Environment Variables

The Week in Green Software (or TWiGS) is back with a new format! This time host Chris Adams is joined by Anne Currie and Asim Hussain to talk about news about AI and the environment (with a particular focus on Chat GPT and Bing), the environmental impact of the cloud, the Corporate Sustainable Software Market report, and some exciting opportunities to explore, learn, and contribute to green software. 


Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website 
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Events:

• LF seeking speakers for upcoming Energy Summit / Linux Foundation June 2023 ⋅ Seeking Speakers until Feb 17

News:

• AI can help address climate change—as long as it doesn’t exacerbate it / Fast Company 
• Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” / Simon Willison
• The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret / Wired
• Why we can no longer afford to overlook the environmental impact of the cloud / Computer Weekly
• Corporate Sustainable Software Market report explores industry size, share, growth & forecast 2028 / WhaTech
• Sustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps / InfoQ
• How a Hackathon Is Slowly Saving The World / Will Buchanan
• CO2.js: An Open Library for Digital Carbon Reporting / ClimateAction.tech

Books:

• Bulls*** Jobs by David Graeber

Previous Episodes Mentioned:

• How does AI and ML Impact Climate Change? / Environment Variables

Ongoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:

• Submit Call for Papers / GSF Speakers Bureau 
• Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
  
  

For our first episode of 2023, we have an episode of The Week in Green Software where Ismael Velasco looks at the dense legislative landscape around green software and technology and energy regulations. Everything from France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation to the UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy; Ismael will help you make sense of it all! 


Learn more about our people:

• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Legislation & Reports:

• State of Green Software Report from The Green Software Foundation [3:16]
• France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation [9:22]
• The US' Executive Order 14067 Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets [11:33]
• AWS Environmental Sustainability Impact Report [23:13]
• ITU Activities & Sustainable Development Goals [30:14]
• Gartner Survey 2022 [34:14]
• 2021 World Bank Study on Green Public Procurement [36:36]
• The UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy [38:31]

Projects, Protocols & Tools:

• Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Tool [24:44]
• ISO 25010 [29:08]
• Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification [32:46]

Talks & Events:

• 2022 World Telecommunications Development Conference [5:04]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
  
  

We’ve moved from a more decentralised internet running on centralised power, to a more centralised internet running on more decentralised power. Is this the only computing model of the future? What would a decentralised internet running on decentralised power look like? We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also the edge of the grid, and this is an area our two guests Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of the University of Edinburgh have spent quite a lot of time researching. They join host Chris Adams in this episode of Environment Variables as they explore community clouds, datacentres, energy regulation, projects on Islands of Orkney and the book that they’re working on together!


Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Dawn Nafus: Website / LinkedIn
• Laura Watts: Website / LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter
• The SDIA

People:

• Rachel Coldicutt
• Noman Bashir - Ecovisors
• Philipp Wiesner
• Lorenzo Kristov

Papers:

• Paper: Carbon-Responsive Computing: Changing the Nexus between Energy and Computing by Dawn Nafus, Eve M. Schooler and Karly Ann Burch.

Projects:

• Microsoft Underwater Data Centers in Orkney
• Solar Protocol

Podcasts:

• Environment Variables Episode on Carbon Aware Computing
• Script Notes Podcast by John August

Books:

• The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Laura’s Book: Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga
• Dawn’s Book: Ethnography for a data-saturated world with Hannah Knox

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript below:
Dawn Nafus: The implication of green software is not just that it's efficient in the immediate savings, but that you're opening the door to this much bigger infrastructure change that is enormously important.

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. On this episode, I am joined by Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of University of Edinburgh, and we'll be discussing community clouds and energy islands. We're shifting from an internet powered predominantly by burning fossil fuels 24 7 in large, centralized generation plants to one powered by a wider mix of decentralized forms of energy, generation.

And yet over the last 10 years, we've seen a shift from a more distributed internet to one where computing is concentrated correspondingly into large centralized Hyperscale data centers running 24 7, much like the centralized power plants of before. So we've moved from a decentralized internet running on centralized power to a more centralized internet running on more decentralized power.

Is this the only computing model of the future though? What would a decentralized internet running on decentralized power look like, though? We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also at the edge of the grid. And this is an area two of our guests have spent quite a lot of time researching to share their insights, and that's what we're gonna dive into today.

But before we dive in, let's do a quick round of intros in alphabetical order. My name's Chris Adams. I am the host of Environment Variables. I am the chair of the policy working group and the executive director of the Green Web foundation. I also help manage the community called climateaction.tech, and I'll hand over to the next person particularly, which I think is you Dawn, Nafus.

Dawn Nafus: Yes, I am Dawn Nafus. I am an anthropologist over at Intel where I focus on AI governance and responsible ai, specifically with an emphasis on AI's role climate change. I'm also an editor with Hannah Knox of for a Data Saturated World, which looks at the surprising ways that ethnography and data science intersection.

So I'll hand it over to Laura.

Laura Watts: Chris, thanks so much for inviting us to be here. This is fantastic. I'm Laura Watts. I'm a consultant and an ethnographer of futures, which basically means that I collaborate with organizations, companies, and communities to explore there innovations and how they, and together we might make the future otherwise.

And I have a background both in tech cuz a long time ago I used to work in the telecoms industry, particularly mobile telecoms. And I'm also a professor of Energy and Society at the University of Edinburgh. And as part of all that work, I've written a book called Energy at the End of the World an Orkney Island Saga, which is published by MIT press.

And that's based on the work that I've been doing for, oh, over a decade in the islands of Orkney, which is islands off the far northeast coast of Scotland. And that's actually also where I live. And I've been talking a bit and working with them on their energy futures, which we'll be hearing more about soon, I think.

Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Okay, so for the uninitiated, we've used some words like the edge of the internet and the edge of the grid. Before we go any further, I just figured it might be worth just putting that out to see what that might mean in this context to basically anyone who's up for answering that.

Dawn Nafus: The cloud is somebody else's computer. It raises interesting questions about what we mean by the edge. So if you think about this common distinction we make right now between, often when we say the word cloud, what we really mean is. The big Hyperscale, large infrastructural sort of entities where you can rent space, compute power, all the rest of it.

But what we're seeing now actually is also some serious growth at, in what my colleagues and computer scientists call the edge, meaning computers that live outside of those large spaces. And there there's a continuum really between the large data center. Large-ish by normal people. Standards that might be at a hospital or a bank, right, all the way through to servers that might actually be in mobile phone towers all the way through to smaller and smaller servers to something smaller that might be in somebody's basement. But all of those things right now we can think about as an edge in computing.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. That's really helpful. And Laura,you mentioned about the edge of the grid.

Laura Watts: Yes, so that's actually where I live. It's a geography, it's a place. So we talk about the edge of the grid, we talk about it, or at least I talk about it in two ways. The first way is the fact that at the edge of the grid, we're in places where the infrastructure, the electricity infrastructure, the grid is more precarious by then when you have storms coming in, or the cables say between islands, so undersea cables might break because they have a lot of tension on them.

So places at the edge of bridge, you got precarious infrastructure. The lights go out occasionally. But unlike places in central areas, there's not this media panic or kind of social media meltdown. People just shrug and get on with. So what that means is you've got places where energy and electricity are visible, and people know where their energy and electricity comes from because they're either fixing it or they're maintaining it or they're thinking about it.

Imagine if you're living in a very stormy environment. When I mean by storm, it's hard to stand upright because that's the kind of level of energy there is in the air. You tend to think about energy. It's something that is part and parcel of your everyday life. You feel it on your body. So when I think about places at the edge of the grid, I mean it in these sites and locations where energy is part of your everyday thinking.

So of course, therefore you're gonna be thinking about. I've got visible infrastructure. I know where it is, but I'm also gonna think about how to generate it. So in places like Orkney, like I said, off the northeast coast, we've got 22,000 Islanders. Think a lot about energy. Very stormy. Long way away from London, closer to the Arctic Circle.

So there they've been generating huge amounts of wind energy, cuz I talked about storms, but also we have wave and tide power and we also have been doing hydro storage to think about ways to store this enormous amounts of energy we're generating in the islands. So that's one effect of being at the edge. You think about the energy, you generate the energy.

The second aspect of being at the edge is that the actual renewable energy resources. So environmental resources, how it's often talked about is at these geographic locations. So if you look on a map, where would you go for where it's windy? Where would you go for where the tidal resources or the wave resources you are going to the edge of the map.

So there is a correlation between being at the edge of the infrastructure and the grid and where the environmental resources, where the waves are big, where the tides are strong, where the wind is very powerful or where there is a large amount of sunlight. So that's the other aspect of the grid. And those two things are what's really changing the shape of the grid as we go forward.

Cuz you're shifting from this. As you talked about, Chris, we went from this centralized fossil fuel power structure. We've got big power station outside cities, and suddenly we're going, huh? Our grid is now the wrong shape because all our power's being generated a long way away from our cities, right? It's being generated in these wind turbines offshore.

It's been generated by other locations, and that has huge implications because the grid is no longer the right shape because we're having to change it as we go into the future.

Chris Adams: Interestingly, one thing you mentioned all the technology there, actually Laura was for the kind of like green software nerds; that's all energy tech that all that people are putting in data centers right now actually. And if I understand correctly, I think you had something you might want to come in on that actually, cuz I could see you nodding away there just then.

Dawn Nafus: Yes. Yeah, no, I do wanna build on that in the sense that if you think about, there's two things to think about here. One is, if you look at the geography of Hyperscale data centers, you can start to see something of a movement, right? You can see, for example, data centers going in the Pacific Northwest where I live, which is really in part about hydropower.

Some wind to a certain extent. You can start to see things starting to move, but it's also connected to. Other kinds of infrastructure, other kinds of considerations like latency, right? So we're not yet at the edges in the way that Laura describes it in, in her work on energy edges. But the other thing that also comes to mind is often when we're doing edge computing, it's true that energy becomes more about salient consideration, right? So you might actually be on battery and have to do a ton of tricks to get your compute down to something you can actually manage, right? You might be running a camera for whatever reason, and you might wanna actually do the computer vision at the camera and not move a bunch of data that you don't need to be moving around specifically either because there's an energy consideration or there's just, it just takes a ton of resources to be able to do that.

So we are baby stepping into this new world where energy is distributed in ways that are different from what we're used to. But we're in no way there yet, right? We're not in those kinds of places where the wind really is serious, or where in the middle of the Australian desert where the sun is, no joke, right?

So it's too slow for my liking in other words.

Chris Adams: Okay, and if I understand it correctly, some of the work in the Orkney Islands is actually seeing how some of the communities are using some of this technology and seeing how they relate to some of this. Is that the case, Laura? This is what some of your research was were you were doing before with the Orkney Cloud. Is that about right? Or maybe you could come in here at this point there.

Laura Watts: Yeah, though I think that picking up from what Dawn said, and this answer your question, we're in this really exciting and important moment where we've gone from cloud computation being about making infrastructure invisible. So if you're a developer, you don't have to think about it. But as we move to adjust energy transition, we're moving to thinking through, okay, we've gotta get, think about where our power comes from. Then suddenly we've gotta understand that question. Where does our power come from? Where does our energy come from? You know, the cloud can no longer be something that's untethered from the energy infrastructure beneath it. It's part of the protocol stack in some ways. So one thing we've been doing in Orkney, which has been quite fun, is asking this question of, and it goes back to your, what you were saying, Chris, but the data center industry is already thinking about where he gets its power from.

That's absolutely central PUE is everything. So what's happening is this reflection on moving away from just power purchase agreements, which is, as I'm sure your listeners know, how data centers try and often power their data centers from renewable sources as they cut a deal to buy renewable energy or invest in renewable energy.

But what's been going on in Orkney is to, rather than basically handing the problem off to a problem of the market. They've been thinking about different kinds of business models and that's where it's things, it starts getting really exciting because instead of it being about, okay, we're just gonna cut a deal and then some, again, distant unknown geography generating the electricity forest or an offshore or onshore wind farm or through wave or tide power, that's something I'm quite interested in - marine energy. But maybe there's things about where we could have a local community and cut a deal direct with them, and that money goes to a charity in the islands that support in the island community. So you can start thinking about fun ideas like fair trade energy or buying direct from wind farmers, literally.

So all these ideas, which we know that we have, but suddenly they become relevant to the energy and data industry. So some of the things we've been doing at Orkney through various projects, We've run an Orkney Cloud project, which was a collaboration with Mozilla, which was great. We've also had a project called Reflex Orkney, which is a government funder project to demonstrate a flexible energy system, and you'll have to ask me to explain terms.

If I get to geeky, it happens. But what we've been doing is saying, normally you manage a grid, so these power purchase agreements might go to renewable energy generation. And grid management at a grid scale. So you're looking at grid scale batteries or you're looking at something like switching turbines on and off what you might do through a smart grid.

But in Orkney, we're going 22,000 people. We're looking much smaller. So we're thinking about managing things like home batteries or electric vehicle charges or micro wind turbines, much smaller community scale things, hydrogen electrolysis, which we have connected to some of our community wind turbines, managing all these things.

To balance the grid. So it's a different kind of management and it enables the communities in Orkney to think about how they can take control of the grid and also to generate energy renewably. So Orkney generates 120% of its electricity needs from renewables. So it's got this amazing resource. And the first stage is doing that, doing like energy as a service type ideas, or think about community asset management.

But then the question is, what if some of those assets weren't just energy assets like a home battery. Maybe it was a server or maybe it was a data center container sitting on a beach plugged into the community windturbine, and you're managing that as an energy asset. Suddenly things become really interesting. We haven't done it yet, but it's an exciting idea.

Chris Adams: Okay, so as I understand it, there were some work with, say, Microsoft having some submerged data centers in various parts of Ireland. This is adjacent to some of that, perhaps. Is that the case?

Laura Watts: Yeah, what you're talking about is something, again, listeners might have heard about. They might have heard about Orkney, because Microsoft who ran the project, Natic said that Orkney had just become one of the most exciting places in tech. And so it was an underwater data center filled with nitrogen, and it was plugged into the European Marine Energy Center test sites.

So it's on. Planted on grid, running off the green electricity in Orkney, and it was underwater for, I'm not sure how many months, maybe a year. You know, listeners can look up project online. And that's about demonstrating the feasibility of underwater data centers for reliability purposes and obviously cooling.

Cuz data centers get hot. That's why talking about them. Cuz it's all about energy and it's all about cooling in Orkney obviously that partly inspired us, but we were also thinking about you could just simply have a server or you could just again know data centers come in containers. What if we plugged them in to our grids and had a conversation about how we think about data processing and data storage in a much more tighter relationship with renewable energy generation. Because as we know, renewable energy only gets generated when the wind blows. We have to either store it in hydrogen or other forms of storage or we have to change the way and when we process, cuz renewable energy needs to be shifted in time and space.

It needs to be moved on the grid over space and it needs to be moved in time to when you need it. And that's maybe something which you can start linking up with the data processing and storage.

Dawn Nafus: One of the reasons why I wanted to think about this topic with Laura is I had separately started doing some work in carbon aware computing, which I understand you had a whole podcast on, on this very topic. And encourage folks to listen cause it really was wonderful. But if you haven't, the short version is that it's about finding techniques to run your workload when and where the renewable energy is available, right? So when the wind is blowing, where the sun is shining, all the rest of it. We've been exploring in inside our labs how to do this with AI training, which is a good thing to do in a carbon aware way because you can wait, right?

The data scientist might be able to wait an hour, might be able to wait a couple days, cuz these things take sometimes weeks to train up. One of the things we quickly learned is carbon awareness is, yes, it's a scheduling problem, right? So there's some software that folks can build, folks have built about when and how to place your workload and all the rest of it.

But it quickly becomes not just a scheduling problem, right? So all the sudden you start to see, oh geez, the grid in California, in fact does look really different from the grid in Oregon. Looks really different. From the grid in New Mexico. So all of a sudden you start to have a relationship to place that you wouldn't otherwise.

Right? And you start to think in these terms that don't think folks tend to think in reading Laura's work, you can then ask the next question, right? Which is, maybe it's not just about the locality and the grid. There actually might be opportunities. To start to think more deeply about who's benefiting and who's actually running what and where workloads are actually going.

Right? And we can start to make choices about that. So as another example, one of the things that's really been heating up right now on social media, you might imagine is with the recent changes, shall we say to Twitter, there are a lot of folks like myself who have moved over to Mastodon. And on Mastodon, we've been having a rip roaring conversation about what would it take to actually stand up a Mastodon server in a place like Orkney where stuff is in fact community run and where there actually is community benefit to how the energy actually works and how it's organized. And there are a million challenges to that that we can talk about, but that's that next step. Once, once you get beyond scheduling, right, you can start to think about all these other social implications that are far deeper than just, you know, writing some scheduling code.

Chris Adams: So if I understand that correctly, Dawn, you're talking about like once you've solved some of the kinda scheduling problems, I suppose there's a chance to then layer over kind of higher level services, like some of the things you might associate with having to have in a more traditional kind of data center.

Like for example, we were using Twitter and that's considered like one way that people actually use to communicate and coordinate with each other. And you're saying like once you've got that, It's plausible to think maybe there's other ways you could create other kind of, for want of a better word, that I'm borrowing from say, some work by Rachael Coldicutt, like community technology, like provision of other kind of services that you might otherwise be getting from very large companies, like say Google Drive and stuff like that.

That's what you're alluding to there?

Dawn Nafus: Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't have to be that way all the time, right? Certainly when my colleagues are training their ai, they're gonna very much want it on their own servers for very good sound reasons, right? But the world is not all that. And so we can start to think about, okay, where does stuff go? To whom does it go, and what are you actually doing on those servers?

And that's when you can start to think about localities, communities, and ultimately who's benefit.

Laura Watts: I thought it might be really helpful for listeners to understand that how this kind of like connects together and how the community might benefit from A to B. So if we're thinking about doing some kind of data processing on a server or in a data center, basically that requires energy, it requires electricity, right?

It requires energy in terms of cooling. But it also requires electricity in terms of just powering the kits. So that's the first bit. If you're basically then putting a load on the electricity grid, so that's what your data process and does, it generates a load on the grid. That means a local community can sell electricity, either direct to the data center or server, or is gonna sell electricity to that distributed part of the grid.

So the other thing to realize is grids are getting more decentralized in the way they're managed, but by creating a load on the datacentre, By doing your processing on a very particular data sense, you potentially allow a local community with a community owned or locally owned energy generator. As I said, like wind is obvious, but it might be solar, it might be other things, or it might be something that's more complex like a, a flexible managed system to sell electricity and to gain revenue.

Because when a community or an individual sells electricity at a small scale. They generate money from what's called the feed in tariff. So you get money by selling electricity and therefore you can generate profit and revenue from the sale of electricity, and that money can be used to reinvest in local communities to support public services or to support local initiatives.

There's lots of things that can do, so I just wanted to paint it out end to end so people can understand why there's this direct relationship between. Not community benefit in some random cash sense, but real organized, governed. Cuz often these organizations at a community level have very clear governance about what decisions they're gonna make, about what they're gonna invest in.

So these are the things that make it a very powerful potential kind of business model. And Dawn talked about the Mastodon example because that's a really nice level to think about because most of the time, certainly in energy, it's about households in tech, it's often about users. Things are thought about as individuals.

Or it's the Hyperscale, huge data centers, big stuff. But when we start thinking at community at, you know, the fediverse level, we're thinking about groups of people. And that's a really interesting place to think about.

Chris Adams: I see. So what you've prescribed, Laura, there's actually another one of the Green Software Foundation members called the S D I A. They're the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. They've got this notion, which they refer to as digital power, which is, if you imagine there being like a feed in tariff for electricity, they basically conceive some of the kind of primitives of computing, say storage or compute or networkers, there's

another kind of building block that they refer to as digital power that you put together to build other kind of applications on top of it. And what it sounds like you described there is if organizations are able to control if they're, instead of just actually like, say, generating their own power, it's plausible that they might be to do something like generate their own kind of digital power if you want, and provide something which is maybe slightly higher value that they could then use as a kind of basis for building services or things to meet some of their own community technology needs.

Laura Watts: It's a really interesting idea, so I'm gonna look into that. Chris, that's awesome. I think one of the things is really interesting, something that Dawn and I have talked about is also the challenge of expertise. Cuz the place where I work in ney has this huge amount of electricity and energy grid expertise.

What it doesn't have so much of is basically expertise in data processing infrastructures, you know, InfoSec. It just doesn't have as much expertise in that because Orkney has a history of North Sea oil and gas, so it's got its long energy history. So a lot of the things you are talking about I think are incredibly exciting, but the piece that's almost underneath that is how do we get the expertise or bring the expertise or bring training and understanding of those things to the right location?

So that's one of the reasons that Dawn and I have had in having this conversation. It's a, okay, so we have all expertise in the energy industry. It's cultures of keeping the lights. And then there's other sets of expertise in tech, which is thinking through issues of carbon aware computing, but is often at a very different game as different kinds of expertise.

So how do we bring these?

Chris Adams: You shared this enticing term, a digital blacksmith with us before, is this for some of the references or something else? Cause I heard that before and I, or just this idea of it. Addressing some of these skill gaps of people who might maybe know their way around energy but not computing or vice versa. We still have this kind of gap to create some of this.

Dawn Nafus: Yeah, Yeah and I think not everybody needs to be a software person necessarily to bring it back to the Macon example. And we might be able in a one off sort of a way, actually find the right people, right? Our networks are pretty big. Your listeners might in fact want to jump in and say, Hey, I'll stand something up over on Orkney.

But then it raises this question of, okay, what about these other corners? Other places where people might have onsite renewable energy of a kind and say, yep, I'm very happy to have some sort of server equipment in here. But what next? And so they're having some sort of abstraction layer or something where in a sense you're abstracting enough away so that folks need to know just enough to get done what they want done.

So you don't wanna abstract away the location in the way that Hyperscale currently does, right? You want some of that visible. But you know enough, we are actually getting into somebody's server in a safe and secure way, and doing that kind of orchestration with the energy that's important, and that's something that is easy and available off the shelf.

Chris Adams: So there's two projects which spring to mind when you talk about it. Actually. One of them is the solar protocol, which I'm getting lots of nods here on the podcast. It's a project which is a kind of collaborative project of various Raspberry Pi's with batteries and solar panels distributed all around the globe with the idea being that the website that has the most sun and the highest amount of charge and a battery will be the website that serves whatever website is actually hosted with the solar protocol. And for a while, that's literally just been one website, but they had a hack day a few months back where they actually started talking about the underlying technology. And basically the underlying technology is a raspberry pi with an Apache server, really reassuringly boring technology that you can run WordPress on.

And they now have an open project to start, hosting new projects on this distributed like a, you can, like super green CDN, I suppose is what you might refer to the solar cdn. That's one, one project they have. There's another thing that I've come across in the uk, which may be of interest. There's a company called Green Cloud, and I've taken advantage of the fact that, yeah, most computers have quite a lot of excess power now, excess computing power.

So the idea would be that if you have a machine with spare computing capacity and you have say like rooftop solar or stuff like that, you can add your computer as a node to a, basically a set of serverless style tools. So the, you have something which feels a lot like the kind of serverless tools that you do have, but you know for sure that you're running it on entirely with green power or basically a kind of mini rooftop, solar powered data center inside someone's home.

So this idea of distributed computing, there's a few interesting examples in the uk, but I would love to hear from more, because that's solar protocol is actually more like American and globally, but these are two ones which I immediately start thinking about when you mentioned actually Dawn.

Dawn Nafus: Yeah, I think they speak to two things. One is, you know when the necessary thing just becomes so evident, right? You, you tend to see it cropping up. Here and there and everywhere. But I think it also speaks to, you mentioned boring servers, . But I think it, it speaks to the need and the importance of doing the boring parts of green software development to making sure that your code is what it needs to be, right. That it's not collecting excess data that you actually don't really need, or that you've architected it in a way that you know makes sense for the infrastructure that you've got, because that infrastructure is changing, right? And so the software that's gonna run really well on a solar protocol or the other infrastructures that you mentioned, right?

Those things have to be developed for and kept in mind as you're building stuff. So the, you know, the implication of green software is not just that, it's efficient in the immediate savings. But that you're opening the door to this much bigger infrastructure change that is enormously important.

Chris Adams: So it's not just efficiency. There's a piece of about resiliency related to that as well.

Dawn Nafus: Absolutely. Absolutely. You're making it possible to be resilient, right?

Chris Adams: Okay. This brings us to a nice question about, okay, what this actually means for a natural developer and how this might be different to developing for, say, the cloud like you might have had before. I know that there is one paper that was released recently. Uh, Oh, God, I totally forgot the name. It's, I think it's, Nolan Bashir.

I'll need to check. It's this notion of an ecovisor. Basically, we have hypervisors, which basically take a resource, like a large computer with a certain amount of hard drives and stuff like that, and split that up into a set of virtualized resources. The concept behind an ecovisor is to do the same thing, but with power.

So rather than just having a steady supply of power that you come in that you just don't really have any real understanding of. It's instead, you have power split into kind of three kinds of forms of power. You'd have grid power where the carbon intensity might change over time. There's a renewable onsite power, which is very low carbon, but it's somewhat variable.

And then there's this notion of like battery power, which is coming from something local that you might be able to design with. And this idea is that if you have an idea of what capacity and what quantity you have of each of these going forward. Then you can design with this in mind to make the best use, reduce the carbon intensity of the software that you're using by either using a certain amount of battery over a certain amount of time, or if there's the cases where you have an abundance of power, you might say.

Just shell out like a set of extra subprocesses to use that kind of resources. That's the only example I've seen so far. But I would love to know if there are any other ones that you folks have come across, cuz that was a really cool idea and I've only found out about it from one of the previous guests, Philipp Wiesner actually, when he, he shared a link like Chris, check out this cool paper. It's awesome.

Laura Watts: It sounds really cool. I think for me what it highlights is this kind of coming together are two very different sets of expertise and development of different systems. So you've got the kind of like the eco advisor concept, and I'd be really interested, I haven't read the paper to see how much that's in conversation with people who are doing grid transmission and things like active network management systems, and flexible management systems. So people are working inside DSOs and DNOs, you know, on grid who are struggling at the moment to figure out these really important questions of how you manage your grid assets cuz you've gotta switch stuff on and off and you've gotta be able to balance it and you've gotta know as much as you possibly can about your wind turbine and how it's operating and about your kind of various different, I'm talk, I talk about it as assets, but essentially load or whether it's batteries and you talk to a really nice categorization there.

So the question for me is like, how do we bring these two together? Because there is enormous expertise that goes back decades that's trying to address some of these issues. And then if you look at, say, the UK government's white paper, it reads on energy grid transmission and the kind of like energy future.

It's talking a lot about data. It was like, we need to think about open data. There's the open data task force that's trying to think about this because all the things that are raised in that paper only work if you can get the data from the asset, you need to know about the battery, somebody else, they need to manage that.

And some of that exists. I mean, we've been trying to do this in Orkney with the Reflex Orkney project. Because we're trying to take the data from the home batteries, the micro wind turbines, all these things have apps. They will have APIs. We can get that data, and then we need to basically be able to manage those things on the grid.

So the first piece is, can you get the data you need? And that's not straightforward or trivial. And the second thing is also regulation. And Dawn, you just talked about really dull things like the dull side of green computation. I wanna talk about regulations. So before your listeners feel like I'm about to give a snoozefest, regulation is one of the biggest challenges to what we're talking about for energy and data and thinking about how we do things like the ecovisor, and that is manage assets because you need to be able to have permission from the regulator to basically switch these things on and off or be able to have any impact on the grid, because keeping the lights on is an absolute commitment. So if you're going to start changing the load, if data's gonna get into this space and thinking, how do we write code for using different amounts of energy sources, that's gonna change the load on the grid. And that starts getting into regulatory issues.

And it seems like a dull thing, but actually it's a really important space to start talking about because we can have huge impacts on what the grid looks like. What does a data electricity grid combined look like in the future? That's a regulatory and governance question as much as it is a technical; how do we shove the data about and change what the software looks like?

Dawn Nafus: Yeah, and just to highlight here, in a sense, data figures at two levels. One is. The data that you need to pull this off at all. Right? The instrumented assets that allow you to put stuff where it needs to go and what granularity that has, how that's governed, right? All the rest of it. But then also there's the data that you're shipping around and a straightforward example of how somebody developing software might develop differently if we did have something like, uh, This eco advisor thing or whatever it is, just in the face of changing energy situations.

One of the things we're starting to learn with our carbon aware AI training project is even just how you develop your training experiment. It makes certain amount of assumptions, right? If you assume that energy is just on and you just run the thing, you build it one way, right? You don't really care too much about pausing, right?

For example, which you might, if your energy is intermittent, right? As another example, you might not care too much about where the data is in relation to the compute, unless you're really pressed for time, in which case you really would. But if you're architecting the training code such that you actually know where the data is in relation to where the best place for compute is, well, You've gotta take this into account in your model, right?

Like how it's gonna train, right? So once you all those options open up, then there are implications for how you're developing machine learning models, right? And those are just the simple ones, right? And we're learning what those are as we go along, but I suspect it'll get more interesting as time goes on.

Chris Adams: That's really interesting what you just said because that's the first time I've heard people talking about fighting data gravity. The idea that everything is up, just being in one gigantic big box out of town data center. Like if you design it differently, then you need and have that, there's a way you can basically design away from that. The gravity issue essentially, right?

Dawn Nafus: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And there might be dynamic choices, right? There might be a time and a place where you look, the data gravity is just so big. It's not worth me messing around with the grids greener over there. Right. It's just not right. You know? You know you're gonna have to do. Training 10 times over , right?

You might want to move stuff wholesale. You might wanna know actually what the networking costs are in between in case you have to shuttle, right? There might be a moment where the grids are running renewable energy in such a way that actually it's worth your while to shuttle. Again, these are things that we're just exploring, but yeah, it, it might not be the same type of training, you know, everywhere for everyone.

Chris Adams: This is really interesting when you talk about this cuz this, this keeps coming back to some work by Lorenzo Kristov. About basically taking the lessons learned about computer science, like Law of Demeter and not having to see every single thing or basically applying lots of the ideas from computer science to grid design.

This sounds like really interesting. I wanna just check, uh, Laura and Dawn, you folks have been working on a book. Okay. You've been thinking about this for a while and I understand that you've been putting together a book or something around this. Is there a chance you might be to talk a little bit about that?

Then maybe we'll wrap up for the last few things cuz there's a few questions about what, what you're listening to and looking at right now. And I'm curious about this book now that sounds like there's some work going into this.

Laura Watts: Yeah, definitely. I think the first thing to say is that all the things we're talking about are the things that we've been thinking through because there is this extraordinary. I wanna say most like it. It's not so much a collision, but there's this entanglement of really important between energy and data.

Particularly important when we go through to this change to renewable energy. It's having an impact on data, and we can think about what the future looks like for this combined energy and data industry. Dawn, you were just talking about ai. One of the things that you and I have also talked about is an author respect for computing as a whole.

