only talking about it. To some extent, it might still be my personal take, nonetheless.

What?

The paper present the SDIA linear approximation formula and the assumptions underlying it. This approximation was developed in collaboration with the SDIA, a non-profit focusing on sustainable IT in a broad sense, and can be used as a rule of thumb to quickly verify energy utilization of those machines for which we know the CPU’s TDP when it is possible to gather proper measurements.

Next to that, the paper segments our efforts into 4 categories and describes our current state of advancement on each one of those categories:

• Software Energy Consumption
• Software Overhead Energy Consumption
• Momentaneous Energy Grid Mix
• Embodied Carbon Emissions

Abstract of the Paper

Despite the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive from the European Union, which presses large enterprises to be more transparent about their GHG emissions, and though large technology- or advisory firms might peddle otherwise, there are plenty of challenges ahead when it comes to measuring GHG emissions from IT activities in the first place. This paper categories those challenges into 4 categories, and explains the current status, shortcomings and potential future research directions. These categories are: measuring software energy consumption, server overhead energy consumption, Energy Mix and emissions from embodied carbon. Next to that, various non-profit and open-source initiatives are introduced as well as a mathematical framework, based on CPU consumption, that can act as a rule-of-thumb for quick and effortless assessments.