Environment Variables

This Week, host Chris Adams is joined by TU Berlin researcher Iegor Riepin to talk about the benefits - and trade-offs - associated with load shifting over both space and time. Together, they nerd out over the specifics, discuss numbers, and weigh alternative methods of computing with green energy all around the globe. Iegor and his team did a study alongside Google, where they modeled the entire European electricity grid in order to study the effects of different types of load shifting, and how it can be most efficiently applied to the world of Green Software.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Iegor Riepin: LinkedIn | GitHub |  Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• https://pypsa.org/ [03:21]
• RE100 [09:47]
• What? The sun isn't always shining?! - by David Roberts [10:16]
• XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta [47:30] 

Resources:

• https://github.com/PyPSA [03:21]
• An introduction to energy's hottest new trend: 24/7 carbon-free electricity 
• System-level impacts of 24/7 carbon-free electricity procurement in Europe [11:22]
• The value of space-time load-shifting flexibility for 24/7 carbon-free electricity procurement [13:24]
• PyPSA · GitHub [22:20]
• GitHub - PyPSA/atlite: Atlite: A Lightweight Python Package for Calculating Renewable Power Potentials and Time Series 
• Electricity Maps [50:40]
• GitHub - PyPSA/247-cfe: Explore the impacts of 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy PPAs [55:55]
• 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact [56:25]
• Open Energy Modelling Initiative
• PyPSA meets Earth 
• PyPSA-Earth: A flexible Python-based open optimisation model to study energy system futures around the world.  

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:
Iegor Riepen: Capacities of wind, solar, and storage required to achieve hourly matching of demand with carbon or clean electricity are reduced when we increase the share of computing jobs, and that means the share of power loads that are flexible. So, in short, demand flexibility makes carbon-free computing more resource efficient.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, we often talk about code efficiency, because it's something that we're often already familiar with. But as you learn more about integrating sustainability into software engineering, you end up learning more about the underlying power systems that all our servers and end-user devices like laptops and phones rely on too. And because the power systems we rely on are in the middle of a generational shift from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy, there are changes taking place there that can inform how we design systems higher up the stack. This summer, a team of researchers from Technical University Berlin published a study in collaboration with Google to help shed light on this emerging field. They modeled the entire European energy grid with open-source grid modeling software written in Python, along with a set of internet-scale data centers, to better understand how scaling their use of compute to match the availability of clean energy can affect the associated environmental impact with running this kind of infrastructure.

If this was interesting enough, But the modeling also revealed some interesting findings about the cost of transitioning to digital services that run on fossil-free power every hour of every day. This sounded like absolute catnip for sustainable software engineers, but because this is also one of the first open studies published around carbon-aware software, it's possible to understand the assumptions behind these results and figure out how they might change in future. So if you want to learn a bit more about this, to help in this quest, joining me today, we have one researcher from the Department of Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technical University of Berlin, Iegor Riepen. Hey, Iegor.

Iegor Riepen: Hi Chris, thanks for having me today.

Chris Adams: Iegor, it's lovely to hear from you again. Before we dive into the world of grids and carbon-aware software and the like, can I give you just a few moments to introduce yourself?

Iegor Riepen: Yes, of course. Hi, everyone. I'm Iegor Riepen. I'm a postdoc researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, where I'm part of the Energy Systems Department. In our department, we use methods from operations research and mathematical optimization, researching the cost-effective opportunities for climate neutrality.

This means I spend most of my time writing, solving, and debugging mathematical models of energy systems. Our research group also maintains an open-source Python environment for state-of-the-art energy system modeling, which is available at pypsa.org and GitHub/PyPSA.com. 

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guests, Anne Faubry and Alexander Dawson of the W3C Community Group. This week, they discuss the Web Sustainability Guidelines as well as the Content Accessibility Guidelines. Web standards as specified by the World Wide Web consortium, play a huge role in shaping expectations about how the web is supposed to work, and for whom. This week’s guests talk about their respective roles in the W3C and in publishing the guidelines, as well as how they came to be part of the group. Listen in to learn more about the differences between standards and guidelines, and what the Web Sustainability Guidelines aim to achieve.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Anne Faubry: LinkedIn
• Alexander Dawson: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Main Site for Guidelines | W3C [21:27]
• Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino's over site accessibility [27:06] 
• Greening government: ICT and digital services strategy 2020 to 2025 - GOV.UK [31:56] 