You know, data is, So I formally have a physics degree way back when, and that, and it leads me with a permanent understanding of the fact that when you talk about data, it's basically just an energy, it's an energy difference between a one and a zero, right? That's all it is. So, you know, whate, whatever you're storing any data, whenever you are doing any processing, you are always using energy and that has huge implications for whether you decide to make an AI at all, whether you decide to store data at all that we have, terms like data lake and all these kinds of things, right?

That seems to give the implication that data is some kind of inert object or it's just sitting there and of course, no. Every data that you store costs energy, and that has an implication to the environment. We can sit here and we can say that's bad, but the conversation we're having today is exciting because we go, actually, we've got lots of really smart ideas about what we might do about that.

We don't have to just shrug. That's really where the book came from, this sense of we've got this interesting combination of industries. That are coming together because there was a shared issue about the fact we know we need to use energy much more smartly and that requires data and energy together.

And so we've got these kind of closed loop issue. And that's really where we started off having the conversation and it led us through things like you heard at the beginning we're ethnographers, which means that we think about issues like culture because that informs the way you think you can imagine a future and build a future based on your experiences of where you come from.

Well, originally you might think there's a big difference between tech and energy because energy is about keeping the lights on. It's very conservative, it's very risk averse. And you know, the traditional idea of the tech industry, it's move fast and break things. It's alpha, beta, ship that really doesn't work in the energy industry.

And then Dawn, you and I started talking about that. They're actually much close than that. Yeah, I just Dawn, you were talking about data centers in particular, being much closer to the energy.

Dawn Nafus: Yeah. As computing has become more and more an important infrastructure in our everyday life, in the same way that energy is right, things have started to go in that direction, right? We really care if you're running a data center, you really care about keeping uptime, keeping your service level agreements, all the rest of it.

If you're in networking, which is computing, right? Same principle holds, right? You don't want packets dropped and things going down. So things are running a lot more like an infrastructure and not just bits of code here and there. And that's important. So there is a sudden point of convergence and that's also interesting.

So again, what we're trying to do in this book is to really think about, okay, what are the best of both worlds that are really gonna help us get through this energy transition?

Laura Watts: Just an example of things that the data industry knows about data privacy. We've had years of worth of thinking about this. We just talked about ai. We knows about this stuff that's really new to the energy industry. Energy industry's got smart meters, it's got home batteries. It's working with personal data, but there's not a lot of experience of thinking about these issues.

We can start realizing actually there's a lot of benefit to bring them together and sharing the expertise across them. And then in the energy industry, certainly in Europe, there's a commitment to making sure you keep the lights onto vulnerable customers and knowing who the most vulnerable people are and making sure they aren't without electricity.

So that ethical attention. Is something we can bring to potentially the data industry, for example. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things that you might be able to do. And all the things we talked about in this podcast were these different kind of business models, different ways of thinking about meso levels of scale ways of thinking through energy and data together, and the flexible management of assets and data.

These are all the kind of things we're thinking through and the kinds of scenarios for, for what a future might look like. That isn't where renew. Can run the grid and can run data and are an energy mix. I've talked about lots of different energy sources already, but there's a huge number of different ways you can generate energy around the world and that you know is enormous potential that data can really thrive from.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Before we go, let's get the name of that book. Before we go so we know what, what to be looking for. Is there a working title or is it Or, or something to look out for?

Laura Watts: We do not have a working title at the This is the most exciting thing because of the fact that the, your listeners are getting literally hot off the press ideas, but what you can do is actually you can get the precursors. So I have a book, which I mentioned, energy at the End of the World, an Orkney Island Saga, which is published by MIT Press, and that is available, it's published in 2019 won various awards.

It's written for a broad audience. It's intended to explain what's been happening so innovatively in Orkney, how and why, and gets into some of these issues. And Dawn, you also have a book out as well.

Dawn Nafus: I do, I have a couple, so there's one. On the relationship between ethnography and data science called ethnography for a Data Saturated World with Hannah Knox. There's also some earlier work on the quantified self movement and self tracking and all things to do with keeping track of both your body and the environment that it lives in.

This will be a new adventure for me, certainly, but I'm looking forward.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Dawn. So I'm just gonna wrap up now. So I'm gonna ask you with one question. Is there a book or a podcast that you're listening to or reading right now that you'd like to share with people?

Dawn Nafus: I'm certainly hugely inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, which I think really does a beautiful job of articulating what it might look like to take climate seriously and all of the social repercussions of doing so.

Laura Watts: And I think that for me, one of the podcasts I've been listening to recently is actually about the kind of practicalities of writing. So it's called Script Notes. It's a podcast which is for screenwriters and, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. So you seem might seem quite distant. It's a podcast by John August who's a film script writer and also Craig Mason, who is known for Chernobyl, who was the showrunner and and script writer for Chernobyl.

But the thing that, the reason why I find that so helpful and inspiring as myself as an author and writer is that many of us are actually writers. So all academics are professional writers. Many people are writing reports and words have enormous power. I mean, obviously words take power to transmit them.

Literally they cost energy to transmit, but also the style of writing we choose changes. How effective what we say can be. And I think a lot as an author about choosing the right words, about making sure the words are most effective they can be. Because whenever we're choosing to write, even if you're writing kind of a technical manual, it sounds an odd thing to say, but I think our words can really change the world.

Even when we're writing something quite simple, we, we transmit a lot of knowledge to the things that we say, whether it's here through podcasting, but also the actual written word itself. So I find that as script notes is yeah, really helpful for kind of reminding people for paying attention to the editorial process and thinking about the power of words.

Chris Adams: Wise words to end the podcast with then actually, Laura, thank you. Okay, we've come up to the hour and folks, I've really enjoyed this. So thank you very much for beaming in from the various parts of the world, from the Orkneys to California, and folks, I'll probably see you again on a future Green Software Environment Variables podcast.

Thanks folks. Take care ourselves. Bye.

Dawn Nafus: Thanks for having us on. Bye-bye.

Laura Watts: Appreciate it. 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 to 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.

Welcome to Fact Check on the Environment Variables podcast! Fact Check is a new segment where we take a deeper dive into the bigger questions in a one-to-one discussion with a special guest. Host Ismael Velasco, is joined by EV regular Sara Bergman, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, and an individual contributor to the Green Software Foundation’s Software Carbon Intensity project. They discuss Sara’s green software journey, the Software Carbon Intensity ISO standard, why it excludes carbon offsets, and fact checking what that tells us about offset-based green software claims, from Google to Blockchain.


Learn more about our people:

• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter
• The GSF’s Software Carbon Intensity Specification 
• Microsoft’s Green Design Principles
• Microsoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11)
• Microsoft’s Sleeping Tabs for Edge
• Browser Plugin: Tab Suspender
• Tim Frick’s MightyBytes

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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Transcript Below:

Sara Bergman: It gives us the software practitioner a way of evaluating if a future change will be good or bad. If an older implemented change was good or bad, it allows us to find the biggest culprit. Sets us up for success in terms of being able to change our software. And I think that's what makes it important because it, it gives us leverage.

It gives us opportunity for room to move, I guess, to do something, to not just stand there and be like, okay, now what?

Asim Hussain: 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.

Ismael Velasco: Hello and welcome to the first episode of Fact, check a new segment in Environment Variables. I am your host Ismael Velasco, and I am thrilled and inspired to be welcoming Sara Bergman to our home.

Sara Bergman: Thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here and I'm very honored to be on this this first episode. So thank you so much for having me.

Ismael Velasco: It's great. And for our listeners, the format that we've had in the past for Environment Variables is where you have a host and several panelists, and you've been a regular. But this will be the first time that you're interviewed one on one as part of fact check. The goal of fact check is to do that, to dive more deeply into a subject with a wonderful expert and just have a good conversation and see where it takes us.

So I am excited to, to start, and before starting, I just wanted to ask a bit. About yourself. I understand that you sort of got into green software in university and just kind of never let it go, but I wanted to know why that happened. You must have chosen to study it. So how did you end up in, in software engineering and how didn't you end up in green software engineering?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really impressed by, by the, by the homework you've made here , so thanks for that. Yeah. So I. Usually say I slipped into software on like a banana peel in the school system in Sweden is such that after 10 years of school you get to select program for your upper, upper secondary diploma.

So you have three years where you can. Go a bit deeper into something. So you have the university preparational programs where you have the more geared towards profession such as carpent tea or hairdressing or, or things like that. And I wanted to do something that was preparatory for university, that was close to science and technology, and that was a special program that they had.

Like a third was computer science. And at the time I knew how to start a computer and I could play the. . That was about the extent of my knowledge. But I thought, and to this day, I can't explain this reasoning, but I was like, yeah, computers would probably be important. At some point I better learn. So that was my sole reason for choosing that program.

And then in the first class, I had to sort of raise my hand and ask, sorry, but what's a CPU? Because I've never heard a term and. Of course were a lot of men in this class, they all turned around like, who is this chick? What she like, does she know what she's done? I did not know what, what I had done at all.

But then this was a great program. The teachers was really great, and after that it was sort of love at first sight once I got into programming and started taking more of those courses and I, I really loved the mindset of how you think about building software and. It's so creative. People don't think it's creative.

It's like the best kept secret of our industry is the creativity. So then after that I chose a, an engineering programming in university, which was geared towards engineering. And yeah, that's where, where, where it led to green software engineering, because we actually. In order to be allowed to graduate with this specific title, you had to take at least one course, which involved sustainable practices.

So I was forced to do something at least. And then I wanted, I took a course called Green itm.

Ismael Velasco: And did you have a previous connection to nature? I heard in one of your talks when you were giving examples and you were making a really great point, you were saying how we make all these efforts to green our domestic lives? And then we get to work and kind of lose our sense of control and forget all about it.

And you said, you know, we'll walk instead of take the car and I can't remember what other thing you mentioned, but then you said, you know, we will reuse the skis we give children instead of using new skis. And I just thought that is a Swedish vignette. I certainly didn't have to make those choices in Mexico growing up, and I just wondered whether that from the sounds.

You were exposed to nature you did grow up with presumably Skiing would be my guess.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I was very much raised into sort of nature close living. My parents competed in orienteering, which is where you run in Themeforest with a map and you find checkpoints. My dad was really successful when I was born, so I think I was at my first orienteering competition at three months of age.

So I've been

Ismael Velasco: Did you find your parents at the end?

Sara Bergman: I'm told my mom held onto me, but . But yes, no, I think that's fairly common for people both in, in Sweden where I'm from, and Norway where I live now, it's integrated into our culture in many ways. Same with skiing. You know, I live in Oslo now. I take my cross country skis on the subway, take the subway directly to the tracks, like with a bunch of other people, which.

When you tell people outside of nowhere, they are like amazed. But to me it's just very, very normal. And aside from that, my mom or we have a family farm. It's a very small scale, mostly forest farming. So yeah, it's, it's always felt like a responsibility to care for our planet and the legacy that we live behind to our children.

Cuz I am glad for the legacy that my great, great parents left me, which is divorced, which is now a big part of my heart.

Ismael Velasco: And I guess sort of that meant that you were predisposed that when you did that compulsory class. It, it made sense to you in not just in an intellectual way, but in a kind of spiritual, existential way. And the other thing that struck me is that I think. You mentioned how the creativity is the great secret of software engineering, and I was thinking when you were talking about your parents doing orienter, that actually software engineering and seeking green software paths is like orienteering, isn't it?

You have a few set of signposts here. You get recognize the landscape, but it's not a direct route. You don't have, you know, you know where you want to get. Roughly, it might not look anything like what you had on the map to start with. So, and you have to sort of be very agile and observant, et cetera. So I can see how growing up in all of those mindsets would have meant that when you landed in engineering, in software engineering and in green self, it particular, you would have resonated

Sara Bergman: And so that's a great comparison. I haven't thought about it. I will definitely steal it. That was great. Yeah. But I think I was also very naive, right? I, I imagine that if you wanna work in sustainability or make an effort, you need to like go into something that was very hands on, like you needed to be working directly with animal conservation.

Like that was my idea. So when I was. Taking this course, it was like, oh, I don't have to go outside my area or my expertise to do this. I can fight climate change in my own arena. And that was like eye opening and something that I'm very happy that I'm able to do because software is something I'm very passionate about.

So I'm glad I can combine those two passions.

Ismael Velasco: And at the same time, I heard your word fight for climate change in your arena and your career, and I think that's really interesting as well because it, it makes me think of you. A young girl asking what is a CPU? And not only had you chosen to go there, which is you know, pretty reckless to start with, but in an old male environment where asking a que a technical question as a girl positions you in a very gendered way, you were fearless and just went, sorry, what's a CPU?

And I get the feeling that then you got a job and you ended up working Microsoft and. You put your hand up again and it was like, yes, but what about the environment? How did that happen? Did you arrive sort of into your professional career and people were already talking about it and that space existed or did you arrive with that kind of passion, awaken you and thought it's nowhere here.

What do I do?

Sara Bergman: I think it was a combination for sure. One of the reasons I chose Microsoft is because they had at the time, and even more so now, a very clear position when it comes to climate. It's always been a pillar of Microsoft to first Carbon neutral and now this increased focus of being carbon negative, so, so that was definitely one of the reasons.

But I think also coming directly from university into a big corporation, there is a certain amount of time needed to find your feet navigating. A professional, what does it mean to go to work? You know, all those things. So it took a while before I figured out how I could marry the two. I used hackathons a lot in the start, which is something, uh, we have internally, which was great to sort of investigate this passion.

I've been so, so lucky to have the support of my managers and the mentors and other peers around me on this journey. And then I think it really took off after I saw Asim speak at March, build in 2020. It was like super early in the pandemic sitting at home and I was like, whoa, I wanna be like him. So again, I guess pretty fiercely.

I set up a one-to-one and was like, teach me your ways And uh, he was kind enough to accept and yeah, opened a lot of doors for me. So I do believe in maybe being a bit troublesome in like a good way. Make good trouble you. . I think that's, uh, that's I.

Ismael Velasco: Two interesting points there for me. One is the role of the hackathons and obviously the Green Silver Foundation just finished. Fantastically successful hackathon. We had such brilliant solutions that came up and 400 technologies mobilized into sometimes for the first time, thinking about carbon aware computing, which we will dive into very soon.

And I've often thought that part of the win, as it were, are the winners, right? You win your money, hopefully you take off with your idea a bit more. And then there's the next layer of winning, which is all of the projects that don't win the money but actually advance in some way. Their idea and some of those ideas are likely to go much further than the winners.

And vice versa. You just, you Canditt tell. And then there's a next layer, which is the judges and the companies and the observers being able to go, ha, I hadn't thought of that. We could do something like that, or, that's a good approach, or we should, instead of investigate this further. But finally, I. It's the live altering trajectories that there are people there who will have come to the hackathon.

You know, if you move forward 15 years, it might be a different life just because they went there. And so the fact that you had the initiative to go and the support to be able to do it as part of your work seems like a really powerful factor in your trajectory.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, indeed. They were truly a cataclyst and I also just wanna echo the sentiments you said about the, the hackathon, the gsf just closed. If people listening in haven't watched the recording or didn't attend the event. Please do the, the winners, like all the projects that were presented were, or the hacks that were presented were amazing.

I was blown away. So yeah, just do yourself a favor and go listen, go listening, cuz it's definitely a learning opportunity.

Ismael Velasco: Absolutely. Then the second element was this being troublesome in a good way at work and in. My last podcast actually, I reflected that people often think about big corporations as these monolithic things. They're good, they're bad, they're doing this, they're doing that. But really they're microsystems.

They're so big that they have all of us, and they have all of our motivations. And I will be very green in somewhere else of my life and then not green in others. And my weaknesses and my strengths will vary, as it were. And there's those set of competing interests inside myself that learn in the planet, that I learn in those organizations.

Microsoft recently released this sustainable design manifesto that I also highlighted in the last episode, and in it they speak about it only takes 3% of people to protest in order to achieve systemic change. And likewise, they say that it only takes a few troublemakers, as it were in tech, in your in a company to create systemic change.

And I wanted to ask you about those dynamics. So on the one hand, you have these positive tendencies in m. That are moving towards sustainability. And on the other hand you have, you know, tendencies that are perhaps not so, sort of mutually supportive of that and you're in the middle of, of this sort of navigating and you're one of that 3%.

How do you feel those two forces, as you were, the forces that drive sustainability and the forces that drive non-sustainable patterns of profit? How do they interact? As a whole and in your job as it were for yourself as a, as a technologist.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely, and and I agree with what you say. I firmly believe in those grassroot movements. If you have grassroot movement and leadership support, I think everything is possible. So if you have both that that is great. I think also what's been important to me is really try to understand people's motivation.

Like obviously I am very interested in sustainability to me, , that's gonna be the most important thing. It is not for everyone. Some people, they will care more about cost. Other people will care more about PR or security, or they have something else that's their cornerstone or corner value, which they will prioritize higher.

That doesn't make them bad people. So you have to think if you're one of those people who. Are emotionally invested in sustainability. For example, if you're gonna argue with everyone to disagree with you, your, your energy's gonna run out really quickly. So my personal mindset is to try and think that everyone is on a different place in their journey, and what I can do is give information based on which level they are right now.

Maybe they're not at all open to this idea. Maybe I can sell them on energy efficiency instead because they are also interested.

Ismael Velasco: Performance.

Sara Bergman: electricity bill. Exactly. Performance. Or I can talk about hardware efficiency because they work in asset management and they don't wanna throw out working hardware either, because that's their core motivation.

So I think that's a cornerstone. Trying to not think of people as your opponent, but you are not yet allies and you know, put on the charm or whatever it is you need to, even if they're never gonna align fully on. your vision. Maybe you can find areas where you overlap and you can be analyzed there and, and that can be super valuable.

So that's something that I try to, to work with a lot. I think also being here in Norway, we are have a more, it's not a flat organizational structure. It's still very. Hierarchical, but socially it's flatter. It's the threshold for interacting with someone who's my managers, manager, managers, whatever, is pretty low for me.

Whereas in other countries and other cultures, that can be quite a big step. I also think I have a benefit just based on the culture I live in. I'm working.

Ismael Velasco: That's really, really interesting and, and I guess one of the reflections I've had in the past is that change scales. When you can align altruism and self-interest, if, if you can put those things together, you can make them coincide. If something that you are motivated by also makes a difference to the world, then the chances of adoption and behavior change are much greater and you've.

Some of those patterns, for example. And in that sense, I've been in sustainability since I was a young man, so for, you know, 30 years, I'm now, you know, 20 years old. So time is, doesn't op operate the way it should, obviously. But having experienced this sort of, The work on sustainability in very different domains.

I find that in software, we are in a very unique place, in a unique position in almost every other arena. Advocating for sustainability is. Implies painful change. It's advocating against self-interest in some area or other, whereas in technology, mostly what makes software sustainable and green also makes it sellable and and cheap.

It's not universal, but it is mostly the case and if you create a piece of software that is sustainable, it's gonna be a piece of software that is fast, that is very well designed for usability that doesn't have a lot of data transmissions, that that is cheaper to run. So in terms of that alignment that you were saying, it is much easier in our industry than it is in most other industries.

And the other element is that that makes our, our industry unique in our ability to make a difference, is that everything we do is designed for scale. It is very, very, very rare that you. Somebody will hire you to build a piece of software that five people will use, right. It has to be at least a few hundred, generally a few thousand, and in your case, billions every month. our ability to have an outsize impact with a small tweak is, is gigantic. And I wanted to ask you about your experience of that trajectory. Where have you. What interventions have you made in your software that you are proud of, that you feel this, you know, took out a 10th of a gram of CO2 every hour for a billion people, or, you know, anything like that?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And then here I have to thread carefully, uh, because of NDAs, but, but something that I'm also passionate about is performance. So whatever I can align those things, whatever I can find an efficiency improvement that doesn't impact user experience maybe at all, or maybe even to the better.

That's gonna dry down CPU and also emissions. Like that's where I feel truly, truly happy and having those opportunities are, depending on where you are in your software life cycle, they will be more rare or there will be more frequent. If you have a piece of software that's very new, you have a lot of opportunity to to decide how things do.

And if you come in with this mindset from the. You can already set up your, your products for a more sustainable way of operating. Now, on the other hand, if you have a very mature software or legacy software, then you get to think about the problem in a whole different type of way. And I had the opportunity to work on both.

And I think they both come with interesting challenges. And for the more mature software, then you might also have to start working with partners and look outside the scope of your own little bubble and see how do. Interact with these piece of software, how can we change that? How can we, maybe there's a software that we know is going to go away, how can we speed that up or, or work with those kind of changes?

So yeah, there's definitely been opportunities, I'm afraid, I can't say specific things I've done.

Ismael Velasco: I think those design principles as it were, Sharing are are very important and they remind me of a specific example that Microsoft has shared widely very recently, which was that it made PC upgrades. Carbon aware and that's amazing. They, and it was announced. I love the fact, it's like I have mixed feelings about it, but at the same time, overall I love it.

I think the fact that the announcement was not tagged sustainability, it was mainstream. It was, this is what we've done in Windows 11, this is our new functionalities. And then at the end they said, and now whenever you charge your. Computer and where it goes to sleep. We've made some tweaks that will make it more carbon efficient and we will now schedule the upgrades for the times where your electricity is green if we've got information that we need from your device.

And that means is an example I imagine of those kinds of very mature technologies that involved a huge amount of partnership discussion and then that landed subtly, but hugely.

Sara Bergman: Exactly. Yeah, I think that's a great example. Another favorite of mine is the sleeping tabs and Edge, where I guess I'm like mo most, um, people in software. I keep way too many tabs. I don't know why. I am a hoarder. I collect tabs. So I'm very happy that the ones I don't use are put to sleep, so they don't have to waste CPU.

And I can still, you know, feel good about my 80 tabs

Ismael Velasco: Yes, I, that mean it has been a game changer to me. I, I use an extension called Tap Suspender because it's sort of more granular, but the idea, my CPU, the fact that my computer runs when I have literally. 500 tabs open. is remarkable. And I know that I'm not killing the planet and I still have my 500 tabs open.

So yeah. And also there's energy saver mode as well. I think that's come out recently in edge. So there's some really good work. And this leads me to another question. So what I see is that we are. That Microsoft is implementing the kind of carbon aware approaches that the Hackathon was all about, and it is seeking to improve efficiency but also diminish its CO2 emissions.

And I suppose a question for me is, where do these metrics live? How could we mainstream, I suppose those metrics. At a granular level where all of the software that we develop comes with a CO2 measure, and I know that in this context you have been really doing pioneering work with the Green Software Foundation around the software carbon intensity specification.

So I wanted to ask you a bit more about how that came about and how you came to be involved in.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. So the SCI specification is by the. Working group in the gsf. We started meeting really early after the foundation was started. I'm not sure it's the first, but it was, it was up and running those weekly meetings really early since it aligned with things that I had been doing in my work.

I was asked if I wanted to join, and of course I did, and that's was sort of the start of it. Those weekly meetings have. So much fun, like getting to learn from people who are also software practitioner, but at other companies have other types of experiences. They have other length of experiences come from different backgrounds.

It's been, it's been so great to have those perspective and to learn from those people and to be able to hopefully give something back to this group as well. And I am so incredibly. Of the work that we did both with the, with the Alpha version, which I was very much involved in the now the Viv one version where I had to step away for little bit cuz of other work things.

But that we released now before COP 27. So yeah, I think, I think that was sort of how I ended up.

Ismael Velasco: And what is it? What is this specification and why does it?

Sara Bergman: The SCI is a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system, and the goal is that you as a software practitioner, no matter, your role, should be able to take informed choices to improve your software so that you reduce or avoid the creation of emissions. So it's a score.

It's not really like a total, it's more a score where a lower number is better and a higher number is worse. But reaching zero is impossible, and it is important because it is biased towards action. It gives us a software practitioner, a way of evaluating if a future change will be good or bad. If an over implemented change was good or.

It allows us to find the biggest culprits. It sets us up for success in terms of being able to change our software, and I think that's what makes it important because it, it gives us leverage. It gives us opportunity for room to move, I guess, to do something, to not just stand there and like, okay, now what?

Ismael Velasco: And do I understand correctly that the way the silver carbon intensity specification measures or gets that. Is three kind of main components. One being how much electricity your software is consuming, so how many kilowatts per hour, and then how that electricity translates into carbon emissions. So that could vary if the grid is dirty or clean at a particular time.

But in general, it would be if one kilo. Our sort of produces 10 grams of co2, then your score would be that plus an estimate for the kind of the carbon that goes from your machine, the embodied carbon. And that would be everything from when it was manufactured to when it's been used to, when it's being disposed of or other, just when it's been manufactured and when it's been disposed of.

Right. Not necessarily the usage time.

Sara Bergman: Unless the usage time includes hardware updates, I suppose then, then you could consider including those as well. But yes. Yeah, you got it completely right. Those are the the three main components that we depend on, and I think when people hear this, they're like, oh, I thought of. It be much harder. , and people expect this to be like a magic formula, which will solve our problem, but really, it, it's quite logical when you start thinking about it.

And of course there are more nuances to it if you, if you read a full specification, you can get into all those details. But yeah, in essence, it's those three core components.

Ismael Velasco: So I want to get into some more of those details, partly because my thought is the opposite. Like, that sounds really complicated. it like I agree. The very, the concept is very simple and that's powerful, right? It's you use electricity, the electricity produces co2. And you have information on the, on what it goes to create the device you're using.

So you add it all up. There you go. So I have a number of questions around that. There are kind of two approaches that I can see that I've seen being used. One is a kind of proxy approach, life cycle inventory. So you may not be able to know exactly, I don't know right now how much electricity. My computer is consuming.

I generally don't know because I don't have a smart meter telling me. So I would probably guess by looking at how much a model of computer like mine consumes electricity using software like this for the hour that we're talking. And that would be my estimate for the electricity. Is that how you see it being used, or do you see it being used by an actual measurement of electricity?

Sara Bergman: So the specification can be useful in two broad. We have to remember that the. Is meant to be used for all software. I think sometimes we can tend to think that software is only something that runs in the cloud in a cloud provider, but that's really not all the software that we have in the world, and we want the s e to be for any software, no matter if you run on an FPGA in like an embedded system or you run on an end user device or you.

are the load balancer inside the cloud provider. We want this to be able to be used for, for every scenario, and thus it's gonna be slightly different and it's gonna be very context specific. So maybe that's where the, the slightly complicated part comes in. But for the two different ways you can, you can either measure it directly and that's very accessible to some, especially if you have a cloud provider that measures it's for you.

Or if you have your own data center and you run everything on premise. you, then it can be fairly easy. The other example is if you calculate it and you use kind of a benchmark, if you, for example, have an application that's, you have a very small service side, the majority of everything is done client side.

It's not really realistic for you to send back energy metrics for every single app on every single device at all time, just so that you can know. Will likely be a lot less green than just doing some experimentation on your side than try to find some kind of average behavior or usual or typical behavior and measure that.

So you can either measure directly or you can do a calculation and both are fine. It, it comes down to what kind of actions you wanna take and where your biggest culprits are. The most important thing is to look system-wide though, and not try to optimize a micro component that potentially have negative.

System wide consequences.

Ismael Velasco: In a sense that brings us to the why. There are two kinds of measurement and one. You measure for, as it were, the truth of the thing. So if you're an academic, you want to get as precise, accurate measurements because that's what you actually care of. And then there is measurement that you use for evaluation that you use for decision making guidance.

And the SCI is primarily focused on the later. And so the idea is not so much Did you catch the exact microgram? Correct. And is, if I run the exercise again, will the curve be identical? But it's more a question, if I understand you correctly of is the curve going up or is it going down? And if it's going up, is it coming from this area of my system or that area of my system?

And if it's coming from that area of my system has take making this decision, brought the curve. That's what really matters rather than, yes, but did it br bring it down by two or by five grams, for example? Would that be fair?

Sara Bergman: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think once again, it's those, those actions that we really want to help enable, of course. And get down to the absolute gram that's good for you. But in the end, the important thing is that you find this to be a tool that is useful for your scenario. And of course if you compare, if you compares to evaluate some kind of change, it's of course important to keep the baseline the same drug just for otherwise it's not very scientifically stable, I guess you could say.

Ismael Velasco: One more question around this is how flexible, I guess, is the framework? So this makes me think of some other metrics that are out there and they actually follow the same approach. So when I think of in the Web space, the. Great Tim Frick multi bytes sort of created together with other really key players.

The Green, Web Foundation does whole grain digital and methodology for measuring the carbon impact of websites in particular. And this has gained traction and it's been used by libraries and bys, sort of browser extensions. And they too work through electricity, co2, and embodied carbon. They create a kind of proxy for their use case where they use data as the proxy for electricity.

So they go, if we've had this many gigabytes of data downloaded, this probably equates to this much electricity. And that's how we get that first part of the se. And then the co2, and this was the question, I guess the calculation of how a set number of electricity translates into CO2 or how, for example, what percentage to add to calculate for embodied emissions does the s e prescribe specific calculations?

Or is it flexible enough for you to say, as long as you are doing this three steps in an evidence based way, we are not too bothered as to whether you are using gigabytes or uh, gigabytes or not, or whether you're using one inventory or another for your emissions.

Sara Bergman: It is quite flexible in that sense. It comes down to the reporting. And how you do that. You may also choose not to report on it and solely use it for your own sake as a, as a tool in your own team or your own business group. I think what's important to know is that if you just take data transfer, for example, it only gives you one lever.

That means the only thing I can do. Is to decrease the amount of data sent over the network. That is not a bad thing, that is a good thing, but it doesn't really give you a full detailed picture. So if you also have the exact grid data, so the exact carbon intensity consumed at the exact point. When you wanna use your software, which you, there are several APIs which provide this data.

If you have this data, then you can also consider other levers such as, maybe I can time shift, potentially I can location shift. I can take other carbon aware actions that not only make my software greener, but through the use of renewable and green energy sources Over time, I'm also helping to shift the energy providers to incentivize greener and renewable energy producing.

That gives me two levers. Two levers is objectively better than one, I would suppose. And same with the embedded carbon. You can use a static number, which I understand that this methodology does more or less, or like a, a percentage based, which is a simplification, right? It gives you one less lever that you can.

Use. So the c I really want to encourage granular data use because it gives you more option, it gives you more insights, it paints the full picture. So really the more granular data you can get, the better. But sometimes you do have to make scientific guesses or reasonable estimations, and yeah, then maybe that's what you have to do in this situation.

But really the more granular you can get, the better.

Ismael Velasco: Would I be correct that all of those approaches would be still consistent with the SCI language? So to be fair, by the way, to the, to the Mighty Methodology, they do add different formulas. For specific emissions. So they do sort of take into account carbon intensity and they say, when you don't know it, use this.

But if you know it, actually use the precise one. But that's a good example. You might not know it. So in a situation where you don't have all that information, would you still be able to call your metric software Carbon intensity? So in the case of someone using. Not the great data they're using. This is the average global grid.

This is a time, this is theater. So you've got all the same components as INS E, but you have a thin surface layer with very few levers because of necessity. In that situation, would the final score be ans e score, or does it require a minimum amount of layers before it can be called?

Sara Bergman: It's a good question. We want this to be easy to use and to inspire action if it does. We are very happy. If you read the full specification, there are some data considerations, some fallbacks, for example, I do believe we recommend hourly or minute granularity on the carbon intensity, but if you can't get that, we suggest annual at the annual basis instead.