Resources:

• afnor spec 2201 [10:37]
• Référentiel général d'écoconception de services numériques (RGESN) [10:53]  
• Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 at a Glance [22:28]
• Checkboxes | W3C [23:40] 
• JSON API | W3C [23:58]
• GitHub - w3c/sustyweb: Sustainable Web Design Community Group [24:16]
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 [26:31] 
• GRI - Standards [29:49]
• Issues · w3c/sustyweb · GitHub [38:05]
• Sustainable Web Design Community Group [38:30]
• Sustyweb Community Home Page
• [email protected] Mail Archives [38:51]
• The Tarot Cards Of Tech | Artefact [39:37]
• Sustainable Web Design Community Group Wiki [42:02]
• Frequently Asked Questions - Sustainable Web Design Community Group [42:11]
• The intro guide to digital eco-design | Designer Éthiques[42:57] 

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:

Anne Faubry: This is what is called externalities. It's a debated word. It's a bit controversial because it's, it comes from an economic background, but it's important to have this in mind when you design a product because sometimes you might have the best intentions, but when it comes to environment, you can sometimes make things worse than what you wanted to do.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When you're building digital services, a lot of the time you're relying on standards up and down the tech stack to ensure that each component works the way it does. And if you work with the web standards, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, play a huge role in shaping expectations about how the web is supposed to work and for whom. Earlier this year, the W3C Sustainable Web Design Community Group published their first, and now second, draft of the Web Sustainability Guidelines, a wide range of recommendations for making websites and products more sustainable. So this now means there's guidance from the W3C, not just about how JavaScript and HTML should work, but also how they should work sustainably. With us, today, we have two key members of the community group behind its publication. Alex Dawson and Anne Faubry, I hope I pronounced it correctly, to learn how it came about, a little bit more about the guidelines and what they recommend, and what's coming next. So, going in alphabetical order, Alex and Anne, I'll give you folks a chance to introduce yourself. So, Alex, um, the floor is yours first, if you'd be so kind.

Alexander Dawson: Yep, okay. I'm Alexander Dawson, and I'm a freelance web developer from the UK. I also am a part-time sustainability researcher and writer, and lately I have had the pleasure of being the co-chair of the Sustainable Web Design Community Group, and I'm a co-editor and contributor to the Web Sustainability Guidelines, which of course we're all here to talk about today.

Chris Adams: Thank you, Alex. And Anne, the floor is yours.

Anne Faubry: Hello everyone, I'm Anne Faubry, so your pronunciation was great, from France, I'm a UX/UI designer. I work as a freelancer for environmental projects like NGOs or public services, and I try to implement accessibility and eco-design in all I do. And I also work part time for an association called Designer Éthiques, Ethical Designers in English, which tries to research the field of responsible designing and also more specifically eco-design. So we published the guidel...

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Tony van Swet from Electricity Maps, to talk about the mapping of the carbon intensity of electricity grid. Tony shares some of the work that Electricity Maps has been doing to make it easier to understand how clean or dirty electricity is around the world, as well as how they’re making this data more accessible and usable to consumers. Join in on this candid conversation discussing the uses of such data and how to access it, as well as Tony talking about carbon intensity, open data, and open source.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Tony van Swet: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• How to trace back the origin of electricity (Smoothie Blog Post) | Electricity Maps [06:16]
• The value of space-time load-shifting flexibility for 24/7 carbon-free electricity procurement | Zenodo (TU Berlin’s Study with Google, using PYPSA) [12:11]
• Electricity Maps | Client Story: Monta (EV Smart Charging use case) [15:41]
• GitHub - electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib: A real-time visualisation of the CO2 emissions of electricity consumption [21:01]
• Electricity Maps | Reports - Hourly Residual Mix Methodology [27:13]

Resources:

• Electricity Maps | Data Portal [18:29] 
• Electricity Maps Methodology 

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:

Tony van Swet: Looking at Google's use case at their data centers, they have the huge potential to shift their computation based on time or location, so this enables them to manipulate their energy consumption through using our API to increase their consumption when the sun shines and the wind blows. 