Most countries, it doesn't change super fast. Of course, with energy crisis in Europe here, it's been changing very rapidly in the past few months. That isn't the normal scenario though, so, so yes, I do think. To the full specification to get maybe some tips and tricks, how you can do this in the best way, but again, more in any insight is better than no insights.

Ismael Velasco: So that's fantastic because it seems to me from hearing you that really what the software Carbon Intensity Specification is doing is creating a common language. It's a statement of faith. It's like, if we do this, we can talk about it together. Let's talk about it together. The ISO is a kind of stamp of approval that says, when we talk about this, let's talk about it this way.

Is that correct? Can you tell us a bit more about the, the why you sought iso that and, and sort of where we are in that, in that process, and why does it.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, sure. So if we remember the, the mission of the Green Software Foundation, it is to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for creating and building green software. And I think trust is such a key word here, especially when you think about standards and certifications and iso.

It is a very trusted way across many industries for sharing methodologies, for sharing standards, and I think it's a quite natural step that if trust is something that is a core value to us, then not only do we want people to not trust us, but also use ISO as a vehicle for. Conveying this trust and for, for conveying this to a broader set of the industry.

But really to my knowledge, we are just in the, the beginning of the ISO journey and we have every ambition to, to do it. We are not there just yet. So yeah, I'm not sure how much else I can say on this topic that would be interesting and useful to people, but personally I'm very excited for it. I think it would really lend that broad.

Industry wide awareness, hopefully at least to, to the standard.

Ismael Velasco: And one of the things you mentioned was the aspiration to make. A trusted standard and how that is, that word trust is so key in the Green, Software, Foundation mission, isn't it? It all, particularly in this arena, and particularly when it comes to metrics, the sci is very clear in that it is focusing on elimination of emissions, not offsetting of emissions.

And obviously this really matters because if you're eliminating them, you are actually greening the planet. There is no ambiguity, right? It's gone if you are offsetting them. There are, there may be more questions, so I wanted to ask you, first of all, what is the difference between elimination and offset, and why did the s e standard choose to go with.

Sara Bergman: Yes. So in an ideal world, elimination and offsetting would be the same. We are not in an ideal world wherein we don't have perfect technology, so they are not the same. If you eliminate something, it means you never emitted it. It stays in the ground, doesn't. Go up in the atmosphere. However, if you offset, there are several different ways of doing that.

The ones most talked about is forestation. So you plant trees, which in itself is great. It's good for biodiversity as well. It's good for oxygen that we breed, but are a number of problems around this. There has been reports of projects where treats were planted, for example, and then later they were deforested anyway.

There are also other studies that should suggest that there isn't enough space to plant the amount of trees we would need to offset all of the emissions considering the rate emissions are growing at. So there are. Bunch of questions there. Same with something that more talked about recently as the carbon captures.

It's like a giant vacuum that sort of sucks carbon directly outta the atmosphere. There are very few functioning examples of this and they are extremely costly and it is betting our future on a technology which isn't really mature enough to hold up to this promise. I mean, hopefully it will be, but I think it's a dangerous bet.

So why is it, why have we excluded it in the sci? Well, firstly, because of there are some controversy. See, and secondly, if you include offset, it doesn't help you or inspire you to take actions to reduce your impact. It just tells you how much you should pay, and that's not really what we are trying to do.

We're trying to help you reduce your impact and then offset to sort of complicates the pictures. It doesn't help you to change your software.

Ismael Velasco: So that's exciting because it basically adds trust, right? It makes me trust the E more because I know that it is doing what it says it's doing, and it's measuring what it says it's measuring. One of the other problems with offsetting is that where the offsetting happens is not where the pollution happens most often.

Sometimes it is, but generally speaking, you may be greening in Kenya and polluting in tanza. And that's great for Kenya and it's great for the planet, but it's not great for Tanzania. And whatever impacts that you're having are are not just global, but they're also local, et cetera. And of course there's a lot of criticism around greenwashing and around claiming of sets that aren't happening or verification and quality.

Sometimes if you plant the wrong trees, you are actually damaging rather. Healing the atmosphere, et cetera. But I suppose that the question that arises, so that's the bit that excites me about it. The bit that arises for me is that the way the planet is currently measuring its progress toward environmental survival, at least, is net zero.

And the concept of net versus growth is precisely the difference, right? Between direct emissions and emissions that you're offsetting. So the growth emissions would be how much pollution my software is creating, and the net ones would be how much emissions my software is creating after I paid other people to green some part of the world.

And if I've paid enough people to green enough that it's the same as what I've produced. Then I've arrived at net zero, even if my growth is a lot bigger. So I suppose my question here is how visible will s c I be if what people are looking at is the net zero effect? If people are not considering gross emissions particularly, you're able to go, my company is now net serious carbon neutral.

Yes. What incentive? I said, where will there be, or how do you see a measure of gross emissions like the se, making it onto the commitments, making it on the frameworks, making it onto the goals and measurements, for example, in Microsoft as an example, but the same for everyone else.

Sara Bergman: This is a very deep issue, I think, and it points to something that's. Way deeper than just the Green, Software, Foundation and us. And I think there's a, a lack of what really Net zero means. It means reducing as much as possible and only offset the rest. But some say the rest is like 10%. Others say it's like as close to zero as possible.

It's not really. A clear global consensus on the exact amount of CO2 we would not have to admit. So that is, I think, a global problem. Same that my understanding is that carbon neutral isn't necessarily the same. You could essentially pay to be carbon neutral because you could then offset everything where it's necessary.

It's really about reducing the majority in almost all and only offsetting the rest. The s e can really be a good tool here because we're all about reductions, so if you wanna reduce, which you will need to reach net zero, then the s e I is hopefully a great tool that will help you get there, or at least get you a lot closer.

Ismael Velasco: And that's a really powerful point. It reminds me of all of your discussion about working in Microsoft and my discussion of Microsoft being a microcosm of the world, that actually there is no technical solution to climate change. That it begins with values that people have to actually care. That if people don't care, it doesn't matter how you paint it, what you measure, what you call it, things are just gonna keep getting worse until people care.

And that in that sense, the sci is one more tool in that conversation, one more tool in sort of helping the people who care have an argument and have a vehicle. For expressing that institutionally. So you may have executives who care, but they don't have the vehicle to put that metric there. And if they say, okay, I am going to, I really do care.

And many and many more people are caring because the world is getting harder and harder. So in that respect, it sounds to me like the scis both, it's a tool for change in the present and potentially it's betting on a future that. He's betting in a future that says, what we actually want to do is these submissions, and now we're ready for this.

So if people are principled about this and not just expedient, it's not just about getting as far as you can to hit your targets and move on, then the SE puts on the map something potentially really impactful at that level. And I suppose along those lines, how do you see the. Of the SE standard happening?

Has it started? Are people using it? I've seen a paper on academia, on machine learning and se, I've seen a few bits and bolts, but what is the state of play now? I know it's only just been formally launched, like at the Carbonized software. One incredible event. Just that, I don't know, was it a week ago? But yes.

Where do you see adoption going? How do you see this taking?

Sara Bergman: It is definitely people using it, people implementing it. We have seen several case studies in the standards working group, so yeah, it is definitely starting and, and I think it will be sort of an avalanche situation. I think, again, going back to something that we talked about earlier is a. Think we're likely to see a grassroot adoption and leadership adoption, and then they will sort of meet in the middle.

I think there are teams who, for or, or business groups or startups or whatever, it's like small groups who can use this and are probably using it right now. Maybe they're not reporting on it, maybe they're not publishing work about it, but they use it as a tool for them internally because it helps them, they don't feel the need to, to write research about it or to publish anything.

they just needed us another tool. And then I hope that we will see more companies being really proudly using it than really using it as a PR metric, I guess, and to, to sort of marry the grassroot movement with the, with the leadership movement. So I don't know when that would happen. I am hoping. It will be soon-ish, but I think it's also, it's gonna be very different for different types of companies.

I think cloud providers, Microsoft and other cloud providers are in a, in a bit of a special situation because our business is software, but other also run software in our data centers and that makes it a bit special from other types of software companies. So I'm not sure cloud providers, if that be Azure, if that be Google will be the first.

I think they were the first, like Microsoft. Closely followed by Google and Amazon or AWS to have really bold strategies that they communicate broadly in terms of who will first publish their sci. I'm not sure the cloud writers will be first. I think they might be smaller. I think there's a huge movement in the open source community.

Maybe they will be first to sort of really go big on this. I don't know. I'm, I'm excited to see regard.

Ismael Velasco: And do you see the E being something that is usable? At the national and global level. So what I'm thinking is that people are measuring how much CO2 emissions is Norway meeting in Sweden and Mexico and Britain, and at the moment they just count electricity, I guess, and I C T, and they don't count any anything else.

They don't have the embodied carbon or stuff like that. Generally speaking, could you see regulators, governments being able to. Use the SCI in environmental indicators at scale in that sense. Is that something that you could see being possible or useful or not really? It's more at the business level, at the operational.

Sara Bergman: It is a very interesting question and it also points to the fact that software is kind of a global citizen. We shift our workloads, well, there are some regulations of course, but otherwise people shift workloads kind of freely, and I think if, I think that's also the crux of it then like why the European Union are.

Typically a front runner in these kinds of questions because they have a broad set of countries behind them where I think if one country said we're gonna start reporting on any software that's run in our company or in our country, would that then incentivize people to shift workloads to their country or incentivize them to shift out that country and would that mean something positive for opportunities for labor, et cetera, et cetera.

I don't know. I don't think it's impossible, but I'm not sure it's the primary use case. At least in the near future.

Ismael Velasco: That makes sense and it's a very great insight how it has to happen at sort of in. Rather than individual. I suspect it's gonna be the same with the bigger companies. It has to. Once you've got a few, then there is an incentive. If you are the first, it might not be, et cetera. You need the pioneers, don't you, at all of the

Sara Bergman: It's always scary to be the first. Yeah.

Ismael Velasco: and thinking along those lines.

I want to finish by asking you to imagine Sara Bergman in 2042. She's such a fantastic engineer that she has cracked time travel. You've been working on all of this now for all of these years. You are your wiser self. You've seen it all. You've been there, and now you've cracked carbon efficient time travel, but it only lasts one or two minutes, and then you transported back and it's anchored to you.

You can't just go anywhere, so you basically get a one minute chat with yourself. So you come back from 2042 and you talk to yourself, what did you think you'd be saying to yourself?

Sara Bergman: Well, an excellent question. I really hope I will be saying you did the right thing at the right time. I'm really hoping I won't say it was too little too. That would just break my heart. So I hope that, I hope there is some encouraging words. Yeah, I hope that's it. And just probably there will be some comment about work life balance up in there if I know my future self, you know?

But I don't think, I'm not the kind of person who would give spoilers away. I wouldn't say like, go do this. No. It's the journey to figuring out that's important thing. So just probably something like, go in this direction, talk to these people. You're on the right path, I think.

Ismael Velasco: Honestly, I find it so beautiful. It just hit my heart. I said, I hope. I hope I would say to myself, you did the right thing at the right time and not it was too little, too late. That is profound and beautiful, and I think it's a question we can leave our listeners with. Are you doing the right thing at the right time or too little, too late?

And what a way to live your life. So thank you so much, Sara, for a beautiful, insightful, deep and fun conversation. I wanted to ask if people want to follow you, and they will after hearing this, where should they find you?

Sara Bergman: You can, at least for now, still find me on Twitter. Not sure how that would be possible. I dunno if that's some dark foreshadowing, but so far I'm still on Twitter. Come find me.

Ismael Velasco: Thank you so much for helping us launch our first episode of Fact Check and helping us fact checking software, carbon intensity, helping us fact check offsets versus real emission cuts, and helping us fact check the future. So thank you very, very much and good luck in your adventure.

Sara Bergman: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.

Asim Hussain: 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 want more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit Green Software Foundation. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈

This Week in Green Software Episode, host Ismael Velasco takes you through the recent key events and happenings in the world of green software. He outlines a range of reports coming out from The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, IPCC, UNEP, UNFCCC, IEA and many other acronyms to boot! He also highlights huge positive (and negative) changes in Big Tech and how you can be part of the crest of the wave of change in green software.

Timings of mentions of links below are listed next to them for your reference!


Learn more about our people:

• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Microsoft’s Green Design Principles [25:52]
• Microsoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11) [28:52]
• AWS: Well Architected Updates [31:20]
• Google Cloud: Cloud Aware Computing Dashboard [33:56]
• Meta: AI Powered Audio Compression [38:09]

Talks & Events:

• Event: Decarbonize Software by The Green Software Foundation [39:13]

Reports & Articles:

• Bulletin: The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin [01:55]
• Report: IPCC Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability [04:27]
• Report: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022 [14:02]
• Report: UNFCCC Reports [15:00]
• Report: IEA World Energy Outlook 2022 Report [16:25]
• Article: Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality is Coming into View by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times [19:24]
• Article: Carbon-aware laptop charging by Andy Stanford-Clark in Hackernoon [23:00]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript Below:

Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most up-to-date news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focused climate action.

I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.

I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. In this episode, I will look at the raft of worrying reports released one after another by all the top international climate agencies. So recently I will explain why the news is dire, yet find the nevertheless significant milestones of hope buried in their reports.

Whereas last episode, I focused on the power of individual initiatives. This episode, I look at the complex role of big tech and highlight hot off the press green software developments in Microsoft, aws, Google, and Meta. Finally, I take the opportunity to trail the milestone represented by the forthcoming the Carbonized software event on November the 10th.

Check the episode notes for all the. So this week the planet received difficult news from a series of devastating reports, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the I P C C, the World Meteorological Organization, the wmo, the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, the United Nation's Framework, Conventional Climate Change, the U N F C C C, and the International Energy Agency.

The I. All released one after another. A series of scary reports. The World Meteorological Organization released its greenhouse gas bulletin, which found the highest ever CO2 emissions showing that we are back to pre covid levels and beyond. It also saw the biggest year on year jump in methane concentrations in 2021.

Since systematic measurements begun nearly 40 years ago, what does this. We hear a lot of the term CO2 emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, greenhouse effect, but I think it's become so prevalent that many of us don't really understand what it actually refers to. We talk about carbon. And CO2 emissions as a shorthand for all greenhouse gases, because other gases like methane stay in the atmosphere less so you're able to kind of do more about it.

Whereas CO2 stays for a very, very long time and removing it is a huge challenge. People sometimes think also that if we manage to remove all the excess co. Life returns to where it was before industrial times, but that is not the case. Whatever happens, the atmosphere has changed, the weather patterns have changed.

So although we desperately need to reduce and remove that excess co2, no one really knows quite what the world will look like even after we've cleared it all back to preindustrial. All we know is that it will be better, but not necessarily where it would have been at the beginning, and in fact, definitely not where it would have been at the beginning.

Now, why does this matter? Well, As I said, this growing heat in the atmosphere creates extreme weather events, and, and recently in a, in an earlier report, the wmo calculated that under current policies and trajectories by 2050, every single child in the world will be exposed to severe heat event. My son will be in his thirties, possibly about to start a family every single child in the planet, which also means every adult really will be exposed to severe heat events by 2050 at this rate.

What about the other reports? The I P C, UNEP, U N F C C, iea, they all release reports that coincide on certain finding. So back in 2015 there was a massive conference, COP 21. I was there and it was a real battle to arrive at unity of thought and. What we agreed as a trade-off between the economic needs of society, the speed of change, and the demands of survival, was that we would aim to control global warming so that it would not rise above one and a half degrees centi.

And certainly keep below the absolute scary maximum of two degrees. So again, these are figures we hear a lot. What does that mean? Well, Dozens of researchers who looked at heat deaths in 732 cities around the globe from 1991 to 2018, calculated that 37% of all the deaths from heat in that period were directly attributed to human cost warming.

Which means that our global emissions were directly responsible for nearly 10,000 people a year dying in just those cities. Of course, the numbers are dramatically higher because there are a lot more people in the planet than just in those 732 cities. So every day our choices. Responsible, not just our own, but also historic choices are responsible for the deaths of over 10,000 people a year, and that was in 2018.

The number will surely be significantly higher now. Now if you think about that, an extreme heat event, That occurred once per decade in a climate without human influence, would happen four times per decade at 1.5 degrees of warming, but it would happen 5.6 times per decade at two degrees. The difference between a massive deadly heat event happening four times and happening six times.

In terms of the damage, the deaths, the illnesses, the weather events is huge. If global warming spirals to four degrees, then such events could occur nearly 10 times per decade once a year. So again, if you think about that trend, that by 2050, every child will be exposed to a heat. If you think about the fact that 10,000 people have been dying at much lower temperatures from these heat events each year, not in total, but simply proportional to our human pollution, then the idea of this multiplying and multiplying is clearly.

So what do these reports that have just come out? Tell us about where we are in relation to those goals of 1.5 degrees and two degrees, and this broader situation of the consequences of global warming and climate change. Well, what all of these reports agree is that global surface temperature will continue to increase under all emissions scenarios considered.

They consider best case scenarios, worst case scenarios, the status quo, a whole range of scenarios, and under all scenarios, surface temperature will continue to increase. That also means that under all scenario, There will be increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes. So these heat waves will happen not just more often, but they will be more intense.

Likewise, more often and more intense will be the marine heat waves, the heavy rains, precipitation and floods, and in some regions agricultural and ecological drought. And there will be also an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones that are devastating continents and reductions in the Arctic, cis snow cover and permafrost.

All of the reports agree that the updated national pledges since Cop 26 make a negligible difference. To predict the 2030 implementation of the current pledges at the moment, those pledges, if we were to implement implement them, we would have a 66% chance of reducing where we're headed to 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.

So in the best case scenario of implementing our best commitments, That were not currently implemented, just our pledges. If we were to implement everything we've pledged, we would overshoot the maximum that we agreed in COP 21 and hit not just 1.5 degrees, not just two degrees, but 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.

This is if we actually do what we say we. If we do what we are actually doing with our current policies in place and don't change them, we are on track for reaching 2.8 degrees in temperature rise by the end of the century to stay within the 1.5 that we consider vaguely safe, which means still harmful but not extreme by comparison.

We would need to cut four and a half times. 450% are emissions every year more than we are doing now, and three times more emissions per year to just keep to the two degree maximum that we'd agree and reduce global catastrophe. And at the moment there is no clear path to. What they all agree is that if we are going to reduce this growing severity, massive societal transformation is required at speed.

If China is excluded, the amount being invested in clean energy in emerging and developing economies has remained flat since the Paris Agreement 2015, The cost of capital for a solar plant in 2021 in key emerging economies was between two and three times higher. Advanced economies and China. So the countries that most suffer and the countries that have the most solar energy available have to pay two to three times more to create a solar plant.

That's crazy. And a prime example of climate injustice. And if clean energy investment does not accelerate, then there would. A need for higher investment in oil and gas to avoid further fuel price volatility. Clearly, when you take stock of these findings, we are in the midst of a disintegrating world.

Our decision making systems, our leadership, our lifestyle choices are leading us toward a break. At so many levels. However, this narrative of this integration, which is how the UK Guardian, for example, in an article that gained a lot of traction, chose to cover these reports is justified, but. There is another narrative that is also true.

There is also a process of integration going on in the planet. There is an integration of people thinking together, visioning together, agreeing on the reading of reality. We have agreed that climate change is real. We are putting in place policies, we are changing our lifestyles, we are changing our consumer choices, and we are building new institutions, new models, new technologies.

So actually inside these reports that were so terrifying, there were also some incredibly positive milestones. So in the unit report, we find that compared to our policy trajectory in 2010, we have cut our gap in emissions toward two degrees by a third. This doesn't mean that if we improve as much in the next two decades as we have done in the last decade, we catch up, we would need to change by 300% to do so.

Our change is dismally behind the. But it's not nothing and it counts. Whereas the worst apocalyptic scenarios looked likely even at the start of the Paris CO 21 Summit in 2015. If we look at the data in the UN report, we are currently in the intermediate scenario, and this is outta five or six I think it is.

So again, it is harmful. But it is dramatic progress. Another milestone, the UNF CCCs report identified that last year's analysis showed projected emissions would continue to increase beyond 2030. This year's analysis shows that emissions are, for the first time ever, no longer increasing after 2030. Again, the decrease is not fast enough to keep us on target.

But it is hugely significant. Think about this current long-term strategies representing 62 parties to the Paris Agreement account for 83% of the world's gdp, 47% of global population in 2019, and around 70% of total energy consumption in 2019. This is to say that most of the world is trying. Half of the population, but 83% of the economic engine and 69% of the energy vacuum is moving in a progressive direction.

This is a strong signal that the world is starting to aim for net zero emissions. Way too slow, but it ain't. Finally, the most exciting news in these reports comes from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report. For the first time, a scenario based on the status quo on current prevailing policy settings has global demand for each of the fossil fuel.

Exhibiting a peak or plateau, cold use falls back within the next few years. Natural gas demand reaches a plateau by the end of the decade. And rising sales of electric vehicles mean that oil demand levels off in the mid 2030s before ebbing slightly to mid-century. Total demand for fossil fuels declines steadily from the mid 2020s by around two exes per year on average to 2050, an annual reduction, roughly equivalent to the lifetime output of a large oil field.

Again, this is massive. Our demand for fossil fuels is the single biggest driver of climate change, and for the first time in. We can see it peak or plateau, starting this very decade. Similarly, they predict that annual clean energy investment rises to more than 2 trillion US dollars by 2030, more than 50% from today, clean energy becomes a huge opportunity for growth and jobs and a major arena for international economic competition by 2030, thanks in large part of the US inflation reduction.

And so learned when capacity additions in the United States grow two and a half times over today's levels, while electric car sales are seven times greater. New targets continue to spur the massive build out of clean energy in China, meaning that its coal and oil consumption both peak before the end of this decade.

That would have been unthinkable at CO 20. Faster deployment of renewables and efficiency improvements in the European Union, bring down EU natural gas and all demand by 20% this decade and coal demand by 50%. Japan's green transformation program provides a major funding boost for technologies including nuclear low emissions, hydrogen, and am.

And India makes further progress toward its domestic renewable capacity target of 500 kts in 2030, and renewables meet nearly two thirds of the country's rapidly rising demand for electricity. When you really take stock of this, you realize that these two processes of this integration and integration are equally powerful and they are recipro.

Integration drives disintegration. Disintegration drives integration, but there is motion in both directions. Perhaps the most balanced treatment I have come across this week of our current moment is this recent article by the New York Times. In it, there is a quote from Kate Marvel, and as a scientist and lead chapter author of an I P C C assessment.

She said, We live in a terrible world and we live in a wonderful world. It is a terrible world that's more than a degree Celsius warmer, but also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost effective and easier to deploy. And I would've ever imagined.

People are writing incredible papers in scientific journals. Making the case at switching rapidly to renewable energy isn't a net cost. It will be a net financial benefit, she says, with a head shake of near disbelief. If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would've thought, Wow, that's a miracle.

So back to. We can be part of the integrative or the disintegrative process. Our industry is part of both trends. A really great example is aws. In their recent report and sustainability, they disclosed that they had achieved extraordinary. Advances in energy efficiency, that means that every process that they do consumes dramatically, exponentially less energy than it did some years ago.

At the same time, their net emissions keep growing because their business keeps growing. So even though they are generating less emissions, In every activity, they are having to generate a lot more activity every year because they keep growing. And this is really not particular to aws. We are all part of this.

Every technologist is helping technology grow. It's helping products grow and. Data consumption and our electricity consumption are going up even as other sectors are going down, so we can be part of that disintegration process. We can just keep adding to the electricity drain, to the carbon emissions, to the greenhouse gas effects, by the way, we build our software or we can be part of.

Integrative process and focus on patterns, methods, values, choices and designs that make us green,

and as we speak of greening our software and following where energy leads, then clearly carbon aware computing is a core part of our future as a. We discussed the CarbonHack 22 last week and the fantastic individual initiatives that it sparked around carbon aware computing. And one of the really exciting developments this week for me was that the Green Software Foundation published an article in Hacker None, and that article is called Our Code is Harming the Planet.

We Need Carbon Aware Design Patent. And the article trended number one in Hacker, which is an incredible thing. 50,000 people, nearly 50,000 people read that article and counting. It was such a privilege to be part of writing that article in a collaborative manner with a team because the resulting article, I think is the best introduction I've seen to carbon over computing.

Whether you are. More or less experienced in this field or completely new to it. So highly recommended as a guide. And along those lines, the CarbonHack has now resulted in. Over 70 teams and over 50 completed project submissions, and the ideas are incredible. They cover the full span from hardware to software to vr, to domestic appliances, to infrastructure as code.

I encourage you to visit simply to get a sense of what's possible and what's out there, because I think this is truly the beginning of something exciting, but really all of these individual initiatives that I discussed last week and that I'm mentioning now, are a very critical part of the roadmap to change.

But that roadmap cannot avoid big tech. And we discuss this massive companies, Microsoft, Googles, Apple Meta as if they were monoliths, just this one body thinking together. But the reality is that they are a microcosm of all of our society and just. Society has constructive and destructive forces integrity and disintegrity process.

So do these behemoths with tens and tens of thousands of people exist within each of these companies. And so we find that each of these companies has areas where it is contributing fantastic, groundbreaking, good things to the planet. And also has things that are massive blockages in the road to positive transformation, and both of these things are happening at once.

So I'd like to begin by highlighting Microsoft's recently released green design principles document. Now this is coming from their sustainable design. And this is an example of the part of Microsoft that is working to harness the power of this massive global corporation for the good of the planet.

Their initial principles, or manifest to, as it were for their getting started backpack on digital sustainability, is that. Climate crisis doesn't happen in a vacuum, that it is not just about carbon, but it is about ethics and relationships and inclusion and social justice, and all of these things come together.

That big change starts small. I'll come back to that in a second. That talking about climate can be hard and that digital is physical. These are the organizing principles of their green design principles manifesto, and they. Work on the idea that you should think bigger before you start, which means to challenge the status quo and to put care first, and that you should build better by default, meaning optimized, transparent, and adaptable.

Without going into detail into all these things, I do want to highlight that their principle of big change starts small, says. Start seeing yourself as a change maker. It takes only 3.5% of the population actively participating in nonviolent protests to ensure serious political change. Similarly, in companies and the tech industry, forming groups that can push change, can have lasting.

When they say, talking about climate can be hard, they say develop a willingness to meet coworkers, clients, stakeholders, or customers where they're at. Grow your ability to frame a conversation in a way that focuses on benefits, incentives, other than sustainability, just being something that is the right thing to.

It can be helpful to learn about climate commitments your workplace already has. You can use this to highlight how your sustainability work fits into these goals. So again, I find it very interesting that their design manifesto begins with designing for organizational change and effective communication.

And one of the recent examples of this in m. Is that they recently announced their latest version of Windows 11, and if you go to the announcement, you will see all kinds of features and they are all functional features, wonderful, good functional features, and then towards the end, without any sustainability heading whatsoever, but as part of the main core announcement, they also announce.

They have now made. Uh, change to their windows update experience. Windows update they say is now carbon aware, making it easier for your devices to reduce carbon emissions. When devices are plugged in, turned on, connected to the internet and regional carbon intensity data is available. Windows update will schedule installations at specific times of the day.

When doing so may result in lower carbon emissions because the higher proportion of electricity is coming from lower carbon sources on the electricity grid. And this is under the heading, Delivering Continuous Windows innovation and value. We've also made some changes they say to the default power setting for sleep and screen off to help reduce carbon emissions when PCs are idle.

And it's a wonderful example of those conversations. But it is also an example of the power of individual initiative outside of Big Tech because the director of sustainability for Microsoft made a post on LinkedIn about this and mentioned how they had built on the work of electricity maps. Electricity maps is not remotely big tech rather, it is one of a few innovations.

What time being the other big one of. Teams of individuals who came together to create an API that tells you what the carbon emissions are or other, what is the carbon intensity for the grid in any given time and place where that information is easily available, and their initiative, this API that they created has been used now to change the entire PC l.

Another development recently in Big Tech is that AWS announced updates to the AWS well-architected framework. And it's very interesting when you see, again, the trend, the movement, the I integrative process. The well-architected framework was born in 2012, and it had four pillars in 2015 when it was fully published for the first time released out.

But sustainability, again, has made it into the mainstream of their standards for good cloud computing. So what's new? The updates have done a couple of things. They have updated the prescriptive guidance of on best practices. To reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence pillars.

Performance efficiency in particular is close to sustainable design and greening emissions, but in addition, they have consolidated, including for the sixth pillar, for sustainability, they have consolidated. White papers and their best practice descriptions, which means that this is now the best tool you could look for if you wanted to understand how to build on the cloud in a sustainable way.

And to give you a sense of what this looks like, the sustainability pillar has six design principles. Understand your. Establish sustainability goals, maximize utilization, anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings. Use managed services and reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads.

And there are six best practice areas. For sustainability in the cloud, namely region selection, how you select a region is clearly very significant to your sustainability practices, user patterns, software and architecture patterns, data patterns, hardware patterns, and development and deployment process.

So this is a collection of patterns, very practical. Guides that apply to all clouds, not just to aws, and then that drill down into AWS tooling as well. What about Google? Well, they're the smallest of the players in the cloud space and very early on they seem to have chosen to differentiate themselves.

By really committing to green software to sustainable computing. And so I think it is fair to say that out of the big three, Google is the one that has advanced the most in terms of its own footprint and also in terms of its transparency and tooling, and it's moving forward with it at pace. Quite recently, they rolled out a ui, a dashboard that allows users of Google Cloud to see which zones or which regions are currently running on clean electricity at any one time.

So, They tell you, for example, right now Europe, North Europe, Southwest and Europe West are on low CO2 with a nice little logo and a highlight that is clickable and takes you to the actual region cardboard footprint. In detail, it tells you that Europe West 1, 2, 3, 4 are not running on low co2, but West Six is and so on for the entire.

World and they tell you what their methodology is for calculating that, et cetera. So they moved from what was an internal benefit to an external benefit. And then again, this year they. Identified another tool. So they did a really interesting research project. They analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across across Google Cloud and found over 600 tons of CO2 emissions in seemingly idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed.

These are your proof of concepts, your experiments, your tutorials. Moth bolt projects, the projects that were created by somebody 10 years ago or five years ago, and that have just, nobody's touching them either way, because nobody knows what they do. If those could be cleaned up, it would have a similar impact to planting almost 10,000 trees.

So Google's response was to create an active assist recommender that alerts. To your seemingly idle projects and tells you how many emissions they are consuming, how much you are producing waste in the world. This is exciting because the amount of dead data in the planet is huge. And finally this week they announced that they were launching their carbon footprint.

Product. A product that provides customers with across carbon emissions, associated with a Google platform usage. There are a number of dimensions here. They collaborated with atos, Etsy, hsbc, L'Oreal, Salesforce, ThoughtWorks, and Twitter. And if you know what's been going on behind the scenes, you recognize that ThoughtWorks have been the pioneers in the cloud carbon footprint.org tool, which pioneered the measurement.

Emissions across all the clouds. Instead of competing with them, they've learned from them. Likewise, you will know that Etsy was one of the pioneers in measuring CO2 emissions. Google have also announced that very soon they will be displaying for users of Google Workspace. We will be getting the carbon emissions of our usage.

So this is all extremely powerful and, and hugely scalable. As a very quick parenthesis, I think I want to make an honorable mention of an innovation that matter. AI has come up with recently that they announced the 25th of October and. It's not yet out. Out as in available to consumers. But using ai, they have managed to achieve a dramatic improvement in audio compression.

They have managed to make the equivalent of a CD quality mp3. Be stored in a 10th of the data. So where an MP3 compresses at 64 kilobytes per second. Their new process compresses at six kilobytes per second, and they are now hoping to take this approach and the techniques they developed with their AI algorithms and see if they can achieve similar gains for video compress.

Lastly, I want to finish by previewing the upcoming Green Software Foundation Cop 27 Showcase the event, the carbonized software in November the 10th. And this really brings together all the threads that I have been discussing because it involves many of the big tech actors. And it involves constituencies within those big tech companies that are moving to drive the progressive integrity process within the massive companies.

But it also includes some of the thought leaders, some of the key innovators that have already nudged and shaped and made possible. Some of the changes in big tech that I've. And finally, it also brings together and celebrates and highlights the individual innovators who are drawing the new frontiers of green software action.

And it brings those three constituencies right at the top, showcasing a raft of initiatives that will be crucial for all of us interested in this. At this showcase, there will be a number of high level panels discussing the state of the art in thinking about green software. In addition, there will be a launch of a new ISO standard, the software carbon intensity specification, a standardized way accepted by ISO to measure.

The carbon footprint of all software, and this is a standard that integrates both direct emissions and embodied emissions to take account of the manufacturing and disposal of the devices that consume the software. It will also be. Launching the training program I highlighted last week. Fantastic training program, which is now going to be owned by the Linux Foundation, so it will be a Linux Foundation course in green software practice.

It will also be launching a Patterns catalog. I mentioned the Well-Architected framework as a collection of patterns. The Green Software Foundation Patterns Catalog is an ambitious. Project to bring together. The green software patterns in Web, in cloud, and in ai, and this is not just a collection, but a vetting and curation.

Every pattern goes through a rigorous vetting process before. Being published and mainstream. So this will become a fantastic reference point and entry point to good practices. And we will have a preview of the State of green software report that I am working on for the Green, Software Foundation, and it will share.

The state of progress. What we will be doing with the survey, with the high level interviews and with the desk research and how we will be covering the, the level of awareness and adoption, the enablers and the points of friction in the expansion of the green software ecosystem. It will further highlight the launch of a green software speaker bureau where.

Anyone organizing a tech conference will be able to source an authoritative voice in green software. And finally, and very dear to my heart, it will be showcasing the most impressive carbon aware proof of concepts. It will be announcing the winners of the Carbon 22 Hackathon out of the Fantastic 50 something.

Solutions that have been completed and submitted and that you can go and visit and see and watch their videos and see their code and potentially work with them. We will be highlighting the absolute best of the best. So these are the initiatives that might be quoted. In one, two years time by big tech, by government, by regulators when they are scaling up new paradigms of green computing.

To finish today, I want to reflect on the nature of change. I believe that the movement toward a green energy sustainable just society. Is not only possible, but inevitable because the alternative is self destruction and human history is chaotic. It's violent, it is destructive, but ultimately it tells us two things.

The two things that human beings have. No matter what, and through all the pain and all the disruption and all the chaos, one is survive. Whenever we've been confronted with a choice of changing or surviving, we have changed. Not easily, not smoothly, not pretty, but we have survived by adapting. And the second thing that human history tells us is that we have.

Grown in our capacity for complex cohesion where we were able to collaborate only at the level of families or clans. After lots of bloodshed, we learned to collaborate at the levels of cities after even more. Trauma and destruction. We learn to collaborate at the level of nations, and right now, in the midst of all the chaos and Confucian, we are learning to collaborate at the level of the entire planet.

And we're not being driven there by Kumbaya songs. We are driven there by pain, and so I. Whether we are going to reach a sustainable, peaceful, just society by an act of collective will and consultation, or only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by our stubborn, clinging to old patterns of behavior that is the choice before all on earth.

That is our choice. And at the moment, let's face it, we are going for the slightly more painful option. And by slightly I mean. But significantly, as I said, the data suggests we are no longer going for the worst case option. We are in the middle in the really painful option as opposed to the catastrophic touch and go survival option.

We are adapting because we are wanting to survive, and I think this process of change is non-linear. It's like the waves of the sea and the rising of the tide in the. The tide does not rise in one go. The water doesn't just keep going up. It goes forward and it retreats. It goes forward and it retreat.

And when it retreats, it leaves dry land and foam and dirt, and then it comes back up in waves. And I think this is what this process is like. We have these retreats and we have these advances, but overall, the nature of survival means that we will have to advance and I believe we will. So we are part of these waves of change.

And I think as individual technologists, we can be in the back of the sea, completely unaware of the waves themselves right at the front, and be working as though the world was not burning. more likely. More and more and more of us, and very soon, perhaps already, most of us are somewhere in the wave of change.

We are at the base, we are at the middle. We are at the top of that wave and at the base. All that may mean is that we're hosted in the cloud and the cloud is already doing something to become greener. And so we're part of that change simply by being in the cloud, But we're not consciously making any decision.

Or we can be in the middle of the cloud. We are aware that this matters. We want to make a difference, and as far as we can fit it into our schedule, we do. But mostly our lives, our schedules are driven by motivations of a very different nature. Or we can be at the crest of the wave. And the crest of the wave is the thinnest part of the.

We are not with the majority of people, and it's the most turbulent part of the wave. It is full of foam and dirt and lack of clarity in that spot. It's the first bit that meets the sand and the resistance and the wind, but it also has a unique privilege. It has advantage point. It's the only point on the wave from which you can.

The other side where you can see the shore and what lies beyond it. And so I'd like to invite you, and I'm sure if you are listening, you are already near that crest. If you are, keep swimming, swim up, get to the cutting edge. Of that wave and it won't be comfortable and it won't be easy, and it might affect your career choices and might lead to awkward conversations with your colleagues and your friends and your family.

But it will give you the incredible gift of seeing past the despair and past the complacence and putting you in a position to be. The first to touch the New Shores. Thank you for joining me on another episode. And good luck with your adventures. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, visit Green Software Foundation, and please, if you liked what you heard, do leave a rating and review. It helps other people discover the show and join in the conversation. The more of us are exploring these issues at home, at work, in our free time and in our projects, the greater chances of taking effective action and making a difference in our own corner of the world.

Good luck in your green software journeys and see you in the next episode.

Welcome to our first episode of The Week in Green Software hosted by Ismael Velasco. This new segment on The Environment Variables Podcast will be a bite size smorgasbord of news, events, resources and tools that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software-focused climate action.  Check out the links below for all the resources mentioned in this podcast! 

Learn more about our people:

• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Course: Green Software Practitioner Training Course by the Green Software Foundation 
• Company: Greenspector
• Website: climateaction.tech 

Talks & Events:

• Event: CarbonHack22 by The Green Software Foundation

Papers, Books, Articles & Blogs:

• Paper: The Sustainability Chapter of the Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
• Book: World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern
• Book: Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick
• Article: Greta Thunberg on the Climate Delusion in The Guardian

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcription below:

Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green. Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most UpToDate news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focus, climate action.

I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.

Hello. I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. Each episode I will visit the cutting edge of software focused climate action and give you a whistlestop tool of the latest research and solutions standards and tools. A Bitesize smorgasbord of News and Resources. If you're just starting your journey as a responsible technologist, The Week in Green Software will give you the signpost you need to navigate this fast changing landscape.

And the first signpost I'll give you is the Green Software Practitioner Training course created by the Green Software Foundation. If you have found your way to this podcast, you probably already know that. Digital creations of our hands as we type on keyboards and build software have very real material impacts on the environment that aggregate into a massive driver of climate change.

And you want to do something about it, and this is why you're here, but perhaps a lot of the vocabulary terminology techniques. Are still fuzzy to you. We speak about CO2 emissions of software. What does that mean? We speak about carbon efficiency versus energy efficiency, and we also speak of carbon awareness and we talk about hardware efficiency and how that interacts with software.

When we talk about all kinds of metrics around all this, and finally we discuss all of these things. Very frequently in the context of climate commitments, whether it be the planetary commitment toward net zero or specific targets in particular companies or nations, and just like a junior developer, junior green software developer.

Can also feel somewhat lost in the massive vocabulary and of new concepts that are not part of the day to day of our practice to this day. So this course creates a very. Easy to consume, clear and evidence-based structure that breaks down the concepts of carbon efficiency, of energy, efficiency, of carbon awareness, hardware efficiency measurement, and of climate commitments, including each core component, each core terminology, and in very brief units.

Allows you to understand the landscape and gives you healthfully some good multiple choice questions at the end to consolidate your learning. By the time you finish this very brief course, you will be equipped to. Dive into the nitty gritty of making your software green, not just at the level of technique, but at the level of understanding why those techniques are having an impact and how they fit as a whole with the various other elements of creating green software.

In short, the Green Software Foundation training course will prepare you to consume. This podcast and others from a position of awareness. But the weaken green software is not only aimed at those starting their journey, if you are a pioneer already greening the material impact of our digital lives, this podcast will keep you updated on the latest advances and how they might enhance your own efforts.

And speaking of pioneers, Second resource I'd like to bring to your attention is the sustainability chapter of a hot of the Press Web Almanac Report by HTTP Archive. HTTP Archive are the creators of the Wayback Machine, and they. Are the foremost collection of copies of snapshots of the worldwide Web in the world, and that results in a massive data set that is indicative of the practices of Web developers.

This chapter was authored by real pioneers, Lauren De Verne Gerry McGovern and Tim Frick, who have helped define and continue to shape discourse and practice in green software on a global scale. Many of the green software practitioners that I know. Began their journey and trace it back to the incredible book, Indispensable book, Worldwide Waste by Gerry McGovern, and many of the people who started trying to respond to the moral imperative and call to action of that powerful occur, that powerful voice from the heart turned to Tim freak's groundbreaking textbook.

Sustainable Web design and he was one of the first people really together. A lot of the practices that today we are working on across the field. And Lo de Verne works with a company called Greenspector who have been really. Forefront of new techniques and new approaches to understanding in a very rigorous and actionable way, the environmental impact not just of websites, but of Web applications and of software in general.

And this chapter that they have written as a dream team together, I would say is probably the single best resource on green website development practices available right now in the world. I would recommend it as both an introductory guide once you've done that first training course to get you up to speed with vocabulary, but also as a truly powerful expert.

It summarizes the state of the art in Web related environmental metrics, methodologists and design patterns, and uniquely, in many ways, it takes an intersectional approach that engages not just with. What is called sometimes carbon tunnel vision, CO2 emissions only, and not even more broadly with environmental degradation around water consumption or other chemicals or energy.

But it also engages with the issues of climate justice and accessibility and says that actually building. Sustainable software is about more than just reducing CO2 emissions. It's also about engaging with the whole planet in a sustainable way. In addition to this already groundbreaking contribution of getting us all up to speed and summarizing in a very accessible but truly, Learn it and evidence based way, the cutting edge of thinking in this area.

It also breaks new ground in that it brings together a really vast. Data set that is open source and accessible to others with very user friendly and powerful diagrams that allow you to just go through that report and get a very granular sense of how the Web ecosystem is actually constituted today from an environmental perspective instead of an average.

Or a projection, which is what we mostly use when identifying the carbon footprint of the worldwide Web. We now have, uh, an empirically backed distribution. The authors tested 8 million websites and mapped in every single one of those 8 million websites, the presence or absence. Of all the good practices that we know make for green Web design, and they now allow us as a result to benchmark all of our websites in a multidimensional and rigorous way.

Your site, for example, might be in the 25th percentile for total size. It's beautifully small. It might be in the 90th percentile for number of requests. Every time that somebody lands on your tiny page, a hundred requests go off to trackers, to analytics, to libraries, to logs, and actually the net result is your very otherwise optimized website is actually a net polluter.

Not only does it give us this kind of data for our own individual practice, but for those of us who are active in. Shaping or advocating for policy agendas or in education for sustainable development in reaching our peers and fellow technologists. The data set provided also allows us to prioritize policy agendas.

For example, one. Impactful takeaway for me from this report was that only 10% of sites in the 8 million sample were hosted on green hosting providers. And that is both surprising in some ways and inexcusable in the sense that. There are so many options today, so many options for green hosting from going directly to the big three, which are probably the greenest of options to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud in reverse order of greenness.

So Google is the greenest followed by a zero, followed by aws, but also a lot of the even hosted providers. At the back of the trail are actually hosted in CloudFlare or in other providers that are green, but 90% of sites are not taking advantage of this, and this is significant because. Servers where our information is hosted and from which it is transmitted are the probably the biggest direct contributors of emissions in the software life cycle.

So the manufacturer of the devices that. Use is much bigger. I believe that the aggregated usage of all of the devices is probably greater, but in terms of the direct footprint of your piece of software, where you host it is hugely significant and it's one of the greatest. Biggest and easiest low hanging fruit.

If you were to shift your. Website from a bare metal or a dirty host and put it into a nice green cloud, you would dramatically improve the footprint, the optimization, the water usage, the electricity consumption of your website. So this kind of data point is a useful. Strategic guide for those of us who have to prioritize between all the various good patterns and messages.

Clearly the battle is not even begun, let alone won. We have to get the message out there that we need to be on green hosts, and perhaps even more significantly, we should be working with regulators, with producers, with industry bodies. To require green standards from all hosting providers so that we're not just having to leave it to the consumer to discover which host is green or not.

Although it's very easy and there are fantastic extensions to it, or you can go to eco greater. Put Globe Mellow on your browser or simply go to the Green Web Foundation, which has an eye wateringly large data set of billions of hosting providers of whom, significant proportion that they have identified our Green Web hosts.

It doesn't mean they're actually green, it just means that they are much greener than any alternative and so worth Priorit. Which brings me to a question that has come up again and again in my conversations this week. Why bother? And I mean, you're listening to this podcast so clearly you care, but in the secret recesses of your soul, or in the late night conversations, do you not ask yourself the question, Can I as an individual technologist, Really have a meaningful impact on this train wreck that is accelerating climate change.

This week, Greta Thunberg wrote of the climate crisis. It will take many things for us to start facing this emergency, but above all, it will take honesty, integrity, and courage. So honestly speaking, do we really believe that by turning off autoplay on a video on our webpage, we can actually change the world?

Is the focus on green software not a distraction? Placing the burden of change on individual technologists while the only people who can make a real difference operate on a much grander. What's the point of debating which bit of dust to clean in the middle of a mudslide? It is easy to be discouraged when faced with systemic societal problems, not just environmental, but across the board.

But it is a dangerous fallacy, I think, to think that the only form of power is authority resources. And coercion. Yes, governments could have a massive impact by regulating and enforcing greener ways of living. And yes, multinationals are in the privileged position to make changes that affect the entire planet in one go, but there are other forms of power.

The power to envision, the power to choose. The power to collaborate and evolve, perhaps the power to become. It is a tiny infinitesimal proportion of humanity who have envisioned tools, systems, and approaches that have allowed entire nations to change their energy con. The crisis of our times, I would argue is not least a crisis of hope and imagination.

For instance, if the extent of my hope is that I will be able to move in this room in which I am recording this podcast, but I have no. Ever opening the door that leads to the rest of my home. Then all of my planning, all of my solutions, all of my initiatives will be confined to these four walls. The. If my hope stretches further, if I believe that it is actually possible for me to roam the confines of my entire house, well that will be very good from the point of view of going to the toilet and having a shower, it will be fantastic from the point of view of feeding myself in a healthy way.

Above all, it will open up a huge range of options for interacting with my space. I can sit in the sofa, I can put some music, I can watch tv, et cetera, etc. I can even perhaps order food brought home and then my possibilities really expand. But if my level of hope only stretches as far as this house, I will never again place my bare feet on the grass.

I will not lie down at night and count the stars. I will not go and visit my children or my friends because all of my planning, all of my choices, all of my actions will be confined to this house. The extent of our ability to act is closely inseparable, in fact, from our ability to hope and to imagine, because if I can imagine not just leaving the house and I cannot just imagine.

But actually hope it, I can believe in its possibility even if at this particular moment I don't really know how to unlock that door because I lost the keys. But if I believe that I can actually get out one way or another, my initiatives, my problem solving will not be focused on which room I will sleep or eat in.

It will be focused in how to open the window or the door or find a way through to the vast landscape and the entire planet that awaits me. Similarly, those few people who have been able to see further, who have been able to imagine to conceive of possibility have allowed us all to. Beyond the confines of our immediate situation between the four enclosing walls, and gradually step into that space because in contrast to the very small number of visionaries creating collective planetary possibilities, it is in fact the aggregated choices.

Of millions of consumers to give their belief, their hope, their commitment, their effort to those ideas, which has been the engine of massive societal transformations. It is individual, often on coordinated, but values driven choices that have led companies and governments to adopt net zero target. And they may be moving too slowly and there may be a lot of green washing.

But the fact is that as a planet, we have agreed on a direction of travel and we are moving in that direction. It is those myriad of tiny individual choices that have aggregated to make esg. A corporate requirement, environmental, social, and governance indicators that have changed regulations, supply chains, manufacturing standards, and have made renewable energies power a growing proportion on an industrial scale at a time when, at the beginning, the very idea that solar could be.

Practicable, let alone scalable was elusive. But those few people there to hope and were able to imagine, and they gave us all the possibility to choose between those visionaries and that growing mass ethical consumers, the visionaries with the power to imagine and us with the power to. It's a dense network of networks of powerful collaborations, mobilizing to educate one another, to persuade one another, to track and implement and verify.

The civil society sector has been growing and growing and growing, not just in numbers, but in influence, in sophistication, in capacity to mobilize. To account for change and obstacles and to make that vision that the innovators and the dreamers and the spiritual and ethical leaders in the real sense of the world have seen for us and make it, reach us, make it, reach the.

And what all of these things have in common is that they allow us to be, not just to run an auto pilot, but to be true to our own best selves, our highest values, and thus not just exist, but really live in the end. The power to hope and to dream, the power to mobilize and collaborate and the power to. All adopt the power to become who we can fully be individually and ultimately as societies and.

The whole human race, which brings me to the Green Software Foundation CarbonHack 22, which is another thing that's coming to my radar this week, which I think is significant and of wider interest even for those listening who will not participate. I have been around the hackathon scene for a few years as a software engineer and as an I.

And this event is, in my view, a truly exceptional opportunity to envision, to collaborate, to choose, and to become. It is an inspiring confirmation of these other forms of less formal, but no less significant forms of power On the one hand. You have participating in this hackathon, the massive corporations with the power to have large scale impacts very quickly.

Intel, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Accenture Globe, and UBS ThoughtWorks. Together, they have made this a hundred thousand dollars challenge, which let me tell you is a lot more than is usual in Hackathons. With a $40,000 first price, this is a great motivator that amounts to more than just encouragement. It becomes a form of seed funding.

Any idea that really, really captures the imagination of the judges from these massive planetary organizations will receive. Money to be able to liberate time or bring in talent or buy equipment that allows their proof of concept, their dream, their vision, that hope beyond the borders of the four walls of our present to embody itself in action.

But perhaps more significant than that price, than that seed funding is the fact that these judges, that these big companies will be genuinely paying attention. I have had people reach out to me from some of these companies. Just wanting to participate as engineers in the hackathon, not for the money because they would not be eligible as sponsors, but simply from the enthusiasm to make a difference and others who are really paying attention, who want to see.

New approaches and solutions that they might support, incorporate scale, that would allow us as a planet and their mass companies to be more responsible, impactful citizens. A single idea that grabs their imagination could be the beginning of massively impactful change. And you also have the collaborative networks of change makers that can socialize, not just the tools that come.

This visioning process, this imagination, this hope in action. We have Code for All, which is the largest civic tech network in the world who are helping disseminate this happening across their amazing network of technologists trying to improve the world beyond just the environment. We have the Green, Web, Foundation, who are.

One of the greatest hubs. Proof of concept innovation. They themselves, just, if you go to the Green Foundation, GitHub re repository, you will see a whole range of things that all amount to windows into the future, to exits into hope threads that you can pull to advance closer toward a greener. And of course, the Green, Software Foundation itself, which is mobilizing to help reach those individuals across all three populations in whose power lies to imagine, to initiate, to sow seeds.

And then you have the innovators, hundreds of volunteers from both the global north and the global south with decades of experience or just starting. Finding one another and exploring what would be relatively simple ideas with the potential to really change the world or one corner of it in a significant and environmentally healthier way.

And already there are ideas, which, when or not I can see have huge potential. The purpose of this hackathon is to promote carbon aware computing. What does that? Well, what we really, really need in the planet is to drastically reduce our energy consumption and our consumption in general, which is. Really driving our planet to multiple cliffs, not just around climate change, but around the exhaustion of valuable resources and the degradation of societies, the exploitation of people, all of the very unhealthy patterns that create a system that is no longer functional for us, if it ever.

But to get to that point where we have achieved equilibrium in our consumption and production patterns is not gonna be like pressing a button. Even if we wanted to, even if we convinced absolutely everyone, there would still be a period of transition of experimentation, of learning, and in this transitional period.

We are all children of the half light with one foot in the sun and the wind and the water, and one foot in the shadow of a coal mine. Indeed, our energy mix is and will remain for a good while mixed. Some of it will be clean. Brought to us from by nature's hand, and some of it will remain dirty in the legacies of a dying world, so we cannot control.

When the sun shines, we cannot say to the wind, to Blauer right now or make the tides rise at will to power our washing machines and our computers and whatever you are using to consume this podcast, we have to follow nature. We are partnering with nature. We are not controlling it. Therefore, carbon awareness means that we ensure that the electricity that we will consume no matter what is sensitive to the flows and ebbs of renewable energy in the electricity grid.

So, for example, you could make sure that that washing machine only runs. When the electricity grid in your area is being powered by the sun or by the wind, And stops when it is powered by burning fossil fuels. Or you might have a massive computing job, which is happening in the cloud. And if you know a little about cloud computing, you know that there are multiple geographic zones where that job could take place.

So carbon where computing would allow you to say, I will run this computing job, not here where I am at this moment when the electricity is dirty. Instead, I'm gonna run this computing job in Sao Paolo or in Sweden where the electricity happens to be green at this particular. So this is carbon aware computing is the idea that we still use energy.

We haven't yet reduced our energy footprint in that sense, but we ensure that the energy we use is as clean as possible and that we avoid as far as possible the peak moments where the electricity is most polluting. The Green Software Foundation created this fantastic API that allows you to know when and where the electricity is being powered by renewable energy and when and where in the planet the electricity is.

Highly polluting and this hackathon is all about hooking to this API and coming up with solutions that allow you to apply this carbon aware computing. Now the solutions that people are working on are super exciting. Some of them are really quite small. For example, a plugin for the serverless framework.

So this is an infrastructure as code framework where you basically write a few lines and say, I want you to create, to provision a computing environment for me in. AWS or in Azure or in Google Cloud particularly, at least I am aware of it being used in AWS for what are called Lambda functions, serverless functions that only are activated when activities happening and then go back to sleep.

So they're very environmentally friendly and very efficient and powerful and composable. The research shows that something like 80 or 90% of all serverless functions, Lambda functions are deployed via serverless. So just a little plugin in this very, very niche area that allows you to ensure that those Lambda functions, those serverless functions only run in the greenest electricity zones around the world.

Could have a massive, massive impact because a lot of computing is being run through lambdas. Other ideas, for example, are around completely different part of the computing stack. So someone is creating green mold UI components. So the idea is that you create websites by composing various pattern. So you use a library like Tailwind or like Bootstrap or like Material ui, which already has pre-built styled components like forms, like buttons, like headers, et, cetera etc.

And those can be very attractive and very beautiful, but also potentially a little heavy. If you could have versions of the very same components of the forms or of the buttons or the nav bars that became simpler and lighter when the electricity was dirty, you would shave a tiny bit of electricity and of CO2 emissions.

And we're back to that idea and why do we care? Why would taking one gram of CO2 out of a webpage make a difference? Well, if that webpage is visited a hundred thousand times each day, then over a year, that is three and a half million tons of CO2 that your one gram reduction has achieved. There are so many other ideas.

There are some very, very simple ideas which are nevertheless really powerful. So simple schedulers, simple alarm belts as it were, that tell you when the electricity is optimal or so suboptimal. So for instance, in my example, you could get a scheduler that allows you to choose when. Put on the washing machine, but also when to game, and when to watch videos and when to engage in the most fun yet most intensive activities in your digital life.

So you can be a responsible gamer or for electrical equipment or for crypto mining if you're going to be mining crypto coins. Consuming a lot of energy and that's not a good thing to do. At the best of times, but if you are gonna do it and people are doing it at scale, wouldn't it be amazing if you could ensure that that mining happens at a time when the grid locally is running on renewables or stops.

You stop your mining when the grid is particularly dirty or when your emissions budget has gone past a certain level. All of these are little glimpses of hope. There are little windows of imagination. There are possibilities where, where a million collective individual choices might eventually lead us.

If those of us now engaging you, listening, the organizations that are participating, mobilized to let, to empower people to be able to make those choices. Maybe one of these ideas really takes off in a huge way. Maybe 10, maybe five of these ideas take off in a small. But still aggregate, not just in making a direct impact and difference, but in stretching our capacity to envision and to dream.

And the result is that a new solution comes on the back of these proof of concepts that actually scales. I want to finish by telling you a story and it's a real story. It took place in Geneva in the year 2000. I was there for a United Nations summit, and this was the Geneva 2000 Millennium Summit, which was five year son for the very first social summit that looked at social develop.

And it was taking forward this, and there were so many thousands of non-governmental organizations. I was representing the International Association for Community Development, and it was a fantastic space to meet incredible change makers. And there's. That stays with me. Out of everyone, there are hundreds of people I met there.

There is one person that I saw that I didn't even speak to properly. I had, you know, 10 seconds of conversation with. Mostly I just saw her walk against the flow of people to get to a meeting. She was from Somalia, and Somalia in 2000 was on fire. There was a terrible, bloody civil war and a mass immigration of war refugees.

This woman, too, had left Somalia, but she hadn't left Somalia to escape. She had left Soma. To launch an incredible vision. Think if you can, if you are old enough or if you've watched on series and movies where the world was technologically in the year 2000. Our phones, I think were barely Nokia, and the most that you could play was snake.

You probably could do a little more by 2000, but you were a far cry from smartphones and they were all in rich countries. What this Somali woman entrepreneur. Came to say in that conference, and I don't even know her name was, invest in mobile technology in Africa, come to Somalia and put in the infrastructure and bring in mobile phones.

At that point, that was sheer fantasy. Imagine starting a business in our war. Imagine bringing mobile phones to a continent that mostly struggled to have electricity and running water, and certainly no fixed phone, which in the year 2000 was still by far the primary way of phone communication. So people said, You haven't even got to the stage of fixed landlines.

You're convincing us that there is a business to be made installing mobile infrastructure and selling mobile phones to the poorest areas of the world. It really seemed ridiculous, and I don't know who listened. The vast majority did not. I was hugely inspired by her, but I have to confess, I was also hugely skeptical.

Fast forward 2022, and Africa is the pioneer in the application of mobile technology to social innovation. They are the. In mobile wallets with 60% of all mobile wallets in Africa, the incredible innovations, the interventions, the way mobile phones were used to save. The entire populations from starvation by, um, a version of universal basic income by sending to all these subsistence traders who were hawking wars and who suddenly could not survive cuz they could not sell and they could not go out because a pandemic was killing people.

They used phones to put money into all of those pockets and lifted an enormous number, enormous proportion of the country. I believe it was in Togo, from starvation and from poverty. Mobile phones are everywhere. I lived for three months in a very remote Maasai village in Tanzania. There were. The only technology that existed in that village was one very old cassette tape running on batteries.

A car that visited once a week or so, maybe three or four. Collective electric torches, battery run, and a few mobile phones. Everything else. Was built from nature and you follow the stars and you follow the seasons and you cope with a drought and you lived entirely by the flows of the natural world, except for mobile phones.

Those Maasai tribes were so entrepreneurial and globally aware and savvy, and they harnessed that technology in incredibly powerful ways that Somali woman was a visionary. If you listening to this podcast, if you got to this moment in this podcast, I know one thing about you. You care about our. You are not just passively despairing, but actively taking action, big or small to make a difference.

And I know you're not alone. That woman was a single undefeatable voice in a conference that wasn't listening. You are part of an incredible community of change makers, whether you've already found each other or you haven't met a single person who is thinking about digital. But you are not alone. Every single person listening to this podcast is another voice in the planetary conference room advocating with you, experimenting beside you, adding their impact to yours.

So I will lend by highlighting the most wonderful space I found to connect with others who are walking the very same path in very different shoes. It is called climateaction.tech, and it's Epicenter is a community on Slack comprising thousands of technologies from. Programmers to product owners, to designers, to investors, students innovators, exploring how to green existing tech across any and all domains.

This includes people who have just begun to think about these issues and also world authorities in this space. In an atmosphere of mutual encouragement, support, humility, and dynamism. That amazing Somali woman accurately envisioned the future. She was alone, but you could tell she knew she wasn't. We are not either.

And armed with this knowledge, we can share in her certainty of impact. How much more when we have so many more channels to find and collaborate with one. Not least The. Week in Green. Software spread the word. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, visit Green Software Foundation, and please, if you liked what you. Do leave a rating and review. It helps other people discover the show and joining the conversation. The more of us are exploring these issues at home, at work, in our free time and in our projects, the greater chances of taking effective action and making a difference in our own corner of the world.

Good luck in your green software journeys and see you in the next episode.

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈

Environment Variables is back! Chris Adams hosts our Green Networks focused episode and he is joined by Eve Schooler, Principal Engineer and Director of Emerging IoT Networks at Intel and Romain Jacob of ETH Zurich. They discuss how can we reduce the energy produced by networks? How could we leverage current research to make the internet more energy efficient?


Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Romain Jacob: Website / Twitter
• Eve Schooler: Website / LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 

Talks & Events:

• Talk: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Event: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Hackathon and Codesprint London (IETF 115)

Papers:

• Paper: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old for Hot Carbon by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Paper: Internet Backbones in Space by Giacomo Giullari, Tobias Klenze, Markus Legner, David Basin, Adrian Perrig and Ankit Singla.
• Paper: ITU GHG Recommendations for the ICT Sector
• Paper: Toward Carbon-Aware Networking by Noa Zilberman, Eve M. Schooler, Uri Cummings, Rajit Manohar, Dawn Nafus, Robert Soulé and Rick Taylor.
• Paper: Greening of the Internet by Maruti Gupta and Suresh Singh.
• Paper: Approaches to calculating network / website energy and carbon by David Mytton.
  