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, it's often common to talk about energy efficiency, and one of the reasons we care about it at all, is that right now we burn a lot of fossil fuels to generate electricity used in data centers, networks, and end-user devices. But how much of that comes from fossil fuels? And is that changing? This data exists all around the world, and sometimes the data is open, but it's often very messy. In 2017, the Electricity Map project was launched to make it easier to understand how clean or dirty electricity was all around the world. And as the name suggests, it took the form of a map showing the carbon intensity of electricity in as many places around the world as possible. Over the subsequent years, an open source project has grown with hundreds of developers around the world, contributing open web scrapers for data in their parts of the world to make the data more accessible. And earlier this year, the company behind the project released a new open data portal for historical data about how clean electricity was for anyone to use how they wish. So, what does this have to do with green software? Having access to this kind of data makes it much easier to understand the carbon footprint of your software. And this week, we're joined by Tony van Swet from Electricity Maps to talk about carbon intensity, open data, and open source. Hey there, Tony.

Tony van Swet: Hi, great to be here.

Chris Adams: Okay, Tony, before I get ahead of myself, I think we should give you a bit of space to introduce yourself properly. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Electricity Maps? And for folks new to the field, what Electricity Maps does these days, please?

Tony van Swet: Yeah, of course. I'm a senior software engineer in the advocacy team at Electricity Maps, and I'll give you a bit of background on what we do at Electricity Maps. So our mission is to organize the world's electricity data to drive the transition to a truly decarbonized electricity system. And as part of the advocacy team, my focus is enabling climate action with transparent insights.

We do this with the help of the open source community, building products such as our map visualization and the data portal that we're here to talk about today.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks for that, Tony. Okay. So if you're new to this podcast, um, my name is Chris Adams, as I mentioned before. Um, I work as the executive director at the Green Web Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit focused on an entirely fossil-free internet. And I also work as the chair of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation. And before we dive in, here's just a quick reminder, everything we talk about, we'll link to in the show notes below. So if there's a paper that caught your interest, or there's a story you've heard about, we'll do everything we can to make sure there's a helpful set of links that you can follow up for your own research a little bit later. But back to Tony. Tony, I've got to have to ask you, I know you're working in Denmark, but... I suspect you might not be coming from Denmark in the first place. What does a Kiwi end up doing on the opposite side of the world in Denmark, working for a company like Electricity Maps? I'm sure there's a story behind that.

Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely a bit of a career shift for me. So I started out about 10 years ago as a truck driver in New Zealand. I was full of self doubt, a bit depressed, struggling to find my place in the world. And to lift myself up out of this, I made it my mission to create technology to combat climate change, ...

This Week in Green Software has Dr. Daniel Schien from the University of Bristol, UK, joining host Chris Adams to talk about old research, recent news, and future prospects all revolving around digital sustainability. This conversation touches on some of the work Daniel has done in the past (and plans to do in  the future) as well as their thoughts and reckons on this and how it can be used to steer our efforts towards a sustainable future. Together, they cover topics such as streaming being the new flying, and some ways in which new research has changed their perspectives on some problems in green tech.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Daniel Schien: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• The True Climate Impact of Streaming - About Netflix [04:06] 
• The carbon impact of streaming: an update on BBC TV's energy footprint [05:07]
• Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls assessing the Internet's energy and carbon impacts - ScienceDirect [21:10]
• Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services | Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [40:50]
• A low carbon kubernetes scheduler — University of Bristol [41:47]    

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:

Daniel Schien: If we are saying streaming is bad and instead consumers jump into their car and go to the cinema, that would be the worst thing that people could do. And same if we are saying streaming is bad and consumers swap to terrestrial broadcast, makes hardly a difference in the short term to the energy consumption that is associated to the delivery of the service.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. 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 another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Daniel Schien, a member of the Green Software Foundation. Daniel teaches and researches sustainable software at the University of Bristol, England.

Hey, Dan.

Daniel Schien: Hi Chris.

Chris Adams: Dan, if any of our listeners lurk on the Green Software Foundation forums, or the kind of IETF E-Impact mailing list, they might be familiar with you. But for folks who are new, would you mind taking a second to introduce yourself to the pod for our listeners, please?

Daniel Schien: Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Daniel Schien, and I, as you said, teach and research at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. I'm a computer scientist and work here in the Faculty of Engineering, researching questions of sustainability of ICT. And here in Bristol, I'm part of a small but dedicated group of researchers looking at the environmental impact of ICT.

Chris Adams: Okay. And I did a bit of research before this call and I realized the first paper I saw from you was back in 2011, researching the dynamic carbon footprint of digital services back in 2011. So it sounds like you've been doing this a while and you've worked with a number of organizations in the industry as well.

Is that correct?

Daniel Schien: Yes, that's true. Indeed, I joined the University of Bristol at the end of 2010, working on a project for the Guardian newspaper, actually. And at that time, they were interested in understanding the transformation of their business from a paper-based delivery to a digital delivery, reading the news online. And at that point there were no methods, no existing similar analyses of environmental impact from the distribution starting at data centers over networks to user devices. And in this void, we helped to come up with an assessment that can compare the quite well understood print side of delivering news with the digital version.

Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. And you've worked with a few other organizations as well. And I think we're going to touch on that a little bit later on. So wow. Thank you. The little story about the Guardian. I had no idea that the Grawn was doing that stuff so long ago already, actually. Okay. Um, cheers for that, Dan. If you're new to this podcast folks, as mentioned before, my name is Chris Adams.

I work as the chair of the policy working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit working towards an entirely fossil-free internet by 2030. I'm also going to share that whenever we mention a story or a project or a paper in this podcast, we'll do everything we can to find a link so you can actually research some of this yourselves and learn somewhat more if anything caught your interest.

And if there's something that you heard us talk about that you didn't see in the show notes, please do send us an email or get in touch and we'll do everything we can to capture that information and make sure it's available for everyone else. Okay, Dan, are you sitting comfortably?

Daniel Schien: Yes, I am. Thank you very much.

Chris Adams: All right, I think we should begin then.

So a few years back, one of the tropes that just would not die when people started talking about sustainability in the digital realm was this idea of streaming being the new flying. And, um, I saw your name linked to some work that was published in 2021, uh, working with Netflix that actually, in my view, helped shed some light into this and, uh, hopefully might put away some of the kind of poorly written part articles that you often see in the newspapers...

This week, join host Chris Adams in a conversation with Tereze Gaile, global Sustainability SME at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. Together they cover topics in sustainability from her organic sustainability role at MuleSoft, to various tools that are available to aid in the decarbonization of software. They touch on resources to help you learn important concepts and skills, how to bring sustainability into an organization, and much more on this episode of TWiGS.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Tereze Gaile: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Salesforce Launches ‘Green Code’ Initiative to Reduce Carbon Footprint of Software [14:49] 
• Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology [15:14] 
• Cut Carbon Emissions with the Developer Carbon Dashboard | Salesforce Developers Blog [16:40]
• Trailhead | Salesforce [19:28] 
• Developer Carbon Dashboard GitHub Repo [21:18]
• Emissions Reduction - FY23 Stakeholder Impact Report [34:41]
• How much of the internet is covered by credible Net Zero targets? An update - Green Web Foundation [37:02] 

Resources:

• Adopting Sustainable Engineering Practices | MuleSoft Blog [7:36] 
• http://principles.green/ and the GitHub repo with the original priciples.green repo website [7:49] 
• Consequence scanning, as introduced by Dotevertone, as described by non profit MySociety and how to plan a workshop using it on trailhead [20:45]
• COMPASS EDUCATION The AMOEBA of Cultural Change [42:35]
• https://outrageandoptimism.libsyn.com/ [43:01]

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:

Tereze Gaile: Sometimes, the challenge is not that they don't care necessarily, but that they have multiple conflicting priorities. And I've seen this time and time again, especially when we look at today, there's a cost of living crisis, and if an organization's bottom line is taking a hit as well, sustainability can be a really hard sell.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. We like talking about green software on this podcast, but for many people working on the day to day, if you're not already in a specialized team and there isn't explicit buy-in from management yet, it's not obvious where to start if you want to see more sustainable practices incorporated into how you build software. Sometimes, it's helpful to hear from someone who's been on that journey already, to float those ideas, get buy in from higher up, and then get some time and money dedicated to figuring out how to do green software inside their organization, especially when they haven't been brought in, uh, with an explicit mandate to set up a green software practice, for example. So in this episode, that's what we're doing with our guest, Tereze Gaile at MuleSoft. Hi, Tereze

Tereze Gaile: hi Chris, very happy to be here and excited for our conversation. Thank you for the opportunity.