  
  

Open Source Projects:

• The Watttime API
• Electricity Map API
• The Green Software Foundation Carbon Aware SDK - the SDK offered by the Green Software Foundation.
• Grid Intensity Go - a Golang CLI and library, for use in projects to extend them for carbon awareness.
• CO2.js
• The Green Web Foundation IP-2-carbon-intensity API

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript Below:
Romain Jacob: In many internet service provider networks. So kind of the edge of the internet, where we have strong, seasonal patterns into traffic, they are allowing fruits. There are many of those small networks. So the benefit you can get there actually add up pretty quickly. And if they, if they don't seem.

Interesting. If you look at a single network, if you apply those principles everywhere, you can achieve very large effect. And that's something, every network operator should, should have a look at if only to reduce their energy.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed 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. The podcast about green software. I'm Chris Adams, your host today, I'm filling in for Asim Hussain. And on this episode, I am joined by Eve schooler of Intel. Hi

Eve Schooler: Hi.

Chris Adams: Eve and Hama, Jacob of et Zurich in Switzerland.

Romain Jacob: Hello, everybody.

Chris Adams: And today we're gonna discuss the levers available to us for greener networking.

Now, if we go by the figures from the international energy agency, data networks used around 250 terror hours of electricity in 2019. And while we don't have the figures yet for 2022. This same agency is projecting a estimate of around 270 terawatts to be used by the end of this year, which for context is more than the entire electricity usage of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, this results in a significant environmental impact.

And thankfully, we'll be talking with some people who've been spending a lot of time thinking about where the biggest levers are to do something about this in the context of the climate crisis. And they'll be sharing their research on how we can end up with greener more sustainable networking. But before, before we dive into the specifics, let's do a quick round of intros.

So maybe you can introduce yourself and your work at Intel.

Eve Schooler: Hi, thank you for inviting me. I am a principal engineer and I'm a director of emerging IOT networks at Intel. And my current work focuses on evolving the internet toward a sustainable edge to cloud infrastructure. My background in expertise is primarily in networking and distributed systems. And although I've spent much of my career in industrial research, I currently straddle a business unit at Intel called the network and edge business unit.

And as well as the corporate strategy office, where I'm responsible for sustainability, innovation and standard. And I'd say that something that's really colored my experiences that I've spent much of my career heavily involved in internet standards and standards bodies, such as N and the I E TF, which is the internet engineering task force.

Where earlier in my career, I developed control protocols for internet telephony and multimedia teleconferencing, but at present I'm heavily involved in and leaving a working group focused on deterministic networks and their extension to operate in. Networks. I'm also actively involved in the open group's open footprint forum, and that aims to standardize the carbon footprint data model.

So you can hear sort of my internet hat as well as the sort of sustainability hat, both coming to the, for.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Eve. And thank you once again for getting up at the crack of Dawn to join us from California today. Okay. I know it's somewhat more sociable time, so maybe I'll just give you a chance to introduce yourself and then we'll dive into some of this.

Romain Jacob: Sure. So. I've been studying at et Switzerland since seven years for now, the first five I spent during my PhD on lo wireless communications for embedded systems. So the, the question of how to save the energy was, was kind of core to everything I was doing there. And after I graduated in 2019, I moved on to more internet.

And most recently I've been interested into how can we reduce the, the energy consumed by networks in general, with a focus on wired networks. And I'm trying to see to which extent the concept of low power wireless networking could be translated into wire networks and how we could leverage that to make the internet more energy efficient.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. And for context, I found about raw math through the conference called hot carbon, which is a kind of energy and carbon nerd conference online where his paper. The internet of the future, that should, what was it? The internet of future will grow old and sleep more. Was, was that something like that?

That tickled me. I should introduce myself. My name is Chris Adams. I am the, uh, I am the, the head of the policy group at the Green Software Foundation. And I'm also the executive director for the. Green Web Foundation, an NGO based in the Netherlands campaigning for a fossil free internet by 2030. And now, you know, all our names.

Maybe we should jump into the actual topic of greener networkings. So Eve I, I first came across your work with, uh, one of the, with a recent paper called towards carbon away networking. And in that paper, There was actually some useful information about setting the scene in terms of how much of the internet, or how much of the tech industry, what, what, how much network makes up of this compared to say data, data centers, and computing.

I wondered if you might be able to just expand on some of that, because this is a useful piece of context. And previously we've spoken primarily about data centers rather than the kind of aggregate impact.

Eve Schooler: Absolutely. I mean, in the press, we hear a lot about how data centers are consuming the world in terms of their energy usage. And it's, it's interesting because there's studies that suggest that networking is as large or larger. Than the data center in, in terms of its consumption. And there, even when you look at, when you dig into the numbers, a little further networks have been estimated to consume as much as one and a half times as much as data centers and, and even within data centers, networks already account for between 10 and 20% of the energy there.

So those numbers set the context, which is why it feels like networking deserves some further investigation. And solutions.

Chris Adams: So, this is one thing that I might, I might ask you a romantic come into, come into on this, because previously we've heard while there are tools, like say CO2 JS or websites like website carbon, which will give you an idea of the environmental impact from say, What looking at a website or you'll see stories about things like say the environmental impact of watching say Netflix, for example.

But as far as I'm aware, the actual energy usage used by networks tends to be relatively, uh, has historically been run something which has relatively stable compared to the other usages from that. And I wondered if you might be able to expand a little bit on that part there, like, is there scope for a change or is it just a static figure that we have, no matter how much we use the internet.

Romain Jacob: Yeah. So there is two, two points to this. What, what, one thing, which is very true, that relates to what you were saying is that the, the energy consumed by networks at any point in time. Say in a time span of a year or months then to be fairly constant. So there have been a number of studies that shows this, that the energy consumed by the network is essentially independent of the load.

So if you are using 10% of the capacity or a hundred percent, essentially the same thing, the, the reason for this, so. The stable number, um, has increased over time as we've scaled up the networking infrastructure, but for the, for giving infrastructure, the energy you consume. So the power you draw at any point in time tends to be fairly constant.

That's, that's kind of worrying because we are typically operating very far from the hundred percent point. So we tend to over provision our networks, meaning we want to make sure there. Much they are capable of much more than what we typically ask, which means that we essentially use a lot of energy all the time.

Whereas we are using the infrastructure fairly little.

Chris Adams: So if I follow what you're saying, this is a little bit like maybe 10 or 20 years ago before kind of pre-cloud where you might have. A big fat, chunky server that you have and you plan for the maximum capacity. And as a result, it may be that if you look at say the usage you have there, because you can't really scale that server down, you've got that same.

You've got that kind of relatively core grained amount of energy usage. Is that the model that is actually helpful to think about when we are looking at the net network usage.

Romain Jacob: Kind of, yes. So when you talk about compute and you kind about what servers are doing a lot of, depending on the workload you're, you're actually working with, but. You can scale up and down the power, depending on how much computer you're producing. Whereas when you're looking at networking, it doesn't really work like this because you have very little compute that actually happens in the network.

What, what the network consumes energy for is to powering the memory on which you read the, the routing information, for example, in the optics. So reading packets in and out and all those things. Have are essentially dominated by idle power, which is the power you draw, just to turn things on.

Eve Schooler: I wanted to make a big distinction, which is that much of the core network has this property that whether or not you've got high usage, you know, lots of packets flowing across it or not. It is gonna have this constant amount of, uh, draw energy draw. But the wireless network. Inherently has was taught from the beginnings of its design to be fairly adaptive.

So I think that's the distinction. One of the distinctions being made here is that wireless and wired networks behave quite differently in the face of congestion or, or even just traffic on the network.

Romain Jacob: Yes, it's very true. Very true.

Chris Adams: Okay. So if I, if I'm were to apply some kind of mental model for this, you might think about kind of like backbone networks as almost like kind of current Deion, current, constant the entire time. And then as the closer you get to the surface or to. End users. You might have a bit more kind of spiciness going up and down.

And that's like a way to think about where some of the levers for reducing. Impact might be. So if we're speaking about consumption and that gives us some way to think about the energy used, there is another kind of source of leverage, which is the carbon intensity of the energy itself. And as I understand it, Eve, this was some of the work that was presented at hot carbon.

And some of the work that the paper that you've been con contributing to towards carbon away, networking, maybe you might expand on some of that because there are some really fascinating ideas I found in that.

Eve Schooler: Sure. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, there's been at least in the data center community, an awareness of what is the quality, if you will, of the. That is being drawn from the socket. Uh, and what I mean by that is what is the carbon intensity? How low a carbon intensity can we get towards using clean energy or renewable energy?

So the lower, the number, the better and data centers in recent years have begun to experiment with. And now are operationalize the idea of time and space shifting workload. To align with the availability of clean energy. That's interesting for a, a bunch of reasons, the most important of which is that as Roma was saying earlier, the, the footprint for data centers and I C T you know, information, communication technology continues to grow.

And especially in the face of all the increased amount of data that we're sending across networks. And so pairing a data center with renewable energy. Enables us to reduce the carbon footprint of those data centers as they consume more energy. But similarly, in the electrical grid domain, we also have more and more integration of renewables and in places like California, which is where I'm based and in Germany and other parts of the world where that integration is happening quite rapidly.

There are parts of the day where there's way more renewable energy than we can possibly consume. And so it just gets dropped on the floor. It gets wasted. And so there's been this lovely pairing of, you know, we've got an entity that's consuming a lot of energy going to renewables and the renewables, creating excess and looking to somewhere to consume that.

So if you can think of compute as load balancing or as being virtual batteries for the data centers and it begs the question that if network. Are using one and a half times as much electricity. Why aren't we using those same techniques in networks? And so there is this growing awareness of where are the places where we can put renewables in order that networks are consuming cleaner energy as well as can we, and is it worthwhile to time and space shift the transmission of our network loads in order that they have a smaller carbon.

Chris Adams: Okay. So this is actually quite interesting to me for a number of reasons, because if I understand the most common tools we might use for. Hacks of data around the world. We don't have that much control ourselves directly. So I might send something to the next hop, but there's something like the border gateway protocol that decides where the next hop is and so on and so on and so on.

So I might have some indirect control there. And there are say, clean slate attempts to redesign parts of the network, or even introduce a notion of kind of path awareness from connecting. Say something you have now here to maybe a website. So you could take a kind of greener route like you have here would either of you have anything you might could so share there because.

As I'm aware things like the border gateway protocol, BD BGP has maybe one main criteria that you have here. And it sounds like we might want to be able to use multiple criteria. Like I care about latency, but I also want to balance that with carbon intensity, for example, or even cost I'll open it up to see if anyone has anything they might wanna share here that might.

Romain Jacob: Yeah. So, as you mentioned, the GP is kind of like the glue that, that connects the internet together, and it is been suited how to extend it, improve it and change it. Over the past, I don't know, 30 years or so various directions for various objectives. Usually security is the main concern that people have with BGP.

But most recently there have been some different additive different approach to go away from BGP. One example of that is the Zion network or networking principle that is also coming for me. That that is trying to let the end. Pick which route the, the traffic should go through in the internet. So it's an idea that is generally known as source routing.

So like the, the source of the traffic should say, I want my traffic to go through this network. Then this network, this network in until I reach my end point. And once you have this tool, so this is good for security purposes, but if you have this, you can also use it for carbon awareness. You could also say, I prefer to go through California because they have a lot more renewable energy rather.

I dunno, some other state in the us, they may not have as much,

Eve Schooler: Like Virginia.

Romain Jacob: for example.

Eve Schooler: West Virginia.

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Romain Jacob: it empowers you to do this. If you want to do that, it is possible.

Eve Schooler: Another way to have a mental model about this is network performance has often been categorized or has attributes like latency, like packet loss, like jitter the variance in the latency. As metrics for the success of transmissions across the network. And so the idea is how to teach things, teach protocols, whether it's BGP or other parts of the network fabric, and even other parts of the network stock about carbon intensity.

So that there's this so that it is carbon intensity is another metric. That is a first class metric. In the selection of these routes, whether it's routes or whether it's software usage or whether it's scheduling. And so in some ways we need to teach many of the protocols that we know and love in the internet about these additional options so that we can do joint optimizations, or we can create source routes as a Rama was suggesting.

But it, it is really a very simpatico with this idea. Deterministic networks in the small, some of the work that is being done around time sensitive networks, for example, is all around selecting paths or subnets that have the lowest latency and even creating multiple paths in order to ensure that packets get delivered in time.

But what if the constraint that we really wanted to optimize for in certain circumstances was the carbon intensity and it really. Also leads us to ask, you know, how do we educate all of this software? That's out there to not only carbon intensity information about the loca, you know, carbon intensity is very location, time and space specific, but how do we also enable our applications to say how time elastic they are in order to be shifted around or delayed?

So they're both issues to.

Chris Adams: All right. So if so, what it's, what this seems to be speaking to is this idea of moving from maybe just one set of criteria to why this set. So for example, If I cared about latency more than cost, I might care about things like say, if I'm doing a video call in Australia, I might be prepared to care more about latency than the cost of say for carbon.

And if I cared about say, making, doing a download of Netflix for, for a video, I might, if I'm not gonna watch it right now, I might say, well, I care more about the cost and the throughput, not, not latency and making it go through a kind of green route. So I would rather have some. Low carbon internet trick shot bouncing through the greenest possible places to end up on my computer for when I come home tonight, for example, or something like that, that seems to be some of the directions and this might be heading towards.

Okay. Wow. That's quite exciting actually. So this also speaks to these ideas of. Maybe changing how we might design software in the first place and having different tolerances. Maybe if you might be to speak to some speak to this bit, cuz you, you mentioned this phrase, I haven't come across before time sensitive networks.

So maybe you could expand on some of that and some of the delay on, on the flip side of that, which presumably will be delay tolerant networks for this.

Eve Schooler: Yes, time sensitive networking community is for example, some of the work that I've been involved in in recent years comes out of the internet of things group at Intel and in particular, the industrial internet of things. Context where you've got control systems that have very, very low latencies, less than a millisecond, for example.

And so you're talking about subnets, very small networks, but some of the work in the IATF is about, well, how do you across factory floors? How do you enable them to be time sensitive across subnets, which may have different underlying technologies. And so all of them need to be taught sort of how to do this now in the time sensitive networking world, often one of the strategies, in addition to, as I mentioned earlier, multi-path.

Having multiple paths by which packets can go between sources and destinations. So there's redundancy for reliability, but there's also the reservation of resources along the path. And for that, it starts to look a little bit like what we were talking about when Roman was referencing the cion work. What if you knew how much time it took you along each.

And you had a certain budget. Well, you could send out a query message between a source and a destination to understand along the way, cumulatively, how much latency am I going to encounter? Reserve enough buffers in those queue. And eliminate congestion along that path. And that's sort of what time sensitive networking in the small has been doing.

Now, the kinship that it has with delay tolerant networks is that we wanna expand these time sensitive networks. We wanna teach them about energy usage and energy awareness, carbon awareness, but these delay tolerant networks. Back to the data center analogy, data centers are shifting their workloads to align with when the sun's shining or the wind is blowing.

And, and so they're holding onto their workloads. There's been a longstanding project in the networking community around delay tolerant networks that have been designed primarily for deep space. And because, because you, you know, routers come and go because planets align in certain ways or satellites align in certain ways and they're not always there.

And so that's why they have to be delayed tolerate. They have to there's this. Dynamic of the availability of the resources. And so the question is, could we be using delay tolerant, networking in context for more than just satellites, uh, in this context where we wanna align with, with the availability of clean energy.

Romain Jacob: Yeah, no, I. I totally agree with what Evo was saying and this, this idea of data or more de tolerance, more tolerance in general in networking is necessary to progress towards more energy efficiency or carbon efficiency. This is essentially what wireless networks have ever was saying have been doing forever in wireless.

How do you save energy while you keep things off for as long as possible, right? You, you just, you make, try to make sure that when you turn on your radio, it's. Achieve something useful and then packets, well go through and as efficiently as possible. And if you think of it, it's extremely easy to push the energy efficiency, right?

What do you do? What you, you turn off for 90% of the time, and then you schedule very tightly the time where you stay on the problem is that that induces delay, right. And your application is to be able to tolerate that delay. And embedded systems IOT, all this work, this, this field has been working in different tradeoffs to play with this so that the, the application performance does not take great too much due to thes by the networking part.

And that's like the story of what I've been doing during my PhD. The, the problem is that the internet networks, the wire networks, they've been building a different paradigm. It was. All about reliability. It's, it's, it's been designed to be as reliable as possible. Like if we have a nuclear war, the internet should still work.

Like that was the initial idea, right? So we need to make sure to provide all level of reliability possible to sustain anything, but we need to get away from this now because the cost of this is that we over provision everything. We have a lot of redundancy and we use very little of that. So some of the things that I'm, I'm thinking about together with several colleagues now, is that okay?

What if we were to redesign indeed those wired networks, so that reliability. It's not something we, we get rid of, but we modulate the requirements we set there and say require reliability is just one objective. How much performance degradation are we willing to tolerate in order to save an energy, to give a very concrete and simple example, most traffic on the internet is driven by.

Human activity. Right. And human activity has a very clear seasonal pattern. We, we use the networks more a certain time of the days and not at others. It's very easy to, to think that we could turn off part of this networks for certain part of the day, because we don't need that much bandwidth. And if we do, we might be able to tolerate a bit more delay than, than at peak hours.

It's very similar to turning off the public lights on the streets, you know, at night when nobody's driving, right. It's the same principle.

Eve Schooler: Or even in your home, right? The analogy of one's parents growing up, don't forget to turn off the lights. It's exactly the same analogy.

Romain Jacob: Yeah, it it's, it's the same idea. Right? And there is no reason this gonna be done. I we know we can do it. The question is, how far can we push it? And, and one, one limit limitations factor. One blocking factor at the moment is how quickly we can turn things on and off, uh, because turning, switching on a router or switch.

Takes as of today in the orders of several minutes. Right? So it's not something that you can just do multiple times per, per, per hours or so, because essentially your network will be completely unor. It can be changed if we were to change the hardware. If, when to change the operating system, we run on those machines.

We could improve on that. How far can we go? This is kind of an open research question at the.

Chris Adams: That's really, really helpful. And thank you for explaining it in that way. I presume this is the, the, the internet must sleep more part of your paper where the internet must sleep more and grow old. Right? What you're talking about here is actually the idea of things. Not necessarily being away there all the time, or the idea of liability, moving to different parts of the system is actually quite an interesting one.

And one we've seen with the cloud.

Eve Schooler: And actually there are a couple of seminal pieces of work that I think we can look back on as really setting us down this path. So for example, you know, Mati Gupta's work in 2009 from SICOM was all about, you know, energy efficiency and, and beginning to examine. How much could we save if we began to turn things off, another interesting paper that's been influential is Dina, Papa Gino's work, access points.

And whether parts of the wireless edge network could be, you know, in internal to buildings be turned on, on demand. So it's sort of the opposite idea of like turning things off, but it's like you turn things on, on demand. And as romance suggested, we understand the patterns. Usability of those things. We know when people come into buildings, whether they're in their homes or whether they're in their offices.

And so an on demand infrastructure at the very edges of the network makes a lot of sense. So those are two pieces of work that certainly have influenced my views on, um, teaching devices, how to sleep.

Chris Adams: Okay. Cool. And this idea of matching demand to supply Eve, you mentioned about kind of speaking in California. I mean, just this week we saw a really good example. Demand response where you saw like a Kaiso the grid operators basically say, Hey folks, we're about to kind of hit a blackout. Can everyone please just turn things down a little bit.

And if I understand it correctly, we were able to see basically one of the largest grids not fall over. And this is like an example. Yeah. The, you don't only just have to think about supply by the sounds of things.

Eve Schooler: And it raises an interesting question because how much of the network involves the user? How actively attentive are users when they route across the network. Right now there's very little engagement. So one of the issues that we probably need to solve is creating as you were referring to them, levers at different points in the architectural software stack, and even in the hardware.

That allows different levels of involve. For users that have different capabilities or interests in enacting those levers all week, we have been receiving warnings about the, the coming temperature. You know, it was 109 unheard of here. It broke all records the other day, but that was through constant messaging that we were asked to please be considerate during the.

In particular between four and 9:00 PM, I guess that's when people begin to come home and turn on their air conditioners, the network doesn't do that. it. Doesn't ask you to be thoughtful, but maybe our software and our software development practices need to incorporate this.

Chris Adams: Thank you for that. So for other listeners, we did cover some of this in episode nine, where we speak about carbon aware computing and the idea of annotating say jobs for Kubernetes or other schedulers to basically say, yeah, I can wait a little while I, you know, I'm important, but not urgent, but it sounds like a well there's.

This reminds me of a blog post by a guy called Ismail Philco he's in the climate action dot slack. And he's been speaking about the idea of, is there a chance to extend some existing protocols, like say we have open API for describing how APIs work on the Web. And there is an ay API, which is another way to say that, which is, as far as I'm aware, is used for lots of kind of programming tools these days, as a way of saying.

To do the same thing, very synchronously. And there he's, there's some work there to basically extend this with this notion of delay tolerance or location tolerance, so that you can basically say this thing is important, but it's not so urgent in the same way that with an operating system, with apples, for example, you can annotate particular tasks to either be returned very quickly for high latency when there's users or something, which might be better suited to a low, a low power core in a computer.

So maybe this is actually thing I wanna ask is right now we spoke about some kind of cool future things. If I could bring this to some of the stuff that's happening right now, these days, if people are listening to this and they want to do something or start playing around with some of these ideas, where should people be looking?

What kind of software is out there? What kind of tools, uh, exist for people to kind of experiment with some of these ideas to play it with their own time, or even possibly build some cool new services on top of, for example,

Eve Schooler: A couple of thoughts, at least one is that at Intel, there is a power, a dynamic power management. Solution that exists called speed select technology. And it does allow you to dynamically adjust the frequency of cores. And there's some interesting description of that technology at the most recent I C N.

Conference in 2022 in a joint paper with British telecom, there was a paper on NFV and energy efficiency describing that service. But for developers, I would say some of the most interesting APIs I've come across are from there. There are quite a few offerings to get carbon intensity information from the electrical grid, but use it in computing systems.

And some of the interesting, uh, APIs are from Watttime. And electricity map. And so I would say you could play with those to see, you know, whether you want to incorporate your both carbon intensity and understand what the patterns are of the carbon intensity, where you reside or where you want your workloads to reside.

I also wanted to put in a plug for a workshop that's coming up. That's being hosted by the internet engineering task force on environmental impact of internet, applications, and systems and the deadline for putting in publications, romance.

Romain Jacob: I'm aware.

Eve Schooler: It's the end of October and with the conference, with the workshop happening in December.

And then finally, one of the things that's been, I wouldn't say bothering me so much as frustrating me, is the long lag time between. Our assessment of the overall internet footprint and the time that goes to publication, there's a small group of people who diligently publish these assessments, but it's really backbreaking work to understand where are the pain points in the infrastructure and topology.

So I would provide a call to action if you will, for networking researchers involved in the internet to help speed. Accurate and timely assessment of the networking and, and overall ICT energy usage by participating in and contributing to these it documents. It's called L dot four seven, but it it's its name.

Human readable name is the G HG for greenhouse gas. Trajectories for the I C T sector. So if you have some insights into the pain points of the Internet's energy usage, where we could be more efficient, turn things off, age things longer, be aware of carbon intensity. We'd like to hear from you.

Chris Adams: When you spoke about that, that does remind me that. So this is the Green Software Foundation podcast, and it's worth, I would be remiss to not mention that there is a green software carbon aware SDK, specifically that. Apps, some of these APIs that you're able to use. I think it's primarily written in.net, but I believe there might be some a go build of somewhere this as well, independently of this, the organization I work for the Green Web Foundation, we've built a CO2 JS, which basically has, uh, a lot of the kind of carbon intensity figures inside it now.

And also grid intends to go, which is a Golan library specifically designed to allow you to essentially, again, wrap these APIs and use them in scheduling tools. The other work that might be worth being aware of is that there's some work with ripe, which is the people who issue IP addresses in Europe.

They've been funding us. Our NGO to basically annotate every single public IP address on earth with carbon intensity information. So if there's a chance to build some of the green routing stuff, yeah. You, we have an API which is API to carbon intensity from our organization that will give you some figures for free, but these are annual.

These are not gonna be fluctuating or updating the way that, what time and some of the other providers do. There's also some work from singularity. Who've also, who've recently. Started sharing some information and hourly resolution all across America for people to be looking at this.

Romain Jacob: One point I wanted to make is that I do agree that this, this question of carbon intensity and carbon awareness is important. For sure. We need to be able to improve on that metric, but we should not forget that at the end of the day, the best energy is the one we do not consume. And so we should also keep investing efforts into being more energy efficient.

While keeping in mind that consuming less energy, if it's energy has to be more carbon heavy is not necessarily the best tradeoff still. We should. We should not. We, we should look at the low hanging fruits in, in reducing the energy we consume for the current service the networks are providing. And I mentioned earlier already today, this, this studio of seasonality, the analyzing the level of redundancy that are existing in network.

I think in many internet service provider networks. So kind of the edge of the internet, where we have strong, seasonal patterns into traffic, they are doing fruits and as F paper of hot carbon was mentioning, there are many of those small networks. So the benefit you, you, you can get there actually add up pretty quickly.

And if they, if they don't seem. Interesting. If you look at a single network, if you apply those principles everywhere, you can achieve very large effect and that's something, every network operator should, should have a look at if only to reduce their energy bill.

Eve Schooler: I think you're absolutely right. Roman, I think there are three things to consider. Actually, when we think about green networks, one is first and foremost, this energy efficiency use less. If you're gonna use energy, ensure that it's decarbonized, but then there's this third facet, which we haven't even touched on, which.

The other environmental impacts, whether that's water or toxicity or air pollution, whatever it is that also need to be somehow captured in metrics as well. And ultimately comprehended.

Chris Adams: We're running short on time. So I'm gonna ask one question just because it's very rare. People who understand the network to help answer this question. So for people who might know people who feel bad about say watching Netflix or feeling guilty about being on video calls would either you have something to say to people who might be struggling with this to maybe put their mind at ease or help kind of come up with a mental model.

Like, should they be feeling bad about the environmental impact or the video calls they make, or the videos they're watching after.

Romain Jacob: Uh, I don't think, uh, trying to make feel people guilty will change anything. People don't have the levers to change anything like most, most individuals like you and me. I mean, you're you open your laptop, you have a service provider and you don't have any control. I mean, you can choose provider a or provider B, and they may sell you some broad characteristic of the internet connection they provide you with.

But I mean, you. Monitor this, if you're an internet geek and you care about these sorts of things, but you cannot truly influence where it goes. It's not exactly true, but in practice, the individual has very limited control. The network providers do that's that at this level, then that things need to be, need to be changed.

Now that being said, you can still do so. Right. You can, for example, just be considerate before consistently streaming and uploading to clouds, gigabytes, and terabytes of, of pictures and multiple the providers, because you care that if Google goes down, then Facebook is not and you get to access your things, you know?

Yes. But how many people are actually doing this? I don't think so. I don't think so many.

Chris Adams: Okay. So there we have from someone who's on the far stages of their PhD and Eve, is there anything you might add for people who are wrestling with this particular issue themselves? When they open up zoom to speak to a loved one or anything like that themselves?

Eve Schooler: I think it's like anything else in our lives, we need to be ACC acculturated to thinking about this as an issue. I don't think we should have that much guilt about it, but we should be thoughtful. And so if it doesn't make a difference in the, in the communication to have the video, when you're just a participant versus a speaker, or if you can do low Def versus high Def, those are really easy decisions.

And I think there will come a time when. People will be asked to fit within budgets of carbon footprints and companies and so forth. And so we'll have to do our part. So we should be getting in the habit of at least thinking about these things. But I, as others have said, we don't have that many choices except on or off, it's sort of a bullying choice.

Maybe, you know, one, one resolution or not. And, and something about teleconferences is we save a tremendous. Using teleconferencing technology over air travel and, and other forms of travel. So it's, you know, incrementally, we're getting more and more efficient as to all those Netflix that we're watching.

that's, that's another concern again, maybe we're, we'll be given a budget in time.

Chris Adams: All right. Okay. Thank you for that. From what I'm, from what I'm hearing, it might not be the case case that streaming is indeed in you flying. So that's one thing that we could take into account. All right. We're just gonna wrap up now for people who have enjoyed this and want to learn more, where can people find you online or where should they be going to learn more about the works that we've discussed here?

Romain Jacob: Yeah, so you can find, find me on my website, homo.net. This is where you will find most work related updates. Otherwise, with my name will be easy to find on Twitter. I will not read my handle because it's unreadable , but uh, my name works fine. I tried it before.

Chris Adams: Okay. Excellent. All right. We'll be adding your, the links in there. And Eve, if people have been interested in some of the stuff you've been talking about, where should they be looking?

Eve Schooler: Similarly, you can find [email protected] and linked LinkedIn as.

Chris Adams: Okay. I'm really glad folks. I've really enjoyed this session. And I think there we've covered a lot of really quite helpful ground for other people who are wrestling with this. And I'm just like curious about this for the listeners. Thank you very much for listening to Environment Variables. All the resources for the podcast will be available at podcast dot Green Software Foundation.

Along with copious show notes, with all our links for this. If you did enjoy this, please do write a review on wherever you've hear in your podcast. It really does help us find new audiences and yeah, that's us. Cheers folks.

Romain Jacob: Bye. Bye.

Eve Schooler: 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.

In this episode of Environment Variables Chris Adams is joined by Colleen Josephson of VMWare, Philipp Wiesner of TU Berlin and Sara Bergman of Microsoft as they discuss the opportunities with making first carbon aware and then carbon intelligent computing. Variability, curtailment, disaggregation, 5G, 6G (!), delay-tolerant networks, intermittent computing, IoT and even a short segue about Raspberry Pi’s all make an appearance in this action-packed episode!


Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Colleen Josephson: Twitter / Website
• Philipp Wiesner: Twitter 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 

Talks & Events:

• Talk:  Breaking the Barriers of Stranded Energy through Multi-cloud and Federated Data Centers by Colleen Josephson, Zhelong Pan, Ben Pfaff and Victor Firoiu.
• Talk: Towards a Fossil Free Internet by Chris Adams.
• Talk: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Event: Hot Carbon at UC San Diego 2022.
• Event: Solar Protocol Hackathon - August 14 2022.

Papers:

• Paper: The Sky is not the limit: untapped opportunities for Green Computing for Hot Carbon by Colleen Josephson, Zhelong Pan, Ben Pfaff and Victor Firoiu.
• Paper: Architecture of a Junkyard Datacenter by Jennifer Switzer, Ryan Kastner and Pat Pannuto.
• Paper: Cucumber: Renewable-Aware Admission Control for Delay-Tolerant Cloud and Edge Workloads by Philipp Wiesner, Dominik Scheinert, Thorsten Wittkopp, Lauritz Thamsen and Odej Kao.
• Paper: Let's Wait Awhile: How Temporal Workload Shifting Can Reduce Carbon Emissions in the Cloud by Philipp Wiesner, Ilja Behnke, Dominik Scheinert, Kordian Gontarska and Lauritz Thamsen.
• Paper: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old for Hot Carbon by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Paper: Internet Backbones in Space by Giacomo Giullari, Tobias Klenze, Markus Legner, David Basin, Adrian Perrig and Ankit Singla.

Open Source Projects:

• The Green Software Foundation Carbon Aware SDK - the SDK offered by the Green Software Foundation.
• Grid Intensity Go - a Golang CLI and library, for use in projects to extend them for carbon awareness.
• The carbon aware branch of Nomad - Nomad, the popular scheduler by Hashicorp has an experimental carbon aware branch.
• Carbon aware autoscaler in KEDA for Kubernetes - The issue mentioned in the podcast for extending Kubernetes. 

Blog Posts & Articles: 

• Blog: Carbon aware autoscaler in KEDA for Kubernetes - The issue mentioned in the podcast for extending Kubernetes by Bill Johnson (Azure SRE).
• Blog: Annotating jobs with AsyncAPI to be more amenable to carbon intelligent architecture patterns by Ismael Velasco.
• Article: The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives | Discover Magazine 
• Article: Intermittent Computing in Satellites: Satellite Designed at CMU Launches into Low-Earth Orbit by SpaceRef magazine.
• Article: A carbon aware internet by Chris Adams for Branch Magazine.
• Blog: Nasa’s work on Delay Tolerant Networks
• Blog: SCION and carbon aware networking the World Economic Forum.
• Blog: Sustainable 6G Efforts by Colleen Josephson.
• Blog: VMware sustainable digital infrastructure collaborations by VMWare.  

Transcript Below:
Philipp Wiesner: So I think we're only touching on the actual potential of how much flexibility there is in many workloads. And I think this is also one of the biggest challenges in the entire field, how to identify opportunities for flexibility, and then especially how to make schedulers aware of these opportunities.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green. 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. Welcome to Environment Variables. On this episode, I'm joined by Colleen Josephson of VMware, Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Philipp, Wiesner of TU Berlin. Today we'll be discussing the opportunities and the challenges associated with making software first carbon aware and then carbon intelligence.

So before we dive in, though, let's have a quick round of introductions.

Colleen Josephson: My name is Colleen Josephson, and I am a research scientist at VMware. And a lot of what I've been doing at VMware has been focusing on sustainability for the past couple of years. The core of it has been in the telecommunication space, actually, which a lot of people don't know that VMware has a business unit dedicated to that, but I switched teams in the past couple of years.

So teams have been moving around and now we're underneath the office of the CTO. So I've been doing much more broad and general sustainability work throughout the company. And as part of that, I'm actually the org representative for. VMware in the Green Software Foundation, we are members.

Philipp Wiesner: Yeah. Hey, I'm Philipp. Thanks for having me here. I'm currently doing my PhD in computer science at the technical university of Berlin. And my research is on ware and renewable Web computing in the cloud, but especially also in novel computing environment, such as fork and edge computing.

Sara Bergman: Hello. My name is Sara Bama. I am a software engineer at Microsoft where I work with Microsoft 365. I am also the chair of writers project in the Green Software Foundation.

Chris Adams: Okay. So every episode we talk about green software and today we're talking about carbon aware and carbon intelligence software, and, well, we all know that electricity has to come from somewhere, but not everyone, not. We don't always think about how it's generated. So I'm just gonna open this up to, uh, for someone who's done a bit of work in this for the uninitiated, what is carbon awareness in the context of computing?

Philipp Wiesner: So the idea behind carbon Web computing is not to save energy, but to use the, the right energy. So that's green or renewable energy. And this has to do with that. The carbon intensity, which is the, how basically how dirty the, the energy in the public grid is this varies over time. And of course it.

Different and different. And in ware computing, we're basically trying to exploit that. So we are trying to shift computational load towards times and towards places where we have green energy or at least where we expect green energy.

Chris Adams: And if I understand it, you've done some work in this field specifically. And there was a, there's a paper. I think that I saw from you. Let's wait a while. Maybe you could just briefly touch on this and then we can open the floor up to some of the other people here.

Philipp Wiesner: yeah. Sure. So in let's wait a while, this is basically an analysis of the potential of temporal workload shifting. So I just touched on it usually. Does come where computing there's two dimensions to it. You can either shift workloads on geo distributed data, data centers, like on a location scale, and you can also defer workloads on a time scale.

And this paper addresses the time scale. So we're basically looking at single data center and within the data center, we have certain workloads that are maybe not urgent. So it doesn't really matter if we compute 'em right now or in four hours or maybe in 10. And on top of that, there might also be scheduled jobs that are always scheduled.

For example, nightly, like nightly builds database backups, and so on. There's plenty of jobs that are scheduled nightly basically to not disturb anyone. But it doesn't really matter if we compute these jobs at one in the morning, two in the morning, five in the morning, as long as they're outside of business hours, but per scheduler for carbon Web scheduler, this makes a big difference because if it has 12 hours of flexibility, Using forecasts for renewable energy or for carbon intensity, it can decide on when to run this workload.

And that can make a very, very big difference. And in this paper, we basically analyze the carbon intensity for different regions and try to identify time windows where shifting is very promising.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. And Colleen, the reason I, I came across your work initially, when I saw the, I think it was ACM energy. You did a talk specifically about this in the, in the context of your work with VMware as well. Is. Case.

Colleen Josephson: Yes. Yeah, it is Victor and I, Victor is over in the VMware research arm. We. That talk together. It's been a kind of a growing area of interest for VMware. When I arrived, it was just after we had partnered with the NSF, the national science foundation in the United States. And we actually specifically set aside some funds for a call on sustainable digital infrastructure.

And we funded, I believe. Three different projects from that area. And we've been working with those academics on the different aspects of overlapping a lot, actually of what Philipp was just talking about. How do you take data centers and make them more carbon aware through, you know, one aspect we discussed a lot is shifting through time and space and we we've done some, you know, early investigations and.

Crunched some numbers. And we've also been working with in particular, Andrew Chen at the university of Chicago. He has been working with Lena rad at the university of Wisconsin, and she has great expertise in kind of the power distribution. Side of things, which has been a really interesting consideration as we've talked with them.

Cuz when you start to think about, you know, beyond a single data center, you know, multi-cloud large customers, people who have workloads and data centers across countries or regions, when you're shifting things and in space, you can actually have a significant impact on the grid. The, these big data center providers, you know, customers that use VMware software M.

Amazon so on. If they are shifting their workloads around, you have the carbon intensity benefit. But one thing that, you know, our academic collaborators made aware to us is this very interesting fact that we will in turn be modifying kind of the, the economic dynamics of the grid have. You know, potentially the actual operating capacity of, you know, how power is distributed.

So that's been a really interesting angle to think about from kind of a major provider point of view. And how do we take these really interesting and promising ideas and begin to scale them up from, you know, a grid provider scale point and another thing that customers have brought up to us. Data borders, you know, if moving things from within, you know, one corner of the United States to the other corner of the United States is typically not a problem, at least legally.

And you might have latency trade offs, which need to be part of the equation. But when we went and kind of pitched our ideas, To people over in the EU, a lot of people were, you know, pretty concerned about the fact that the, the borders are a lot closer. So , you have customer data and it can get a little bit trickier moving it from one region to another.

Sara Bergman: As someone working for a major cloud provider and based in Europe, this is of course something that, that touches in my interest or peaks my interest because I think this is really interesting, at least for Microsoft, we have this Microsoft runs on. We have the cute running t-shirts and everything. Like it's a core part of our business.

And I know that is the case for a lot of customers, only Microsoft. So this is an important part of the equation, um, to make this. not only theoretically possible, but actually possible at scales for where we can solve this for the large business customers. But I think I watched one of your talks as well.

Colleen, I think it was, we can, you also talked about the, the difference throughout the day, because even if one country, which is in Europe quite small, doesn't have a lot of different energy providers. Not only can the. Type of energy that's generated change throughout the day, but also what is competing for that energy will change throughout the day.

Like when we're all standing up in the morning and everyone's taking a shower before work and, you know, it's, I live in Norway where everyone charges their electric car. Of course there's gonna be higher load on the grid versus in the night, there is a lot less, for example. So I think that's an interesting aspect as.

Philipp Wiesner: Yeah, I think directly to add on that this variability can be quite dramatic. So in France, for example, they have clean, not clean maybe, but like, oh, carbon energy, because of all the nuclear power they are deploying throughout the day. So there you have barely any potential. But then there's regions like Germany, for example, which are very interesting because they're super variable, like Germany employs comparably, much wind power as well as solar power.

So at many times of the day, they manage to have large fractions of the grid provided by green energy. But if neither sand nor wind available, we burn brown cold, which is pretty much the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. And this is why variability is really crazy. Like within a normal day, you can expect twice or like 50% fluctuations.

Like could be that one kilowatt hour that you consume now is twice as dirty. If you consume the same kilowatt hour, few hours later. And within a few days, you can even see like the difference between the min and the max can be factor four or something. So one kilowatt hour can really vary from 100 grams co.

Up to 400 grams or more 500 grams.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah, this variability, you know, particularly with wind and solar and renewables like that, that touches on something that we covered in our talk, which is the, the idea of curtailment, which is a really interesting opportunity. I, before I started in this area as an energy consumer, I had no idea about this concept, but.

Basically it's this, it gets into this supply and demand relationship that I was talking about where energy providers, they. Want to match the energy available to the energy being consumed. And if the demand is low, uh, as Sara was talking about there's times where people that you wake up, you take a shower, you know, or you get home and you, you start cooking or watching TV.

There's an ebb and flow of power, power. Is consumed. And that admin flow does not necessarily match with how nature is behaving. So if people aren't using a lot of power, the grid can't accept it. We, we not yet. Anyway. So what we have to do is actually burn it off, which I thought that was pretty shocking.

When I learned about it is we have all these renewables and we're just letting it go to waste at the moment. So there's this. Untapped potential as we start thinking about these workloads that can be deferred or moved in time or space. Well, when these curtailment conditions occur, can we pull from our back pocket, some of these compute workloads and start basically increased demand.

So we don't let this clean energy go to waste.

Chris Adams: Okay. If I'm bring spring it down for a second, just to make sure I understand the idea that you have here is that you, without making any changes to code itself, you're not changing the code. Really. You're just deciding to run the same code either at different places. In a kind of sci-fi move it through space or through time.

And this is going to have this, this is basically a way that you can essentially reduce the environmental impact of something without necessarily having to redesign it or from, from scratch. That's what it sounds like you're saying in this case. Yeah.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that that's, that's one way to put it. And of course, you know, the very process of taking a workload and moving it in itself has kind of, maybe you can think of it as meta code and it can be enormously complex to get all of that. Correct. But let's say maybe, you know, the core of what you wanna do is some training for a artificial intelligence model.

That same exact training is happening. You're just picking it up and plopping it in a new place or a new time.

Chris Adams: And when you spoke about curtailment, just then there was this idea that essentially because you can't get the energy, that's generated to someone who's able to consume it, it is essentially wasted and you're not able to make some kind of. Effective or economically useful use of it. That's the, that, that, that I'm sharing this largely for folks who might not have heard some of these terms, because if you're a software engineer, you might not have heard of curtailment or any of this stuff here, actually, we've spoken bit about carbon aware.

So we have this notion of you can be carbon aware in that, knowing that there are natural cycles on the grid that you can respond to. And Colleen, I think you mentioned this idea of, is it carbon inte. Was in one of the papers that you spoke about recently? I think I, I, I'm not sure. I think it was in your most recent paper.

It was actually kind of exciting for me, cause I haven't, I hadn't heard this term before and it feels like one of the next steps from this notion of carbon oil, perhaps it was among, I heard at hot carbon, which is basically a conference specifically for folks doing this kind of work.

Colleen Josephson: I think that actually was not our paper looking through it. Maybe. Carbon my colleague that one of the other authors spoke about it and that could be something he said, but we definitely talk about carbon aware computing in our paper. But I think that that in itself is kind of an interesting point to bring up is these terms are.

New. And they're very new because the conversations and I mean, there are some people who have been working in this area for a long time, but in the past couple of years, I think that. Interest in work in this space is really accelerated in pick up and I'm seeing more venues than ever in which to present this work.

So I think carbon aware versus carbon intelligence is, you know, kind of an, an artifact of the fact that we're still pretty early on in the. The conversations that we're having and standardizing on our terminology , which is, you know, Green Software Foundation itself has a standards group. So I guess this is a case in point why standardization is so important.

Philipp Wiesner: I think Google is using the term car intelligence across their papers, but I think it's just terminology. I think they all mean the same.

Chris Adams: Okay. Alright, we'll go with carbon aware for the time being in that case until we hear otherwise. So essentially when someone says carbon intelligent and carbon aware, it's more or less the same idea of essentially. Making your work or the workloads are making them kind of sympathetic to the natural cycles that I guess surround us really.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah. And I think to add to kind of this hierarchy, what we think about in VMware is kind of a few different levels. One of the most important things that a lot of companies are still struggling with right now, Is just how much carbon are we consuming through our operations and all the different scopes.

It's really hard to answer that question right now. How much does this application does this container? What, what, however I choose to slice it. What, what is the consumption of, you know, carbon and other re resources and then. From there, you know, that that's the classic. You have to know, you know, be able to measure the problem in order to solve it.

And then the next step is once you have this really good visibility into what you're consuming, you can then start to optimize for it. And that's where we get into kind of this awareness, uh, intelligence managing your carbon.

Sara Bergman: Yes. And, and I think that. Visibility is so important. And I think it's important to get the right visibility to the right people. I think scheduling of, of some sort isn't really new. I mean, we've had the supercomputers scheduled the work for them for quite a long time, but this type of scheduling is of, of course new.

But if you, if you get these concepts to people who have domain knowledge, then that's a concept they know, and they can say, oh, you know, This job can wait a while because they have the domain knowledge to make use of this technology. And, and that's where it becomes really powerful when we have the, the visibility to allow everyone to participate in it.

Because yeah, also, like we said, I think more people want to contribute and want to do something. And if you make it really easy, well then all the better.

Chris Adams: Okay. So I have to ask, are there any, so let's say you can tune things to basically. Take advantage of electricity when it's cheap and green and, and abundant. Are there any kind of measurable savings that are actually published or out there? Because this sounds great, but surely it does. Are there any early results to at least give us some idea of what kind of savings could be gleaned from this before you think you start thinking about redesigning?

Like, let's say you right to do you, you've got an app and you are trying to reduce the impact. Is there any kind of measurable reduction in carbon on this kind of work? For example, what, what kind of figure. Have been sh have been coming up so far from.

Colleen Josephson: I think what Philipp was saying earlier, really lines up what we've been finding these swings of 50%, depending on your region. You know, that can be that the high end, we saw a carbon savings of 50%. If you're in a highly volatile region and then even in places where it's less volatile, there's still.

This cycle and, you know, that tends to be more like 10%. And I think it's really hard to say right now, because a lot of the experiments as we talked about are not yet taking into consideration, which workloads are good candidates to move, you know, which workloads, you know, these data boards, you know, part of how we evaluated is we were just like, okay, let's take it from Germany to somewhere else and not think about these, you know, Policy issues that might make it so that we can only go from Germany to Poland, for example.

Philipp Wiesner: Yeah, I, I fully agree on that. I think the thing is that currently many results are still simulation based also our results. So you can easily craft scenarios where you can under certain conditions get 50% carbon savings by moving workloads from the night to the day or something. The only research that I'm aware of where like this was actually deployed somewhere, it was a Google paper that was publish.

last year or this year where they really have something running on their infrastructure. And then they report, like, I think it's 1% or something that they actually cut out. But this is then not only about jobs that were actually shifted. It's about like their entire workload of the entire data center.

And that's then already quite impressive because I think we're only touching on the actual potential of how much flexibility there is in many workloads. And I think this is also one of the biggest challenges in the entire field and how to identify how. Yeah, identified as flexibility opportunities for flexibility, and then especially how to make schedulers aware of these opportunities.

So most workloads are still black boxes in many, in many regards, you maybe have a deadline, but that's it. But there's a lot more information about workloads that would be good to have for cloud providers if they want to schedule them. For example, whether workloads are interruptable and what's the cost, the overhead of interrupting and resuming a work.

So for example, many machine learning trainings can take days. It's absolutely not uncommon. So if you know that interrupting these jobs is cheap and it often is because they do already do checkpointing. They write immediate results to the disc all the time. So if you can interrupt and resume these workloads, then you can really exploit it.

Short-term fluctuations in, in the grid. And.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah. I just wanna say that Philipp. I absolutely agree everything. You're saying really lines up with what we find. Really critical part of going from simulation to reality is this concept of how do you identify these candidate workloads? How do you do this? You know, figuring out what is good to move and, you know, maybe start off doing that by hand.

But in the long term, we need this to be automatic, you know? No. Human in the loop. So our systems need to be adapted so that we create a workload and it has some sort of metric for, you know, whether or not it's moveable at that time, how flexible it is. And so on.

Chris Adams: Okay. Now, if I, if we could maybe unpack some of this for the case of like these, these examples that you folks have just described, Colleen, you are, you're working at VMware. So. Whereabouts is this happening in the stack? Is it a product from VMware that is doing this stuff or is it somewhere higher up?

Would like, say Kubernetes, for example, is this happening at a hypervisor level or is there somewhere else in this? Cuz I know there are various parts of the stack that you could make an intervention. And I know there are examples of things like a carbon away, Kubernetes scheduler and where we work.

We've been doing some, we've got some P press open to Keta, which is an autoscaler specifically for Kubernetes to use some of this information so far. But I would love to hear cuz yeah, I didn't really know that much about VMware and it seems like there's a whole fascinating paper on this actually.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah. So I. We can't. I can't say this is like home to a specific product. I think one of the things that's things that's actually really nice about VMware is we have something called our 2030 agenda where we have 30 goals that we want to achieve before 20, 30 and sustainability. It's an ESG driven agenda and we have a whole bunch of goals related to sustainability.

So we've really taken the past couple of years since we announced the agenda to make sustainability kind of. In the core of what we do. So rather than having a sustainability office at the top, we wanna embed it and empower every single individual. Engineer. So we have these types of projects for moving workloads, measuring things they're kind of going on in a few different places.

So, and all I can really say for sure. You know, every company is a little hesitant to promise. Features for a specific project. we are very actively working on, we have engineers and project managers and researchers it's to be determined, kind of where it will emerge. But, you know, we've been talking with partners and stakeholders, and I think that it's been a very active space in a number of places in the company.

Chris Adams: Cool. Cool. Thank you for that. Okay, Sara did, there was something you would've come in on.

Sara Bergman: No, I would just say noting vigorously on, on a few things. So yeah, no, no. Additional to ask, add. Yeah.

Chris Adams: all right. So one of the things that came out of that was this idea of being able to, when you have a piece of work to be computed, it's either providing some kind of annotation or some, um, way of expressing that. Yes. It's okay. To pause me for example, or, yes, my I'm not I'm I'm not so urgent, but I'm, but as long as I'm done by this time, for example, So maybe have a few folks come across any kind of patterns that have actually that we might be seeing us wear, cuz based on what you folks tell me, it makes me think of the, the fact that I know when some of say Apple's work because they're now switching to a different kind of architecture that there is this notion of like annotating particular work that needs to be interactive to a user.

Something that might be a background thread. Do we have anything in the region of like a convention fr annotating stuff so that it's easy to. Especially. Yeah, go Colleen.

Colleen Josephson: I can't name any specific patents, but what this is reminding me of is telecommunications and I telecommunications as a deep. Degree of work in prioritizing data streams. And that's been a really active area for a couple of decades, you know, whether it's cellular or more traditional, just internet, there is this idea of delay in tolerant traffic versus more delayed tolerant traffic.

And there's a really rich body of research that we can look at and maybe borrow.

Philipp Wiesner: Yeah. Just one thing to add on that. I think what's special in particular about this scheduling problem in comparison to like scheduling problems that we had before is the, the time scale as well. Because like, if you talk about delay tolerance and telecommunications, And if we have like scheduling on a CPU level, that's really milliseconds or less or whatsoever, while in, if we talk about carbon awareness, like actually optimizing for the carbon grid, it rarely goes below 15 minutes that we have as a forecast and frequency, basically.

And if you optimize for, let's say your own solar panels, then you can maybe use satellite. in like the five, 10 minute scale, you can use like weather data for like a few hours or like, but if you want to go below five minutes, then you already need sky cameras. You already need like video information of where clouds move and stuff.

So when we talk about scheduling and delay tolerance here, then we do not really mean that we start a job and 30 seconds later we resume it. It's like bigger jobs that run for at least 15 minutes. And then we stop them for a few hours and then we resume them. So this makes it a bit different to, to what we have.

So.

Sara Bergman: Yes. I, I think this is super interesting because it's, if you start optimizing for perfect scheduling, it's easy to fall into the trap or you're investing more or spending more into actually. The savings. It, it, you need to think of it as economics. So yeah, you can maybe schedule it down to every five minutes, which may be great for your application.

But if you then, like you said, Philipp need to buy a sky camera, need to invest in like your own satellite network. I'm exaggerating now, but you understand the, the scenario. Well then the actual car saving is at the end of it might be like net positive, uh, in which is a negative in this disregard. So any, any sort of carbon project that would.

Whatever, wherever it is, need to take in the totality, because we are just one, one planet. And I see the same similar discourse in machine learning a lot where people are very eager to use machine learning for solving climate problem, which I think is great. And I'm not saying we should stop doing that, but sometimes we're spending massive resources training those models to then save the world where we actually polluted the world more while doing.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that we actually made that exact point in a recent white paper. One of the other organizations that VMware is involved with is the next G Alliance, which focuses on telecommunications in north America is looking at, we're talking a lot about 5g. We've already got our site set on 60 and Microsoft is actually also a member with.

And I co-lead something called the green G working group, looking at how, how we can make our next generation telecommunications networks intrinsically sustainable. And there, there is a lot of excitement, like you said, Sara, about. You applying machine learning, but you have to remember this caveat that right now, training these models is really carbon intensive.

So you have to remember the resources you consume to, to get the job done. and kind of the same thing comes in with upgrades. So if you look at upgrading hardware and data centers or telecommunications hardware, so 5g, I think got some bad press for how much power the base stations consumed, but what's actually true about it is that the power consumed per bit transmitted has gone.

Significantly. So there's a good advantage to upgrading your hardware, but then, you know, what about this hardware? You're getting rid of everything that we produce has this concept of embodied emissions. It takes resources and carbon to produce this hardware. So you have. Really carefully look at that sort of trade off.

It turns out that keeping our devices, especially smaller devices in use for as long as possible is one of the greenest things that we can do.

Sara Bergman: Exactly because it's very tempting to look at only your share and try to slim it down as much as possible. But if that means you're just overflowing into other carbon budgets, you, well, the net effect. What you want anyway. And that might be a leap from how a lot of us are used to thinking about software, but I also think it, it like triggers that natural engineering curiosity in us all.

So it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Chris Adams: So we're talking about the embodied emissions for this, and I'm, I'm glad you actually spoke about the network part, cuz this is one thing that. , I don't have that much access to experts when looking at this. But, uh, as I understand it, for example, with 5g, there was an, there's a significant amount of embodied energy in making each of these towers, but would it be the case that you would have more towers which are more efficient, but have higher embodied emissions compared to what you had before?

Like maybe it'd be really cur I'm curious about what the kind of trade offs you actually might have to make there because as I understood it, 5g. Tends to have a lower range. Is that the case compared to say 4g, for example, or is it able to fill in some of those.

Colleen Josephson: There's different types of cellular infrastructure for different types of transmissions. So I think what you're touching on is this idea of these micro cells, which are, you know, you have millimeter wave, they have short range they're deployed in dense, urban environ. But that doesn't mean that cellular providers have stopped having these longer range communications it's, you know, kinda like how your cell phone has different types of communication for different scopes.

You have Bluetooth for short range, you have NFC for ultra short range, and then you have your cellular and wifi for longer range. The same is true of cellular networks for really dense urban environments. You're gonna have these smaller. Micro cells trying to give high speed coverage in these urban areas, but you still are gonna have these larger cells deployed across the United States so that you still have, you know, a good range in coverage everywhere.

But when we talk about savings in telecommunications, I think one of the really big opportunities that's getting, you know, off the ground rate now has to do. Software defined networking and virtualization. So historically in telecommunications, everything you needed was kind of in the tower and there's this massive movement for disaggregation going on.

So you can begin to pick and choose providers and move different parts of the cellular network around. So, you know, one of the things that we've talked about is, you know, there's the telecommunications industry and then there's I C T and. The line between the two is beginning to blur because a lot of what used to maybe happen only on a tower or in specialized hardware can now be done in general data centers.

So the two industries are really kind of solving the same sorts of problems , which is really interest.

Chris Adams: So, if I understand that correctly, you are saying that some of the. Hardware that was all bundled or some of the functionality that might have been bundled into a single piece of hardware is somewhat being kind of unbundled. So that maybe a cloud computing thing might be happening. And this is things like, would this be stuff like open ran or like the open radio network kind of stuff?

Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that's definitely getting into that area, openness so that you can have different modules communicating with each other. And there's a lot of really interesting opportunities there. So one fact for example, is incumbent like really kind of older and existing cellular networks. You don't have the ability to easily turn off a base station when it's not in use.

So these base stations are what are consuming the overwhelming amount. Of power in the network and kind of this really low hanging fruit is, well, when there's nobody around turn down the volume and the ability to have it more software defined means that we can try out these algorithms to dynamically do that.

Right now it's a lot of, if people have to turn things down by hand, do a lot of really onerous changes to implement this, but as we start to move to a more nimble infrastructure for 5g, And beyond, we really have this interesting opportunity to rapidly prototype these power savings algorithms and see what we can do.

Philipp Wiesner: So I see that in networking, we have plenty of opportunities for energy saving. But do you see any opportunities for carbon awareness? Because from my experience, there's not so much, you either have like edge infrastructure that is wireless and really energy intensive, but it's by design critical it's by design has to be fast.

Otherwise it wouldn't be at the edge like, well, on the other hand, you have the big data centers that have like a lot of patch jobs that are like very flexible and defer. But they are connected via fiber, which is super energy efficient and there's barely any, any consumption on that. So do you see any opportunities in that regard or is it mainly computing that we can make car aware?

Colleen Josephson: Huge opportunities. And that's one of the reasons I'm glad that we're thinking about six G right now is we have. This major to reuse the word opportunity to design this next generation network to be carbon aware from the beginning. One thing we noticed when we started this work is right now, we're historically figuring out how much power 3g, 4g 5g network consumes has been very much a cyclical thing.

You build the network and then you look back in time and then you make measurements. So you. When we were working on our first white paper, we actually couldn't even answer the question. How much energy does 5g consume there? There's just the work on that is ongoing right now where, you know, kind of, we realized as we were doing this, it's like, why.

And we, we have infrastructure to measure uptime, to measure latency. We already measure these things across basically every facet of computing. So why are we not measuring energy consumption and figuring out the carbon footprint? So we really need to design in this ability to measure how much power.

Part of the network is consuming and report it with really fine grain in a really fine grained way in a real time way so that we know as we're starting to prototype six G exactly how much power it's consuming. And as we deploy different pieces of hardware or different algorithms, did this change actually work?

Chris Adams: All right. So this is actually something that we're probably gonna cover on our future episode. In more detail, there is some really fascinating work going on from an organization, working on a protocol called the cion. Just like a clean slate implementation of their staff, where we work. We've been doing a bit, bit of work with them and we have an ongoing project.

So basically annotate every single public IP address on earth with carbon intensity information such that you can start creating some of these paths. But one of the problems you have with the existing internet is that. You BGP doesn't necessarily account for these different criteria that you might want to have.

So if you go back to this notion of saying, I have a job where I need to move something, you only have one dimension right now with BGP, whereas you can't really talk about saying, I care about latency more than I do about cost. For example, if I'm on a really important video call, whereas if I'm not doing a big backup or shitting a bunch of data, I might care about cost more than latency.

So there is some work had to taking place in here and. The only example I've come across so far and it is, it's totally worth a look. I look up, I think actually, cuz it's kind of interesting, but I hadn't actually thought about this in the context of six G actually to be before this phone call. I hadn't even heard of six G so I guess there's a whole, whole little bit to actually add.

So if I may, I'm just gonna touch on this notion of. delay tolerant networks. Cause we spoke about the idea of having different criteria for jobs and stuff. Now, my understanding of, of this is that there is a decent body of work already. You used for interplanetary networks. That's where some of this initially came from is that I think cuz if you, when I did, when I was doing some research before this, for this podcast, I found out that the, the NASA actually has a whole bunch of really fascinating research on delay tolerant networks and it looks.

The actual timeframes for what they look at in terms of delay, aren't that different from the time scales we've been talking about, like in terms of 15 minutes to an hour, for example, I'd be curious if any of you folks have come across any kind of overlapping research here, because the idea of using technology from space sounds kind of cool and it kind of worked for Velcro.

So I figured maybe, maybe there's some stuff that we could actually take use, make use of.

Colleen Josephson: Well, I don't know a whole lot about delay tolerant, networking in specific, but this is reminding me of another. Area called intermittent computing, which has also ended up in space. Uh, and this is basically taking inspiration from the really small and embedded side of things, which is, I think a theme in general of green software embedded devices.

Historically they have a much, much lower power budget than something that's in a data center. And as we look at these. Networks of, you know, kind of internet of things. We wanna put them in more, in more inhospitable places, outer space, farm fields, et cetera. And these places have no fixed power or communication in infrastructure.

So it becomes really challenging to figure out how do you budget? When, you know, you're, you're not sure how long you might have to run. So there's researchers, I think at the university of Massachusetts and Carnegie Mellon who have done some really interesting work in how you. Have this architecture that deals with the fact that you could suddenly, and gracelessly lose your operating power.

So how do you, you know, checkpoint things so that when for example, the sun comes back out, you can pick up where you left off and make progress and continue to do compute or fire out a packet. and some of this intermittent computing has ended up in outer space. I think there's a, a satellite that was created that takes advantage of some of these concepts.

Chris Adams: Okay, this is something that is totally new to me. I'd never heard. If someone did wanna find out about how to apply space technology to these kind of problems, where should they be looking? This sounds really, really fascinating. I did not expect us to go in down this direction, but it, it sounds lots of fun to.

Colleen Josephson: Well, the, the researcher who did these space, toasters is Brandon Lucia. I think also, I mean, looking straight at NASA and , they, they do a lot of research in this area and they have funding and I was talking to somebody who works there and they actually have a lot of work. That's not directly tied to space.

So that they do stuff on, you know, underwater networking, for example, is one thing I was surprised to hear that they work on. So I wouldn't be too surprised if there are researchers already there starting to think about some of these issues and how you can apply what they've learned from delay tolerant networks or intermittent computing to some of these challenge.

Chris Adams: I've just realized that if anyone who is interested in the context on the concept of intermittent computing, there is really fascinating art project called the solar protocol. And it's a really run wacky project, which is essentially it's a website, which is. Really a cluster of Raspberry, Pi's all around the world in different parts of the world.

And basically there is a DNS server, which basically roots requests to whichever Raspberry Pi has battery. And when the batteries are run out, the Raspberry Pi stops serving websites, but because it's always sunny somewhere, there's always the steady supply of this stuff. And the thing that's really interesting is that they have a hack day coming up on the 15th of August.