Chris Adams: You're welcome, Tereze okay. So Tereze, when we first spoke, I have to confess, I'd heard of Salesforce and I think most people working in tech have heard of that company, but I didn't, didn't know that much about MuleSoft and I didn't quite understand the relationship between the two. So for the uninitiated, would you take a moment to introduce yourself, just briefly outline this relationship between the two and give a bit of background about what you do there, please?

Tereze Gaile: It would be my pleasure. First of all, my name is Tereze Gaile, and I'm a technical architect at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. I'm also MuleSoft's global sustainability champion slash subject matter expert, but more on this later. First, let's start with a little story. to get a better understanding on Salesforce and MuleSoft and how they are connected.

So Salesforce was founded in 1999 and its core product back then was Salesforce CRM or Customer Relationship Management and its vision in a nutshell was to be a world class internet company for Salesforce Automation, hence why the name. Since then, Salesforce has acquired quite a large number of organizations and a vision has evolved to include AI, data, and CRM.

So some of Salesforce's acquisitions include companies that you might have heard of, so like Tableau, Slack, and also MuleSoft, with the latter being acquired in 2018. And MuleSoft is essentially a product or integration platform as a service. Which means you can use our platform to design, build, and manage your APIs and integrations.

But something that's quite interesting is it actually start...

This Week in Green Software brings a conversation with Arne Tarara, CEO of Green Coding Berlin. Join host Chris Adams as they discuss the new programming language Mojo and its efficiency, as well as other news from the world of sustainable software development. Together they share their thoughts on progress in Grid Forecasting in order to reduce high-carbon electricity use, in particular a new announcement made by Apple in this field. Finally, Arne and Chris share what’s on their wishlist for green software in this latest episode of TWiGS.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Arne Tarara: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Modular: Mojo🔥 - It’s finally here! [4:22]
• How engineers can make IT more sustainable | Scaleway [10:44]
• SCI (Green Software Foundation) [16:50]
• Apple brings Grid Forecast to Apple Home to tell you when you’re using clean energy - The Verge [21:18]
• Wagtail 5.1 gets a bit greener and leaner [24:31]
• Detecting Green Impact in Source Code - Meet Greg Rivera, VP of Product at CAST [29:03]

Events:

• Green Software Development Karlsruhe | Meetup
• Green Software - Scotland | Meetup 
• Green Software - Brighton | Meetup 
• Green Software - Oslo | Meetup 
• Green Software - Northern Ireland | Meetup 
• CNCF Cloud Native Sustainability Week [33:55]
• Decarbonize Software | GSF [34:10] 

Resources:

• Apple unveils its first carbon neutral products [24:03]
• Your New Apple Watch Series 9 Won’t Be Carbon Neutral | WIRED [24:03]
• GitHub - green-code-initiative/ecoCode: Reduce the environmental footprint of your software programs with SonarQube 

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:

Arne Tarara: You can also say, "why don't you use C?" Right? This would be the direct response to people. And then there's always people saying, "yeah, but Python developers are easier to get. The development speed is so much faster. So obviously you have a time to product, but you also have a time to fix." Like, software sustainability is not only about green stuff, it's also about maintainability.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. 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 This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In this episode, we're going to talk about working out the carbon footprint of any open source project on GitHub, myths around decarbonizing cloud platforms, and how to make your code 68, 000 times more efficient with one weird trick. But before we dive in, let me introduce my guest for this episode of This Week in Green Software. With us today, around the corner, we have Arne Tarara. Hey, Arne.

Arne Tarara: Hey, Chris. Yeah. Hi, I'm Arne Tarara. Uh, I'm the CEO at Green Coding Berlin, and I'm super excited to be on the show. Some regular listeners might've heard the name before, very often in a slightly, I would say more humoristic sense, because the name is more expressive than it is creative and I heard Asim lately making a pun about it, but in all fairness, he was not the first.

But on the flip side, the name says exactly what we're doing on a daily basis. Like we are a very small team. We have four people of senior engineers that work on open source tools that allow companies and engineers to measure and quantify carbon and energy costs of software. I think our most relevant software, the Green Metrics Tool, we will talk about later, but apart from that, to give a bit more insight, what we're doing is we consult companies and also work in government initiatives like, for instance, the Germany's Blue Angel Certification for Software, which I think was also slightly mentioned in the last episode, and with software open source communities like, for instance, Wagtail, that I know Chris, you're also involved with, and advancing the software industry as a whole through the open source tools and research that we're doing.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks for joining us. Arne, just before we dive into the world of technology, how was your weekend anyway? 

Arne Tarara: We have the luck currently in Berlin, as you probably also know, that it's very sunny. We just... We had this very rainy phase before, and so my partner and I ventured out into the Tempelhofer Feld, which is this super big area. I have to make a guess, but I would say it's something like one or two square kilometers at least.

It's really big, so you can sometimes not really see the end of the other side, because there might even be some mist, or I don't know what's going on. And there was this kite festival, so there was this advertisement in the newspaper about it, and I was directly hooked. You get these 50 met...

Join Chris Skipper and this week’s guest Namrata Narayan in discussing the upcoming Decarbonize Software 2023 event taking place this November, as well as the role Namrata plays in the GSF. In this episode, they cover the relationships between different member organizations and their role in green software and how they can work toward the same goals in a competitive environment. They touch on how and where this year’s Decarb event will take place and even how it has been set up to reduce its own carbon footprint. Hear about the planned sessions of the day and how to register in this episode of Environment Variables.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Skipper: LinkedIn
• Namrata Narayan: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Decarbonize Software | [29:08]
• Register for Decarbonize Software 2023 | [34:58]

Events:

• Decarbonize Software 2023

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:

Namrata Narayan: If we see software as an agent for climate action, then we are going to be a lot more successful in articulating why software aligns with sustainability.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. 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. 

Chris Skipper: Welcome to this episode of Environment Variables. I'm your host, Chris Skipper. And in this episode, we will be discussing the upcoming Decarbonize Software 2023 event with the Green Software Foundation's Director of Communications and Member Relations, Namrata Narayan. Hello, Namrata, and welcome to Environment Variables.

Namrata Narayan: Hi Chris, excited to be here.

Chris Skipper: Cool. So before we dive into the meat of this podcast for our listeners, could you please introduce yourself?

Namrata Narayan: Sure. So, as you said, my name is Namrata Narayan and I really lead communications and member relations now at the Green Software Foundation. I've been with the foundation for about a year, actually more than a year.

Chris Skipper: That's amazing. And Just so people know, I'll say a little bit about myself. You might have heard my voice in this podcast before. I'm Chris. I'm the podcast producer. The other Chris is the host and I'm an absolute noob when it comes to green software. I don't have a software background at all. In fact, I have a musical background and a podcast background.

So, but yeah, so other than doing podcasts, I like drinking lots of coffee and at the moment avoiding all the cherry blossoms here in Australia because it is spring and I have a grass allergy. So there you And before we dive in, here's a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode.

So before we talk about Decarbonize Software 2023. Let's chat a little bit about yourself. So what does being the Director of Communications and Member Relations in the GSF entail? And what are your responsibilities and goals in this role, Namrata?

Namrata Narayan: This is a role that was just recently created. I was doing this work for the last few months and it just made sense to formalize it and make sure that everybody in the community knew who to reach out to and in what capacity. So my role is really focused on building awareness about green software, the work we're doing at the foundation, and nurturing relationships with our member organizations and their people to support knowledge sharing, participation in our projects, and ultimately really support a culture change towards sustainability in tech. So in nutshell, I oversee content marketing, run our social media and weekly newsletter, advise our leadership and working group teams on branding and messaging and identify opportunities to support our members within the context of our projects and initiatives.

Chris Skipper: Awesome. And so you've been with the foundation for just over a year. Have you seen, in your role with marketing and promoting the growth of the community, have you seen a change, A, in the number of members that have come into the Green Software Foundation, and B, in the type of members that have come into the foundation?

Namrata Narayan: Yeah, that's a good question. I certainly have. I think since I started working with the foundation, we welcomed probably 10 new members at this point. They're all different shapes and sizes, which I love because it really speaks to the fact that this is an issue that everybody should be concerned about, and all types of teams should be working on, it's not just a problem for the big giants, but also for small engineering teams, for consultancies, for service providers.

So we've got a really nice variety of members that we're now working with.

Chris Skipper: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I think I probably came on around about the same time as you then, because Environment Variables is just over a year old, or maybe I think it's been longer than that because there was a lot of planning for this podcast to actually go ahead and then eventually Asim got around to recording something and sent it to me.

But yeah. So, and I'm not as in touch with members, I would say, as yourself probably, but I've definitely seen global membership the Green Software Foundation. For context for listeners, I'm currently in Australia, but Namrata is sitting in Canada and that's just within the people who work for the Green Software Foundation.