So if anyone does wanna play with this stuff, you can actually do it. It's entirely open. There is a whole set of really fascinating stuff. And at a recent conference called limits 2022 computing within limits. I believe they've actually, there's a paper for this as well. It's a really fun project. And we've written about it on a magazine that we publish called branch.

And if anyone has a cur has some curiosity in intermittent computing, this is probably the kind of most iconic and wacky idea I've seen so far. And it should, I imagine it might be a lot of fun for the people who listen to this kind of podcast.

Sara Bergman: I love it when it feels like my work is becoming sci-fi, but that's the best

Chris Adams: Well, this is like part of the idea, the idea that you can move work through time and space. When you actually talk about that, that sounds extremely science fictionally. And this is partly why we wanted to speak about this in addition to just the conversations about efficiency, because in many ways it does feel like it's sympathetic to a lot of the kind of patterns we might normally have.

You can think of. Say seasonal food is a bit like kind of seasonal electricity or something like that. Just on a much, much more compressed time scale.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah, this is starting to remind. Of some recent work that a friend and colleague did pat Canuto at the university of California, San Diego, he, and one of his students, they started, they started working on this concept of something called a junkyard data center where they're using old phones, nexus four and nexus five phones to kind of serve this Raspberry Pi role that you're, you're talking about.

And they found that they were able to kind of match and occasionally exceed, you know, modern cloud compute offerings. And this is kind of like, I thought this was neat because it's the intersection of what we were talking about earlier. If you've got this kind of low, low, high power computing, but then you also introduce at the, the junkyard part is getting to this, what we were talking about earlier with embodied emissions, these phones people don't use nexus four and.

Phones very much anymore because they're a number of years old, but they still can do really useful and powerful computing. So, you know, this is the reuse part of reduced reuse, recycle, where we still have these very good, relatively speaking sources of compute power. So how can we extend their useful life?

So that is a pretty cool piece of ongoing work also.

Chris Adams: Colleen, the stuff you mentioned there reminds me. A service from a company called Lanum, who basically use XX Hyperscale data center. And they put them into shipping containers right next to all kinds of solar farms and wind turbine places to essentially do this kind of interruptable, low carbon computing.

And in many cases, when the cost of electricity is say negative, for example, or when you are paid to kind of scale back your power, they've essentially got another way to. These kind of services. I think this is really fascinating when you're able to DEC decouple a bunch of these open source pro uh, ideas from necessarily a gigantic data center.

You, they, you don't necessarily need to have a massive out of town, big box Walmart data center to take advantage of these techniques.

Colleen Josephson: Yeah, this idea of kind of sustainable. Computing has really also gotten a lot of attention. VMware has its own project where in that's reminding me a lot of this in collaboration with vapor IO, where we kind of have a container data center and we're looking at these sorts of savings. So I think there's a few instances of this sort of work starting to happen.

Chris Adams: all right. Sounds like lots of stuff for us to add to the show notes that we have here. If there's any kind of links or podcasts or projects that you'd like to draw people's attention to. Yeah. What's caught your eye recently that you'd say in the context of the podcast, that you'd suggest people look.

Philipp Wiesner: What I personally found quite interesting is recent work from. Monica vital from the poly technical to Milano in Italy, who looks at this entire topic of sustainable computing very much from an application side. So basically looking at, we have a certain business process, for example, where different components in our microservice architecture have a certain purpose.

And for example, like Sheena papers talks about flight booking process, and then maybe certain aspects like certain components of this pipeline may not really be necessary. They might add revenue. To the operator, they might add quality of service or quality of experience, but under certain times or conditions, we could trade this quality of experience or quality of service.

to consume less energy, or maybe we have different implementations of certain aspects of a system. I mean, I think this is really, really interesting work to think that maybe we can, if we like go deeper in the applications of how applications should be designed. So actually changing the code of software, like to refer back to what is at, in the beginning, we can actually trade some qualities of software for energy reductions during certain times to be to better align with the actual availability of renewable energy.

And I think that's really interesting.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Philipp. I definitely need to get that as a, as a link for the show notes. Sara. You've got something here to add as well. Right?

Sara Bergman: Yes. I've been reading a blog post called the dirty carbon secret behind solid state memory drives, which is a very enticing title, but it's about it ties into this episode because it talks. The trade offs between the embodied carbon and the lifetime emissions from using energy. So I'll link it. I, I thought it was insight.

Chris Adams: Okay. Colleen, what's showing up on your radar these days.

Colleen Josephson: I think I already mentioned it, the junkyard data center. So I'll find a link for that, cuz I thought that was pretty neat work. And then I'll also try to find the piece on the, the intermittent satellites.

Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Okay. In that case, I'm gonna share a couple, couple of mind, and then I think we're gonna wrap up the thing that I'm really interested right now in this particular context is a carbon aware branch of nomad, which is the alternative scheduler from Hashi called. It's very, very similar to Kubernetes, but somewhat simpler.

There is now a carbon away branch that actually does include some of this for its scheduling decisions. And that's something that I'm really excited about at the moment. And there's also a bunch of jokes around low carbon etes. Instead of Kubernetes, these days, we've been doing a bit work to build a specific CLI go based CLI to plug into tools like this so that we can.

A carbon aware, any version, any, any carbon aware cluster, any, any cluster you run should be able to be doing this kind of stuff. That's the thing I'm, I'm gonna be adding to the links here. All right, folks, I've really enjoyed this. This has been super nerdy, but that's basically why people sign up and listen to this podcast.

And I really appreciate you sharing your time with us. So folks, thank you very much for this. Just before I go. If people wanna hear more about your research or your work, where would they be looking.

Philipp Wiesner: Probably just Twitter. So just first name, last name without any just Philipp, Wiesner without any thoughts or anything.

Chris Adams: Cool. And Sara

Sara Bergman: Same, you can find me on Twitter. It's my name with an E in the middle.

Chris Adams: and Colleen

Colleen Josephson: Yeah. I post a lot on my website, see ColleenJosephson dot net. And I also share some on Twitter, which is see Josephson full because see Josephson was taken

Chris Adams: I could definitely identify with that. And my name is Chris Adams. Chris Adams was taken. So I am Mr. Chris Adams, which is @mrchrisadams. All right, folks. Thank you very much for talking to us about green software and carbon aware and carbon intelligence software, and hopefully we'll see you on future episodes.

Thanks folks. Bye.

Philipp Wiesner: Thanks a lot.

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 Green Software Foundation that's Green Software Foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈

The future of Green Software lies in education. In this episode host Chris Adams is joined by Luis Cruz of TU Delft and Sara Bergman of Microsoft as they discuss how to teach and learn to make Green Software. With Luis’ unique insight as a professor, he is able to bring us up to date with pedagogical approaches that are laying the groundwork for future software engineers.

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Luis Cruz: LinkedIn / Twitter / Website (with course info).

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Luis’ open source course on sustainable software engineering, taught at TU Delft
• Sara’s Paper on performance characteristics of Blockchains and other distributed consensus mechanisms

People to follow doing relevant work in this field:

• Person: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani - IEEE Xplore Author Profile
• Person: Hannah Smith: Educator - Hannah Smith (opcan.co.uk)
• Person: Sabine Canditt and her book Small steps. Large... by Sabine Canditt
• Person: Patricia Lago: Full Professor at VUAmsterdam.
• Person: Elina Eriksson: Associate Professor KTH. 
• Person: Mikael Asplund: Linköping University.
• Person: Sandra Pallier - ClimateAction.tech organiser and designer at Microsoft.
• Person: Colleen Josephson - VM Ware. Collen’s recent talk and paper at ACM Energy.
• Person: Bilge Acun - Facebook/Meta - See Carbon Explorer on github.
  
  

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript Below:
Luis Cruz: If you want to change the generation of software engineers, you need to change the mindset of their leaders and you need to start earlier. And the obvious answer for that is to include green software as part of our university courses.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed 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. Welcome to Environment Variables. 

My name's Chris Adams. And on this episode, I am joined by Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Luis Cruz of TU Delft. That's technical university of Delft. We'll be talking about how people teach and learn to make green software. Before we dive in though, maybe it's time for a quick round of introductions.

My name is Chris Adams. I am the chair of the Green Software Foundation policy group, and I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, where we work towards an entirely fossil for internet by 2030, Luis. Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself, then we'll give Sara a chance to explain, introduce herself and see what she, and what she does.

Luis Cruz: Sure thing. Hello everyone. My name is Luis Cruz, and I'm an assistant professor at the software engineering group at TU Delft. And there we do research and educate the next generation of software developers. and our main topics, we've overrun, software testing, software deducting, and of course also about green software, how to build energy efficient software.

So most of my time is devoted on doing research on green software, green AI, sustainable software engineering, and of course also about educating and finally about managing because when we have a lot of people, we also have to manage. People and students are also part of these managing and management load that we have at the universities, like to you, Chris.

Chris Adams: Luis. And, uh, Sara, one of our recurring hosts. Why don't you introduce yourself for some of the folks who may not have heard the previous episodes?

Sara Bergman: Great. Thanks. Always great to be back on the podcast. My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft where I work in M 365 or with M 365 products. And in the Green Software Foundation, I'm the chair of the writer's project, where we deal with some of our written materials, like the articles we produce and the newsletter that you're all hopefully subscribed to.

Chris Adams: Okay, thank you, Sara. And just for the record, while you brought that up, if someone did want to subscribe to the newsletter and find out about this through regular and. Updates, where would they be going to find out such a thing?

Sara Bergman: you go to our website, Green Software Foundation and it should be like right in your face.

Chris Adams: Okay. Awesome. I think even I could follow that, actually. Okay. So today we're talking about basically teaching, teaching green software, because if we're gonna be. Helping people figure out how to make more planet friendly applications. Then it probably helps to know what's going on in the world of teaching software and see where, where people are learning this stuff.

And this is partly why Luis is kind of, I'm glad to have you on for this because we actually met through things like the climate action.tech slack group. But one thing that was, I found really exciting from some of the work you did was the fact that you were working on. Entirely open syllabus for sustainable software engineering and obviously lots of us like open source, an open, an open culture, but I figured it might be worth just maybe you telling us a little bit about why the core, why you made the course and why you chose to make it open.

Luis Cruz: Yeah, that's a very good question, Chris. And that's a, maybe let me get back a little bit and tell you. How did all this started? Yeah, so it started by the fact that I was doing research in green software way before teaching sustainable software engineering and the always the main motivation point was the fact that.

Software engineers are eager to build more energy efficient software, but they often lack the resources or they often don't know exactly how to do it, but they, they are highly motivated to do it. So they keep asking about what are the best practices, how can we test energy efficiency, these sort of things.

So, so that was my main motivation to start this line of research, but then of course, I started realizing, okay. I should not only be doing research in my. Office, right. I should also try to communicate these back to developers. And that was when I realized that, in fact, it's not only about building or creating writing papers, but also about communicate them back to the community when, and when you Google about it, or when you look at the Web for resources about this, you almost don't see anything about it.

And then if you look at the conversations that we have. Climate action. How to change our software industry into a more sustainable industry. It always revolve around new policies, right? How to make sure that the industry is complying. with sustainable practices, how to make sure that we can ask our suppliers for energy efficient certificates, these sort of things.

But sometimes we forget that if you want to change our society. The strongest weapon we have is education. Right? If you want to change the generation of software engineers of the software industry, you need to change the mindset of their leaders and you need to start earlier and. To me, the obvious answer for that is to include green software as part of our university courses, because that's how you change the mindset of the future leaders in the next generation of software engineering.

But again, when I started, when I realized this, I started looking for content at, in my university, okay. Who is teaching these kind of topics. And I realized. , there was a lot of content around sustainability at UD Delft, but they kind of miss the, the fact that software also has an impact on sustainability.

So if you build a software system, this software system will probably have a carbon impact. And somehow I feel that the other fields kind of miss this point because they tend to. Target sustainable problems by creating a new AI model, creating a new software system that will automate something and help them improve the sustainability of their problems.

And they kind of forget that if you run something in a server, that server will probably be spending energy. So going back to the, to these pursuit of sustainability topics at the university, I realized that the computer science courses had nothing to do about. . And the funny thing is that if you think about green software, you will see that it, it, it covers, or it touches upon different topics of computer science testing, but programming languages, even in software engineering, the way you, the software development life cycle.

If you look at all the stages, every single stage. Should have a perspective on sustainability if you really want to make sustainable software. So in a way, the fact that none of these courses in computer science had a single chapter that would cover energy efficiency or sustainability was somehow a trigger for me and more motivation for me to think, okay, we really need to start creating.

Content. And at the Delft, they were very open. When I started pitching about a new course idea, they thought, okay, this is really something that aligns with our values. So they gave me all the freedom to start designing the course and creating the course. and I'm really happy that this first edition we had around 20, 20 something students that were really enthusiastic about the topic and they knew nothing about it.

Because as I said, there was nothing around this and there were already. Fourth year master students. So after four years of education, they, they were not exposed to this to me, the fact that it was so challenging to find content, to help me design the course. I think it was clear to me that I would, if I wanted to change our community, I would have to deliver this content and everyone can use it and reuse it and learn from it because that's the way that we can make.

A second addition of this course, or someone else can make an improved addition of a sustainable software engineering course. And that's the main goal. So this, this is not about getting a recognition. This is about changing society. And, and I think the best thing we can do to change society is to make this content open.

Chris Adams: Cool. So I have a couple of questions, but before I come in on that, I just want to see Sarah. Is there anything that you want to kind of come in on there before I come in with my questions on this?

Sara Bergman: This is where I wish the podcast was like a video recording. Cause you would've seen me nodding vigorously throughout entire thing. Yeah. There's so much of this that resonates very deeply with me. And, and I was lucky enough to be one like not, not one of your students, but when I was a student a few years ago in, in Sweden, we did have a course called green.

It led by an amazing professor called Simin who basically. she like her, the whole course was based on reading research papers. So it's like she has been a researcher in this field for a long time about energy efficiency. And she was basically like, don't just take my word for it. Take all of these other researchers word for it.

And it really opened my eyes a lot. And I know it changed other people's mindset to took the course. And that was the one course that made me wanna pursue this more. It's such a powerful tool and yeah, just a big plus one, I guess.

Chris Adams: Cool. Right. Well, Louis, when students are actually taking this course, were there some parts of introducing a sustainability element that seem to work particularly easily? Or were there some parts that they particularly struggled with? Because what I've learned is that some things can be a little bit counterintuitive and yeah, I'm really curious, cuz I've never heard from someone who's actually teaching, you know, undergrads home or even postgraduates for them to kind of pick up some of these skills that are obviously gonna be in demand in the future.

Luis Cruz: Yeah, that is a very, very good question. So one important part of the course is about measuring energy. Option of a software application. Yeah. And I don't want to be boring or anything, but of course, when you have to measure, you need a metric, right. You need to measure a particular metric and this metric needs to be, uh, Clear enough for the person that is analyzing the data.

Yeah. So to make it more precise, when you are measuring energy efficiency, probably you're gonna look into energy consumption, but you also have more metrics. You also have the power consumption, right? And, and power can be the average power over the execution of a particular software, but can also be the instant power that is being.

Uh, used by the, by the CPUs, by the memory, by the whole laptop system. So this is the most issue. So what should I be analyzing energy or power. And depending on the use case, you should be looking at one or another, but then of course you need to make sense out of it. So if your software is wasting 20 jewels after two minutes, I mean, what does it mean?

Is it energy efficient or is it like energy inefficient? Should I do something about it? Should I just assume that it's fine. And this kind of thing requires quite some discussion most of the time, because every single problem is different. Every, every software, every program language will have different thresholds and I won't have a clear answer.

Like I, I always don't have all the answers for every single. Result we get, but one of the cool things about having this course is that then we use that as an opportunity for discussion during the class. And this works quite well. When you have around 20, 30 people in the same room. Because if it's more than that, it's a bit difficult.

Sometimes it happens to have really large classes, but when you have a small group, they will come up with the most interesting observations about this. So that's really exciting when you bring people together just to critically analyze these, these, these bullet. And another thing that I'd like to bring up here is that, so my main passion goes around energy efficiency.

So the most of the course is about energy efficiency and software, but we also focus on other aspects of sustainability. Individual sustainability as in how to make sure that your software organization is actually helping developers or all the stakeholders be more productive and satisfied with the work environment.

So we call it individual sustainability. and the social sustainability, how your software is affecting democracy or how is it affecting the wellbeing of individuals in the soci in the society? And these kind of things are also. Also bring very interesting questions that not always have clear or not, not always everyone is on the same page.

For example, I can bring up the concept of inclusive programming language, but sometimes it's very difficult for some students to understand some, some of the guidelines that we have to make sure that this particular software is inclusive.

Chris Adams: so there's one thing that you spoke about was this, as I understand it, there's an issue about units. Like, what am I using? Cause you mentioned was like power and energy, for example. So that was one thing that you mentioned that was something that students struggle with. And then this thing about like inclusive programming is that like how easy it might be to learn in terms of how many concepts you need to have in your head.

Something like Python or by comparison to like say C plus plus, which has a lot more features than a language, for example, is it that kind of.

Luis Cruz: Now, when we, when we talk about inclusiveness, it's more about some keywords that you might have in your code that might have a meaning in our society. That. That might be not so inclusive. Yeah. For example, there are some guidelines around inclusive language that recommend you not use dummy Variables.

For example, like, uh, dummy variable is something that every code learns, uh, to use, uh, since the first stages, because sometimes you need to have a done variable.

Chris Adams: this is like food bar, Baz, that kind of stuff. When you say dummy. Okay.

Luis Cruz: And, and, and, and these dummy, some guidelines say, Hmm, you might be, you might want to use a different. Word here that, that doesn't denote that someone is silly or this kind of things, or that someone doesn't is not mentally well.

So maybe you want to use just like, I, I don't remember the replacement, but there is a dictionary with a few, uh, new replacements for all these Variables. And usually this is, this is so new for everyone that if you look at the code, no one is following these practices, but every single. Part of this let's call a dictionary has a meaning behind it that it's not immediate for us because we are kind of privileged and that we, we don't need to worry about this.

Or we, we never suffer from, from the users of these names in society, but they will actually affect someone. And, and that's why many organizations are starting to bring this up.

Sara Bergman: I think this is really interesting, cuz I've I remember being to the NDC conference, the conference here in Oslo, it was remote cuz it was 2020 I believe. And it was a keynote about the same concept and I had. thought about a lot of this concept otherwise, but things. Why is it called a whitelist and a blacklist?

When we really mean an allow list and a block list, those words are actually more descriptive, but it's true tradition. We've used other words, for example, if you mean a primary and a secondary data source, why would you use terminology like monster slave, cuz really what you mean is primary and secondary.

They, they better explain the scenario and they're also more inclusive, but I think that's a learning curve for, for a lot of people. No matter your, your age or experience level in the.

Chris Adams: Yeah, I agree. This is something that you you'll see in loads of code bases, kind of quote unquote in the wild as well. And like a, you do see some organiza, some large projects actually starting to adopt this kind of stuff, but on the subject of. Particular kind of like terminology, you said one or two really interesting things there.

Luis, you spoke about the idea of, okay. There's efficiency, but there's also like the individual sustainability and also the impact that you might have on the outside world. And I suppose internally we have. I mean when recently I, I was on a panel recently, and one discussion was basically about this distinction between say green it and green software.

And it for sustainability, like this idea that these are two separate concepts, which may be related, but they're different from each other. And a lot of the time it's very easy to see these ideas being conflated a lot. And, uh, I wonder if this is something that you've seen you've seen on the course, or if you've, or this is something students have been able to kind of pick up quite intuitively, for example,

Luis Cruz: Well, to be honest, I do know the answer. Case on the first class, I made sure that we all have a common definition, but I could imagine that some of my students were expecting something else when they joined the course. Yeah. Because indeed there are so many different names around sustainability about around the green software.

And when I mention green AI, people immediately think about AI for energy efficiency or AI for social good. And. when I talk about green AI, and I'm not saying that I have the right definition. because there are so many definitions that it's difficult to keep up with the right ones. But when I talk about green AI immediately think about building AI systems that are energy efficient, and they have minimal footprint foot painting our.

So, but I'm not claiming that I have the right definition because this is so new. I mean, the first paper on green AI is like three or four years old. And I don't think we are already at the stage where we can say that our, our field is mature, that we can already. Settle on these definitions because maybe next year a new problem will bring will, will be brought into the picture and we need another definition.

And then suddenly we need to rethink about this. And indeed, as you were saying, this, this can be quite, not only encounter intuitive, but confusing. And, and the simple fact that when we talk about sustainable software engineering, Uh, different people might have different definitions. And I'm gonna challenge that definition a little bit.

So some definitions, when we talk about sustainable software engineering also include economical, sustainability. and technical sustainability. And of course we, we don't care about economical, sustainability. Everyone is taking care of that. Saudi the world runs and we don't care about technical sustainability because software is a Newfield is already.

Quite mature for 60 years, we have been studying technical sustainability for software, but just to give you an idea that this doesn't make our life easier, but the good thing is that once we start getting our hands dirty, once we start measuring energy consumption and. Extracting knowledge out of these data and experiments, definitions are just a way of communicating it.

But what we need is groundwork people like-minded that are willing to create new tools, do new experiments, things like. What is the most energy efficient video call platform? Is it zoom? Is it Microsoft teams? No one use, no, no one knows, but if I knew I'll start doing all my calls with a particular system, because I'll know that I'll know there is an impact.

They are actually worrying about it and they are actually trying to, to, to do something about it. So they, they deserve having more users.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, and I think that's an interesting point as well. If you think about students and, and I can only speak from my own experience as I'm gonna self proclaim as a young person, as a millennial or a zillennial, it's a new word I've learned, which is the people between millennial and gen Z. I don't know.

Maybe that's where I fall in. Anyway, I think my generation grew up more with climate awareness. There was never a grace period in our life where we were not aware of climate change or where we did not feel the. Oh, climate change. I cannot remember a time in my life where I was told because I've always known sort of cuz I was, I, I, I suppose I was told at some point that I was too young to remember that now.

So there is an increased desire, I think, to, to lean in and to be part of the solution. I think an easier way for people is, is to use you say you become a software engineer, cuz that's your passion or, or a like researcher in the field, but you still wanna do something to help. And. Applying technology to a climate problem seems like the easiest thing you can do.

Like, yes, I love AI. I wanna use it for good. And that's great. Like we're not saying stop doing that, but I think when you flip it on the end and say, okay, but if the way you're doing this is actually unsustainable, it's kind of maybe not. counterintuitive, but not really meeting what you're trying to do.

And I've been speaking a lot externally, specifically about machine learning and AI. And almost every time I get people after almost frustrated, like, but I wanna know what I can do. And it's like, yeah, but I totally, you, a bunch of things you can do. No, but I don't wanna, I just wanna do my normal stuff, like code away and then like contribute to something.

And I think as a mindset, mind shift that need to happen and you can definitely do both, but I think we also need a bit of marketing for like this, what you said Luis, about building these libraries, doing these case studies, doing the groundwork to figure out, cause it's still very new, but that doesn't mean there are no opportunities and no chances for people to contribute there on the opposite.

There are tons of chances for people to contribute and, and make it a big, significant contribution and difference to, to this.

Chris Adams: So, this is actually maybe a good time to plug for people. Who've never heard this who haven't, haven't listened to previous episodes. Some of the work we did when we looked at AI green, eye green, AI and AI for sustainability. Of issues ago in that we had both, um, Dr. Lynn Kaack, sorry professor Lynn Kaack talking about basic AI for sustainability and some of the specific applications you could actually see in, and also where some of the blind spots might be when it comes to regulators.

But the nice thing was that there was a paper that, that, that she'd mentioned, but also one of the other people on the other guests will, I totally forgot Will's name, but his paper was actually published specifically, like iterating through all these techniques you can actually use. So, if you look through the previous episodes and the show notes, you'll see the paper, which literally says these are some of the techniques you're using.

So if you're using technique a here's how to, here's how to use technique B for almost the same impact, or these are the trade offs you might actually have. And I, Sara, I, I kind of wanna ask you a little bit about some of the study, some of the work that you studied on this. Cuz as I understand it, you were doing a bit of work.

Consensus mechanisms. I don't wanna, let's not dive too deeply into the world of, of cryptocurrencies and, and greening cryptocurrencies, cuz to an extent it feels like the price of the falling price is sorting some of the out for anyway. But there is a whole thing. Like you, you did some work comparing, I think some tools around this, like a like Hyperledger.

Sara Bergman: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So back this was my master thesis actually, which was later turned into a paper. At the time blockchain technology, I'm not, I'm gonna refer to it as blockchain technologies sort of remove the economics from it because you can view it as an economic structure, or you can view it as a data structure for this talk.

We're gonna look at it as a data structure, cuz that allows us more freedom in some sense. So at the time blockchain technology was really new. There were very, very few studies and to the best of our knowledge, the study I did was the first study where we actually compared. Blockchain technology to distribute the databases cause especially for permission, blockchains, so where you, where you have traffic, they can achieve a lot of the same use cases.

And it can be interesting for you as a practitioner to know when you should select one or the other. Because in theory, in my mind, a blockchain is kind of like an append only data structure. and that sounded interesting to, to investigate more, cuz it's very different from a traditional distributed database, even though they can do some things very similarly.

So I looked specifically at Hyperledger fabric, which was still kind of new at the time and at Cassandra who, who was a bit older at the time and did a performance comparison, cuz performances is one aspect you can like sustainability is very multifaceted. and when you have a master thesis, you kind of have limited times you can't delve into all the things.

Uh, but yeah, that was, that was the work that I did.

Chris Adams: So Cassandra, a distributed kind of key value store essentially, and a Hyperledger, which I, I, I can't even begin to understand how, uh, or, or talk confidently about hype, about her, the internals of Hyperledger. But I do know, like, since that's been published, There's actually been quite a lot of interesting work moving on from just looking at kind of key value stores, like, okay.

Cassandra, for example, I know that Cassandra's mostly written in Java, is it, is it not? It's primarily on the G JVM, right?

Sara Bergman: I think so. Yes.

Chris Adams: Yeah. I know that there is, there's essentially one, a kind of technique that I've seen relatively new, which I'm. I think I'm borrowing a term that IBM coined about a decade ago called scale in which I think is really interesting because it's essentially creating a API compatible implementation of an existing piece of software that is much, much more efficient in many cases.

So the canonical example would be say, ScyllaDB it's written in a very particular kind of C++ uses like a shared nothing kind of architecture. That basically means that it's. API compatible, but quite a bit faster. And, and as a result, you're able to kind of run the same workloads on a, on a fraction of the kind of resources.

And this is one thing that I've seen. And I'd be really curious about seeing some of that. Well, seeing that study rerun again, because you see that this is a pattern that I've. Seen once. And, uh, I think there are actually other examples. If you do stuff with SQL light these days, there's one called duck DB, which essentially lets you do the kind of large scale or medium data analytics these days, but onto something which is running in a single process.

There's a bunch of really interesting stuff in this field right now, actually.

Sara Bergman: Yeah. And, and I think what, what you said there in the middle was the sort of key, I think performance might not be an immediate. Into sustainability and green software, but the, the packed tighter is, is the keyboard here. Cuz if you use fewer CPU cycles, while you have more free CPU cycles to use for other things, that means you can use less resources.

So that's why we write efficiency is very important. That's also, when we look at machine learning, for example, the training. Time. So the latency you have for that is a very interesting factor for sustainability. And there's been papers published on this to support. It's just not my opinion, other smarter people's opinions as well.

Chris Adams: All right. I'm glad you mentioned the papers thing because Luis, this is actually one thing that I was gonna, I'll just ask you about the course. We spoke mostly about energy efficiency, so far as one or resource efficiency, but like, you know, hardware usage, for example, do. Have have students have had had much luck understanding one of the other pillars, the idea of like carbon efficiency or being able to change the intensity of the resources you might use.

Cuz this is one thing that is relatively new and it's something we've spoken about and where you can use some tools for this. Like what time, for example, to see. How green energy might be. And I wanna name shook a couple of papers, which have been doing some really, really cool stuff in this, but I figured it might be ask worth asking you how students respond to this part here.

Or if that even shows up in the course.

Luis Cruz: Yeah. So I, I was not very long on the, when I talked about units, but we have a. A single class dedicated to units on energy efficiency. And we start with the energy consumption, of course, power consumption, but then we go all the way to, to the data center level in which we no longer think only about energy efficiency, but we also need to think about the carbon footprint carbon.

I. The carbon consumption. What does it mean to be carbon efficient? I mean, what is exactly carbon, right? It's not only about CO2. It's also about all the other CO2 equivalent cases. And, and this, this kind of thing is not clear to everyone, even to me, sometimes I need to go back to the, my documentation and check whether I get the definitions.

Right. So. one class is fully to it, but one cool thing is after, after this class, I think most students got it right? If not everyone. So, so one part of the course is you need to come up with a project that revolves around the tool that will help software engineers build energy efficient software. Or sustainable software, I'd say.

And one of the projects that was developed by one of the groups was a scheduler of software tasks that will take into account the carbon footprint or the carbon intensity of the grid. So that means that when you are scheduling a task, you can say this task takes two hours, but I don't mind waiting 10 hours to get the result.

And then based on this, the scheduler would check what would be the best time to run this task. And this is a very simple idea that is based on a paper from Google. If I'm not mistaken where they have carbon aware data centers in it, they basically decide when a particular task can be run or not, but they have a very complex setup and these students thought, okay, that's a really cool idea.

It works for large organizations, but why not give. The power of these idea tools, just the ordinary software developer, that, that also wants to do something around these lines. So they created the very basic tool. I can share the link to it. It's a prototype of course, because they only had four weeks to develop it.

But you, you basically just. Define, what is the common you wanna execute? What is your time constraints? And there you go. We have a carbon efficient, uh, execution, and I find it quite cool. Uh, another thing, if you, if you allow me, Chris, and since we mentioned blockchain and energy efficiency in the same paragraph, and usually get a lot of people angry about it, regardless of the, uh, The idea or opinion we have about it.

I just wanted to say that, although I'm not against blockchain, I, I think we, we need blockchain, but that also means that we need energy efficiency in blockchain. So we, we need energy efficiency and blockchain and the same paragraph more often, and we need to have constructive conversations. So we need everyone, even the ones that.

Getting rich with Bitcoins. We need all these people to, to, to think about how to solve this problem, because this is a real problem. And, and I'm gonna stop here. I don't want angry people around there.

Chris Adams: Okay. Well, there's one thing that you've actually pointed to. One thing you've mentioned. I mean, if with your position, as a professor, I'm being able to like, have some influence on new developers and new new engineers, I'll happily let you give you that platform to like, say that. Yeah. You should probably be caring about that because.

Yeah. I mean, this is actually one thing we were talking about before Sara, you mentioned one of the reasons you chose to study what you studied on your masters was because there was some influence from one of your professors and they kind of like gave you some of the space to even think about this stuff.

And maybe you might would like explain that, cuz that was a really nice story. I thought.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And I touched briefly on it in, in earlier as well, but this green, it course that I was able to take in my fourth year. Actually, it, it really opened my eyes also to this concept of the duality of it. Like we've talked about in this podcast, not only that you can use software for good purposes, but the software itself actually comes from somewhere and, and data centers are huge when.

If you've never been to a data center, it's kind of hard to fathom. Like they're very fussy in like concept, at least to me, like if you come from a kind of normal non-data science background as a kid, which most kids do field trips to data centers, aren't that common yet, then it can be hard to understand just how big this impact can be.

Around the time I took this course, it was at the time relatively new paper. And I was like older paper that compared the carbon footprint of the ICT sector and placed the dust at 2%, which was the same as aviation. And that's a number I still see quoted over and over and over again because it's so impactful.

Cuz we talk a lot about aviation, but we talk less, but not more about. So, yeah. Simin who was the professor of that course and Mikael Asplund, who is on the big influence from Linköping university in Sweden. They were my supervisor and oh, I dunno the English word for it. Whoever approves your master thesis person.

Luis Cruz: Maybe promoter.

Sara Bergman: yeah, possibly that's the word I'll I'll I'll address you. Yeah. To give me the space to, to explore this deep end and they have done more research on energy EF. later as well. And I think it, it is so important to have that influence when you are sort of mallable I guess you never stop being mallable, but you're truly mallable at university.

So I am forever grateful to having had that opportunity so early. And actually my university enforces you, everyone has to take one course that has a sustainability topic. You cannot graduate until you've done that. Which also think is a good way. Cuz there are like, for some reason, some political. Tied into this, which I personally, I think is unnecessary, but there are for some people, but this way is a good way to make sure everyone at least gets a baseline of knowledge,

Chris Adams: All right. So we're coming up to last, like say a few minutes of the episode. So I figured while we're talking about some of the people whose work that's. who you'd recommend or point people to. And what add is it Simin? TU? I need you to pronounce it one time. Cause I'm not very good at that name. I'm sorry.

Sara Bergman: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani

Chris Adams: okay. Well make sure that's definitely in the show notes because that's, there's definitely worth looking at well we're here. I'm Luis. Is there any, are there any people you'd recommend or you think is whose work. Suggest people look up because there's a couple of names that I found really interesting of late, and I figure this might be a nice way to kind of wrap up with a top topic of pedagogy and learning from existing state of the art.

For example.

Luis Cruz: Yeah, I, I, I can, on top of my head, I can think of two rock stars. Elina Eriksson. She's an associate professor KTH. She has been awarded a number of times for her work on a education of sustainable software. Sustainable I CT in the universities and of course, Patricia Lago from view Amsterdam. She's one of the first researchers in green software in our software engineering C.

So, if you want to have an interesting landscape of, or, or, or a role model for research and education on sustainable software engineering, they are definitely, uh, worth, uh, follow.

Chris Adams: All right. I'll add a couple because just recently. There was a series of conferences. The ACM had a conference specifically about energy and there was one paper, which was co-authored. I think Colleen Josephson was the, uh, one of the lead authors. She did some really interesting stuff about this whole idea about like your student mentioned about moving.

Uh, basically, uh, time shifting compute in various places. That was one thing that I found really fascinating, and that was actually actually talking about, okay, she works at VM where these are the numbers we've sat, we we've seen and been able to use. And here's how we're actually where to productionize some of this stuff.

And the other work that I think is really interesting, I'm probably gonna, uh, mispronounce her name as well. And I'm so sorry, uh, for the author, I think it's Bilge, Bilge Acun or. Um, there was a work called carbon Explorer, which is both online on GitHub and is also a really fascinating paper that was also presented at that conference, which I think is consider as like one of the state-of-the-art things here.

Actually, I found it really, really worth looking through, because once again, this was someone who's worked doing some work at Facebook, looking at the ways that they're able to achieve the targets. Carbon reduction year on year going through this. And they both looked at the load shifting part. They looked at using mixing in renewables and they actually put together a server to, for each, each, every single data center.

Talk about what the optimal mix was for each of these. I've never seen that work before and it's really, really worth looking. And I've when I looked up at work, there's like just so much there to look at. It's so nice seeing that stuff in the open. Sara, I wanna give you kind of the last, the last word on this, cuz I'm sure there's some other people who've, who've actually found interesting or whose work.

I know fan of, or you direct people's eyes to, I suppose

Sara Bergman: Absolutely Sabine Canditt she recently wrote a book. It's in German. So sadly I can't read it, but I've had the synopsis explain to me. And she, she talked to me about the book I was interviewed also for it. Hannah Smith is another great educator. Who's involved in climate action, tech and green tech Southwest, I believe is the community.

And also Sandra Pallinger from, from Microsoft. Who's also involved in climate action tech, who I really.

Chris Adams: I didn't know that you were gonna mention Hannah, but, uh, the thing I probably need to say is that Hannah recently joined, uh, the organization, a work app called the Green Web Foundation. And she's now heading up all the training. So I'm, I really glad, happy to hear that. You've mentioned that because yeah, she's working on a bunch of that stuff.

So if this is interesting, 21, who's listening then. Well, I guess there's a plug Luis. I feel a bit embarrassed about mention talking about our own organization here. So I'm probably gonna. Try and leave the last word with you about this, because you've mentioned this course. If people do wanna find out more about this work that you're doing, or some of the other output that you are, you'd like to kind of people to look at, is there a particular website or is there a space you'd share?

Cuz we'll share the link to the, the, the engineering course, but there may be other things that you wanna draw people's attention to for.

Luis Cruz: Yeah. I mean, definitely. If you wanna have a quick start on sustainable software engineering, please do share the link at the end of the podcast podcast. I'm not gonna say it out loudly, but please do check it. I also write frequently. So if you check my personal website, I have a blog where I try to write the same content of the course, but in a way that is more friendly for the internet reader.

so I try to write it in the form of blog posts. So if, if you wanna reach out, of course, you can also follow me on Twitter, please. I'm Cruz, and I'm more than happy to interact to, to hear any thoughts or any feedback about the course. If there are more ideas. That are more content that I should add, please let me know.

And I'm, I'm making this request not only to salary increase, but to anyone out there, because I think this is how we can evolve and how we can change our software industry.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Luis.. Well, I think that's taken us up to the time we have left available. Sara. Luis. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah. Have a lovely evening or morning wherever you're in the world. Okay. Take care. 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 episode is taken from a recent panel discussion from the Green Software Foundation’s Global Summit of 2022. EV regulars, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain are joined by Anne Currie, Chris Lloyd-Jones and Elise Zelechowski as they discuss Accessibility and Green Software. What’s driving interest in Green Software? What ESG principles are being adopted by companies and what is needed to drive accountability and accessibility in this sphere? Where does the main driver for Green Software come from within an organisation?

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website 
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Chris Lloyd-Jones: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Elise Zelechowski: LinkedIn 

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit
• The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Policy: Blaue Engel / Blue Angel

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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Transcription below:

Elise Zelechowski: I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem. And so the way we need to take this forward is get CIOs to the table and say, now, how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit?

How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?

Asim Hussain: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. Brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed 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 and your host Asim Hussain.

Chris Skipper: Hey everyone. Chris, the producer of Environment Variables here with a quick note to say that the following episode of the podcast was taken from a panel discussion from the recent Green Software Foundation global summit. If you would like to hear and see an unfiltered raw version of this discussion, head on over to our YouTube channel and look for the video entitled GSF global summit closing ceremony, 2022.

In fact, I'll do you one better and add a link below in the show notes of the podcast. So head there, click the link and you can check out not only that discussion, but all the other episodes of the Environment Variables podcast too. Now on with the show.

Asim Hussain: Welcome, my name Is Asim Hussain and I'm excited today to host a panel with guests from the Green Software Foundation.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'm Chris Lloyd-Jones.

Chris Adams: Hi there. My name's Chris Adams. Oh, sorry, Anne.

Anne Currie: hi, I'm Anne Currie.

Elise Zelechowski: Hi, Elise Zelechowski.

Asim Hussain: Awesome. I've got some wonderful, uh, interesting questions, hopefully for all of you. And I'd love to hear your opinions. Very interesting topics around green software. My first question is, you know, what's driving, I personally have experienced a lot more interest in this space in kind of the last year, at the very least.

What do you, think's driving interest in green software in, across the industry, Chris Lloyd-Jones. Why don't you go ahead with that one.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: So for me, I think it's the growing understanding from individuals that our way of life needs to be greener, to be sustainable and be resilient. And now there's a lot of talk from governments and around setting targets and policies, and those are very important, but green software lets every individual make an impact and make a difference, which I think is a differentiator from all the other initiatives that are going.

Asim Hussain: Mm. Yeah, really good point. I, I, I feel there's a ground spell movement across the world as well. Yes. Elise, what's your, what's your thoughts on that? On that question?

Elise Zelechowski: I would, I would echo that and just say, I mean, I think that technologists today are, are, are growing up with more and more real sort of impacts from climate change. They're seeing them manifested in ways that are really impacting how they experience the world around them and how they think about their future.

And organizations like the Green Software Foundation that really provide a forum to take action and to feel like you have agency to really make a change and sort of really not just make a change broadly, but make a change in what you're building every day really gives people a sense of the power to change.

And I think that that is one of the, the most exciting things about the, the Green Software Foundation. I also just think that, you know, Organizations are increasingly adopting ESG frameworks. I think there's more and more accountability expectations around that. And of course, organizations that, that have an outsized emissions footprint from their it right, are gonna be looking at green software as one of the big opportunities to make an impact.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful that, that that's. Yeah, that's definitely aligned to my thinking as well. So given the fact that organizations. You know, they're interested in green software, but they need to adopt, you know, processes, principles, patterns of, of engineering in order to greenify their, their software and reduce the emissions of software, what what's needed in your mind for organizations to, to adopt these patterns and principles, Chris Adams.

What's your thoughts in that area?

Chris Adams: So what really, our big, big one, right. Is capacity, like organizations having the skills in house to do this. And you know how, when like Ruby rails might have come out and then people are saying, I want a Ruby rails developer with 10 years experience. When the frameworks only a year old, we are kind of seeing something a little bit like that right now, where various organizations are trying to hire and ask for this stuff.

And they're not quite sure what they're after and we have this kind of shortage right now. So if anything, there's a real. Need to have some kind of way to provide, to kind of get this level of, of, of skill and competency up quite high, actually. And, and, well, I think this is something you've spoken about quite a lot, actually, as.

Anne Currie: Yes. Yeah. Cause we have to make sure that being green doesn't conflict with developer productivity in anybody's mind, because in the end developer productivity will always win. There are hardly any developers that compared to how many we need in the industry, we need more. And so everybody wants to use them to deliver on business goals, not kind.

Climate goals really. So one thing that I think will really help and is definitely helping at the moment is where you get open source or cloud providers who are offering services that are both good for developer productivity and also greener. The more we can, we can raise the profile of that and push it.

The more likely we are to get, take up, because what we cannot ask people to do, because they will not do it. I've asked them so many times over the years, we can't get people to rewrite their applications in sea or rust or making things more efficient is too expensive for people in terms of time. So we need to find services that will do it for them, make it the, the default, make it no or effort for them, or in fact less effort for them to choose those solutions.

Asim Hussain: Know, I do. I do think that one of the challenges is that we're either talking about software that hasn't been written. and the vast majority of software, which needs to be written has not been written yet. We are very, very early stages in this whole industry we're in right now, but there is also this legacy software that exists that we just have to figure out how do we manage that?

And rewriting that in a new language is not an option that, you know, that flies these days, but there is new development's happening, or maybe some of that stuff will. Will fly. Who made those choices early on? One of the things Chris, I just thought, I D dunno if you have any opinions on this or whether you've seen anything else on the horizon.

I, I was very, very delighted to see, I think just yesterday, the day before there were, there are several, you know, job roles out there. I saw some for Amazon. Of a sustainable solutions architect and I'm starting to see a more and more and more. And I know some of your organizations have roles, you know, with the title, agreeing the title.

I mean, what's, what do you see in terms of the job market regarding kind of our space? Do you see a lot of growth in this area?

Chris Adams: is definitely interest in this often at a kind of executive level and often at a kind of developer on the, kind of in the trenches level. But. The part in the middle people, aren't quite sure how to kind of prioritize it or even ask for, or even specify it right now. So like people asking, well, how do I buy a green, a greener version of any kind of service right now?

There's a real gap there right now. And I think even at the architectural level, we don't really have the language yet. Or it's not that common to really kind of talk about the trade offs you might be doing. So like, I could do one thing here, which takes advantage of how the energy markets have totally changed over the last 10 years to, to change the economics.

Right. But I dunno how to talk about the, the tradeoffs that might be, that I might make in order to unlock that stuff. And I think you kind of need this capacity or these abilities at the design level right now, before you can kind of get to the implementation part. That's what I feel is a real kind of.

Gap right now until we have like an iron triangle for things like greener software, for example, or this stuff here. I think we're gonna struggle to have like, informed decisions about how you're gonna spend a developer's time budget or an actual cash money budget on things. That's probably one of the big gaps I see in the next six to 12 months, that needs to be kind of plugged, I suppose.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I just wanna weigh in on the chasm there. One thing that I've noticed is that some organizations are starting to see this as an either or that you either focus on sustainability in your business model and secular economy, or you do green software. Whereas actually the personas and the people doing these things are very different.

I think you can have sustainability in your technology and sustainability with technology. And I think organizations don't need to take that kind of zero sum approach to focusing on where they need to change.

Asim Hussain: great point, great point. And I think that's that's. The interesting question is, is. There is a gap. There's a gap between different types of roles, but there's also a gap between, as you mentioned, Chris CIO to, to, to in the trenches, they're in the middle, there's kind of this, this knowledge gap. And once that gets filled, then the rest of the roles and the understanding will spread throughout an organization.

But then that leads to one of my favorite questions, which is where will change come from? I think there's been lots. Attention thought strategy attempts in the past, going kind of top down, CIO CEO, down to the, down to the further down organization. And there's been other attempts going from maybe more. I call it in the trenches on the front lines, let's say, oh God.

So all these awful war metaphors, we need to stop using them up, up, up, up the chain. Where do you think the kind of main driver for adoption of green software come from? Which direction I'm gonna ask at least this question first.

Elise Zelechowski: Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's right. Sort of one of the unique features of, and, and, and, and there is theory of change right at the Green Software Foundation is that we can create kind of a groundswell movement here of technologists who are really driving, driving change. But of course there needs to be support structures in place, right.

And there needs to be enablement from CIOs and other members of the team. And to the point that was just made. You know, there needs to be kind of a systems approach. Think about things as integrated, right? This is not, you know, an either or scenario. We need to kind of look at strategies that embed sustainability approaches throughout the entire space within the company.

But I think that CIOs are increasingly understanding that they play a role in an organization's sustainability ambitions. I think, as I mentioned earlier, I think ESG is, is part of that regulation sort of driving. Expectations around environmental performance. But I think that I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are, are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem.

And so. The next sort of step or the, the way we need to take this forward is, is get CIOs to the table and say, now how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit? How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?

Asim Hussain: Yeah, a holistic approach. We need everybody at the table, but yeah, they're definitely there. The, I know you have certain opinions.

Anne Currie: do I, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in the middle. Managers as being the, kind of the secret key to this, because 10 years ago in the financial services industry, when they wanted to try and stop everybody being Cowboys, and there'd just been a huge financial crash, whatever, and they wanted everybody's behave a bit better.

They realized that actually the key to that was the middle managers because. People at the bottom have, might have enthusiasm, but they didn't really have the power to make any changes. And they were all together. They didn't how to do it. People at the top would quite often get on board and say, yeah, we wanna do this.

But everybody assumed they were just lying in the middle and would just stamp on all the projects as soon as they, they go anywhere. So we it's, it's kind of senior architects, middle manager, other, otherwise they have a tendency to just kill everything. For good reason, because they know that loads of projects get kicked off that are actually banned for the business.

And their job is usually to keep the business alive and running and, and operating and not easily. No, not because somebody's NA the CEO's neighbors once said that they thought this was a good idea. So everybody has to drop everything and do it. They're there to protect from that and, and kill those projects.

So we need to persuade them. Otherwise everything's killed is stone dead. So yeah, we need it's. As Elise said, it's holistic. Everybody has to be convinced and we can't leave them to the end or they'll stop.

Asim Hussain: to Anne, we should fire all the CIOs and middle management jobs to say no. Got it.

Um, Chris Adams, were you about to put your hand up?

Chris Adams: Yeah was indeed. Yeah, like a little school, boy. I think there's actually. I think it's worth looking at the role that policy makers have been playing in this in there. And we can also look to other places where people started introducing things like what you might refer to as well. Not really non-functional requirements, but like other kind of key kind of indicators of quality.

And you might think about things like, say accessibility, if you look how accessibility was something, which is now become relatively mainstream in terms of like working. Yeah. You had a push. At a kind of regulatory level where people would say every single website built with public sector money now has to meet a minimum level, but you also needed something like ways to convert those ideas into something that people can act upon.

Like, if you have like a Web content, accessibility guidelines, you got poor, which is like, you know, perceivable. Understandable robust. You kind of need something like that for green software right now to make it a bit easier for people to manage success in this. And so like basically a product manager or someone is able to kind of accept something and say, yeah, this is actually meeting these criteria here.

And right now, We don't quite have that, but it'll be really lovely to have something like that to make it a bit easier for the people who are at that mid-level to essentially guide people along the way, or at least tell when something is actually hitting the targets, they think it's supposed to be hitting, for example.

Asim Hussain: We need a C level to say, yes, we need the middle middle management say yes, but also have the knowledge and the tools and the information to be able to guide and drive and, and, and drive work in, in, in the right direction. I also think it's interesting about the accessibility aspect of it. A lot of people assume that, you know, a lot of accessibility arguments.

Don't have financial benefits. There's huge financial benefits to accessibility arguments mean it's like on some circumstances, it's, you know, significant percentage of your customer base is someone who is, you know, differently. And because it can also be temporal as well, like cuz you can, you know, Maybe have a baby.

So if you don't have a one arm for like six months. Yeah. Well, this is the thing actually seemed like, I mean, so Microsoft did have some stuff like this, which is quite helpful when they spoke about things like situational positional kind of disabilities that is actually really useful in having the vocabulary to actually realize that there are benefits in lots of other places.

We don't quite have that language in. Technology right now, but it does exist. People do talk about co-benefits all the time. You can talk about greening electricity, for example, and saving literally millions of lives each year, that would otherwise be cut short with like particulate matter. There's all these things you can talk about.

And there's arguments you can make to say, well, maybe your staff might wanna hang around more. If they feel like they're part of the good side. For with using advanced humane things, rather than this really, really weird 20th century kind of stuff from before. There's all this stuff that we could be talking about.

And I don't know about you, but I think most developers would rather build star treks than build mad max and.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'd say that even with the code benefits you're talking about, I mean, that's kind of the values driven. It is the right thing to do. I think the thing around green software, there's almost a pragmatic business case without kind of wanting to relate everything back to money. If you reduce electricity in a data center, you reduce spend, right?

If you reduce consumption in the cloud, you reduce, spend as much as I think we should do this. Cuz it's the right thing to do. If it does come down to a business case for the bottom line for the pound, the dollar, the Euro. There's also, it can be a very strong, almost linear correlation between reduced carbon and reduced money.

And you can invest that in training, I think to then help those middle managers stop squatting all these projects. Yeah.

Elise Zelechowski: Yeah, no, that's right. The optimization is, is key. And I think that gets back to that point where, you know, companies with sort of outside impact from their, it are moving more quickly to kind of look at where those opportunities are. Right. There's sort of environmental benefits. Right. But there's also that, that big cost saving opportunity when you take this on.

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Adams: this is the thing, though. Again, we can look from other sectors that do things like this. Like if you value. Then you can literally value it. You can price it. Like you see organizations doing this all the time. Like I'm gonna point to Microsoft because they have done things like this. They have like an internal carbon price.

So you've got a kind of carbon war chest for this cool green stuff. But they've also got things to say, well, maybe there's something which is the. Actually we're struggling to kind of bring down the emissions, right? For example, like an aviation, that's got a different internal carbon price. So you can price things to actually do this.

And like, this is literally what Boeing have been doing for like 20 to 30 years to achieve weight savings. They basically automatically give any engineer a kind of. Budget that they're, they're able to spend to buy weight savings. And I think you can do these kind of, if there's all these management patterns that are, that are like used lots of places, which would work really well in this field.

And now I'm gonna hand to Anne, cuz I think she's got something to say here as

Anne Currie: Yeah, because I, I totally disagree with all of you. So, so this is a good thing on the panel. I totally disagree with you. I don't think, I don't think cost savings sell to enterprises because they don't because for. Them the cost of developers exceeds cost of operating data. They, that's why they move to the cloud, cuz they're willing to pay more in order to give their developers less work to do so.

I don't think that's an, an argument that lad, how having said that, I think it is an argument that that can be made and it is convincing if you operate a data center because there electricity cost is a really key part of your business costs. So aviation. Aviation fuel is a really key part of your business cost.

You will go outta business if aviation fuel, if you spend too much on aviation fuel, but it's not, you will not go out business in the tech industry because you spend too much money on your data center. You go out business because you key business would a business, whatever it is, isn't generating the income you want it to.

It's not your number one priority.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I think it depends on who you're speaking to though the C-suite level, for sure. That's not gonna make an impact, but again, I'm gonna use your analogy of middle managers. If you are looking at your spend and you look to what the spend was before, and you are seeing your use of function. An Azure or Orlando function, spiking.

And you see your app services. I think even if it might not materially impact the business, those people panic. So having a way to see that they can keep their cost in check. Then also, I guess, sell upwards, manage upwards that they're being green, doing the right things. I'm not actually saying it's a key business driver that helps those people make decisions, which might be a bit Machavellian.

Maybe

Asim Hussain: think, I think it's a co-benefit. And I think that's one of the things there has to be. There's multiple vectors in making decisions. I think I do. I do agree with Anne to a certain degree that I think if it's the only yard when you're putting forward, it won't, it won't land. But if you're saying it's, it's got this benefit, this benefit, this benefit, it is greener.

It's faster. It's more reliable. All those things added together. I do think, I do think it adds it's not nothing.

Chris Adams: When I talk about pricing something, I'm not necessarily saying the cost of a computer, for example, you can cost things in all these different. And there's a whole set of management theory, all around cost of delay, which is like, what is the cost of, of us not shipping this product, for example, the day before, okay, let's choose a bad example like black Monday or something like that.

Right. That is a clear cost of doing that. Right. And that's what I'm talking about. We price things accordingly. And if you're able to talk about this and, and then, and if you, if you accept that in many cases, organizations are driven by numbers. If you can translate these into that, Incredibly reductive single one dimension that helps you get, make it argue for something.

Then I think that's actually useful and we have patterns for doing this kind of stuff. So it's not necessarily the cost of compute. It's the cost of the opportunity cost of what you could be doing. Otherwise, for example, you can express these in numerical form and people make lots and lots of money building models and designing that and managing this way anyway.

So I think that you could apply this to carbon because there are absolutely. Consequences while the science spells out, there are consequences for us not pricing in carbon into how we work.

Asim Hussain: If you're working for a for-profit organization, it's it's money it's, you know, that, that's what that's the purpose of the organization is to, is to make a profit it's a for-profit organization, but there's other aspects of the world. You know, we have these free markets, but then we, hopefully we have regulations and regulatory authorities that work that temper and control the access is perhaps of, of a free market economy.

So we talked a lot about, you know, if, if there was just the money argument, Just the market driven money argument, you know, what, what, what could happen? What are some regulatory policies that if it, if they came out would help accelerate the adoption of not just green software, but you know, more sustainable tech solutions.

Anne Currie: Cast our mind back that we talked earlier about accessibility and, and you know, that that that's useful for generating additional customers and things. But actually, I, I, I remember at the time I was head of it for a company and the main argument for why we should make the site accessible. Was that the SEO was better.

Google used to give you an SEO boost if you were accessible. And that was one of the key performance indicators that they had, which was where are you in Google? That was a top line item for every C-suite business discussion. So you could easily say, well, we have to be accessible because it'll move us.

Through Google. And that was the reason why, you know, it was clearly measurable thing. And I think people really cared about, and I also used to work for companies like Microsoft and for them, the reason to go for accessibility was that there were government mandates on accessibility standards that a lot of applications had to pass.

So that was, well, you just cannot sell into the us government, which is a key customer that you want, if you don't meet these levels. So if we had. Something like that again, that would be effective, um, in the past that was effective and I think it would be effective again. So how do we get those kind of like both business?

So Google provided the push through the SEO and government provided the push through. You have to have these meet these standards in order to sell to us. And that was effective.

Chris Adams: like this is currently happening in Germany and in Hong Kong we're already. So I think last month, the first ever eco certified software was granted. Blauer angle or Blauer Engel certificate. And one of the reasons that people were doing that was because in government, which had many cases have legally binding targets to reduce emissions, they need to have a thing to ask for.

So now you see that and there is now a German project called software. Which is like soft aware, but with a kind of German accent, what that does, that's basically something a bit like continuous integration checking every single time. Are, are you making, are you moving forward or moving backwards in terms of the actual missions associated with any of the things you're doing?

So there are loads of efforts like this, but it's still early days. There's Germany and there's Hong Kong, but no one else has new certifications yet. But there's like a loose network of like 28 different countries who are trying to figure out what to be asking for so that when they put a big fat procurement tender in, they can say, I need this to be, I don't know, instead of perceivable, operable understandable and oh, Christ robust, maybe green, open, lean, decentralized gold, something like that.

We need to have things like that for it really.

Elise Zelechowski: And I'll just add, I think that's, I mean, that's right. The role of the Green Software Foundation, right. Is, is we have this forum to help drive and sort of bring kind of. It right to this question of like, what does good look like and what should we be really aiming for as a community? And our, I think our approach and our processes, you know, are based on transparent principles, right?

And, and really about let's get everyone at the table and really talk about this in an open forum. And so I think that regulation is key, but we need to sort of get to a place where we start to, to drive that alignment on, Hey, this is kind of a good stand and keep building. As you say, Chris, more sort of visibility awareness in the.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Wonderful. So it's even when it comes to government influence, it's still, still going back to money, cuz it's like, where, where is the government gonna spend its money? But I think that will evolve to something hopefully a bit closer to policy regulation. And I would also say that, you know, Google, the Google SEO example, that was a Google policy.

It was a decision that they made not, I dunno, we probably had some, I don't know the background of that decision, so I'm just guessing, but it was this decision that they made, which drove a lot of action from a lot of organizations. And that's why these things are such great levers to, to pull because it's a small change can have a big impact as we're kind of reaching to the end of the, of the, of the panel.

We might have gone over a little bit. But I just wanted to ask each of you, you know, what advice do you have for someone looking to start having conversations regarding green software in inner roles, or even just in their communities? Let's start with you, Chris. Lloyd-Jones. Do you have any advice for people?

Chris Lloyd-Jones: me. It be about identifying that business case to support green software, but also understanding your culture. I mean, focusing again, gonna repeat it on that management example. I do think you need to know what your organization's motivated by and be quite honest about that. If you are a pragmatic organization cost or one of the other drivers, Chris mentioned will be important for some organizations, it being the right thing to do will be enough to start these conversations.

We need that organizational support to have that driver support adoption. You also need a sponsor. Cause without that, buy-in, it will be difficult to encourage teams to actually adopt these new practices. Go out for training. Like, like Anne was saying, if you're taking away from developer productivity, there has to be a really strong reason for that.

So that's the top down. I think the other thing I would say to start having conversations would be grassroots advocacy, meet the like-minded individuals. Those would be my two main.

Anne Currie: Great piece of advice, Chris Anne, what's your thoughts? Well, my thought would be, remember you have consumer power, almost everyone in the tech industry has consumer power to make change. Yes. So when you are buying, when you are buying stuff or. When you're thinking about buying staff, talk to your suppliers and say, I care about this, and this will, this is something that will make the difference between whether I buy from you or I buy from somebody else, because if you can then get them to go and change their products either immediately, or just because it's the feedback they're getting from their customers that will have outside impacts without you having to do anything at all, or get any internal sign off.

Just, just ask for it.

Asim Hussain: Right. Absolutely. Use your wallet, Chris Adams. What's your thoughts?

Chris Adams: I'm actually gonna agree with a lot of what Andrew said. There's a whole phenomena called the values perception gap. That's common in psychology, where everyone basically assumes that everyone. Doesn't care about anything until they ask them and realize that they do care about things. And like, until you do that and are explicit about that, or explicitly give a team permission to do this, or explicitly talk to someone, they'll basically assume that you do not care.

And if you don't do that, then. Well, we are kind of here because everyone is assuming that no one else cares and no one is prepared to ask, like, can you please do to our provider or Hey team, do you reckon people might wanna join us? If like we were, what some, we look more like the good guys, rather than the bad guys, there's all this stuff that we could be doing.

And I feel like a lot of time is basically be very explicit about this, about what you're after and what your values actually are lead with your values in many cases. But back 'em up with some numbers that you can come up to justify when someone is asking when someone is challenging, you, you later.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. And I will, I will just add to the, I do work for one of those large cloud providers and I will, I will. That the sales org, they do. It is flagged. It is put in a database when a customer reaches out and complains about anything. But like specifically there's a there's, you know, if, if the request or suggestion is around sustainability, it is flagged then is go.

It does go in a database, which is brought up in discussions, at least with you, like, what are your, what's your, what's your guidance?

Elise Zelechowski: Yeah, I, I would say all, all great points and all part of the kind of systems thinking that needs to be applied here of sort of activating right. Sort of different stakeholders and levers within an organization. You know, I can speak, you know, you know, specifically to, to ThoughtWorks, you know, one of the things that I have found, you know, we are a very decentralized culture, wherever agile culture, and it's.

So important for us to find champions in different parts of the business and then do the education and training and bring them along. And, and we've learned a lot from our participation already in the, in the foundation, but just getting enough people who are starting to spread the word, you know, sort of in a frankly, in a grassroots, right.

Sort of like pollinating different parts of the business. So you have. Suddenly you have this sort of like, oh, I'm hearing about this over here. Oh. And I'm hearing about this over there. And then as you're sort of building that business case that Chris is talking about, you know, and putting this together, you've already sort of primed the organization culturally and kind of gotten enough momentum building that, that it, I feel like you can just move then more quickly and get gain more momentum.

But definitely I, I feel like that grass. Piece has been very important at ThoughtWorks, even though we're a very purpose led company, it's just the, the way our organization works. You need to kind of do that pollination.

Asim Hussain: I would, I would absolutely agree with you. I think that we, one of the things people don't realize about Microsoft is it has one of the largest kind of green teams of any organization in the world. I think we're almost 6,000 people now in the organization kind of actively sit and participate and talk and, and, and make it very, very clear that sustainability is a value to them.

And. I think that's a strong signal to everybody else in an organization. So the middle management and the CIOs CTOs and the CIOs that, you know, they to make a decision around sustainability would be, it would be supported. So, um, yeah, absolutely. I agree with all of you, all of your opinions. Thank you.

Thank you. All of you. Thank you all for being part of this panel and thank you for being part of the foundation, your guidance and support. And your knowledge is instrumental in us achieving our mission and our goals. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks so much. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation.

Please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.