But we have had people as far away as Japan and I think, I believe even South America attend events. So yeah, it's very much global. I don't need to, I'm preaching to the choir here. I've forgotten how the term is, yeah, but people, people who are listening to this podcast are probably members of the Green Software Foundation.

And if you aren't already, you should probably join. How easy is it to join the Green Software Foundation?

Namrata Narayan: We've got a few differe...

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by guest Molly Webb from Energy Unlocked for another week in Green Software. In this episode, follow their conversation covering the latest G20 summit in New Delhi and a special announcement they made relating to renewable energy, a surprising move by Apple to now support Right to Repair and their reckons on the subject, as well as news from W3C’s first draft of Wed Sustainability Guidelines, and more. In this episode you can expect to be well informed on the going-ons of the past week and also upcoming events in sustainability and tech. Tune in for an open and exciting chat on The Week in Green Software.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Molly Webb: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Big weekend news in the G20 - a commitment to amongst other things tripling renewables by 2030 | [4:33]
• In a historic about-face, Apple publicly supports right-to-repair bill | Grist | [13:16]
• Introducing Web Sustainability Guidelines | 2023 | Blog | W3C | [19:24]
• Data centers in Ireland use as much metered energy as all the cities in Ireland | Central Statistics Office of Ireland [24:52] 

Events:

• CNCF Cloud Native Sustainability Week | [42:14]
• Decarbonize Software | GSF [42:23]
• UN Climate Change Conference - United Arab Emirates Nov/Dec 2023 | UNFCCC | [42:55]

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:

Molly Webb: [00:00:00] It's about, "is my device that's sitting in my home behind a meter somehow going to be able to make itself visible to the grid and then be coordinated as a virtual power plant?" And even though we've heard the jargon and we talk about virtual power plants, we're really not there yet. That's the key part for software.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris [00:01:00] Adams. In this episode, we cover some ambitious new goals at the recent G20 meeting on renewable energy and how that might affect green software.

We'll cover Apple's recent about-face on right to repair, the first set of web sustainability guidelines from the W3C, and finally some eye opening stats on data center energy usage in Ireland. Finally we'll share some exciting events from the world of green software as well. But before we dive in, let me introduce my guest and colleague for this episode of This Week in Green Software.

With us today, we have Molly Webb of Energy Unlocked. Hi Molly.

Molly Webb: Hi, Chris.

Chris Adams: Thank you very much for joining us. Molly, I know that we've gone back for a while actually, but for people who are new to you, would you take a moment to just introduce yourself and see where you're, just explain where you're coming from and then we can begin the show.

Molly Webb: Great, thank you. I'm Molly Webb. I have been living in London since 2003 in [00:02:00] spite of my American accent. I set up an organization called Energy Unlocked in 2015 after working in climate change advocacy for many years and my focus on climate change advocacy was all in software to IT and telecommunications industry and how you would apply novel software or digitally enabled solutions to solve climate change. So Energy Unlocked in 2015 was focused on challenge-led processes to support new entrants and businesses and cities to accelerate their energy transitions. And then in just recently, I've set up a spin out called Pure Carbon, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Molly. Now, Molly, it's nice to be on a call with you again, because I believe we might've met back in the, at least, oh my God, in the early 2010s, [00:03:00] when I was working at a wacky startup called AMEE, which stood for Avoid Mass Extinction Engine, there was a meetup, I think it was called CleanWeb London, and I think I might've seen you presenting one time there. 

So yeah.

Molly Webb: It I was back in 2007 that I started working on "what is the role of IT and telecommunications in climate change?" And I feel like I've, it's still a small world, but at the time it really was a small world.

So I'm not surprised we didn't, that we met then. Great. Yeah. So yeah. It's

Chris Adams: It's good, lovely to have you back and to be running through some of this show with me again. So for people who are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams, as I mentioned before. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. That's a small Dutch non-profit focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030, and I also work as the policy chair for the Green Software Foundation. [00:04:00] And as you might know, I am the host of this podcast. All right. So. If you are new to this show, what we do on this weekly show is we basically look at a series of stories that have showed up on our radar, that are of interest, where there's a kind of green software angle, and we basically just talk about them and share some of the, some of our own reckons on this.

So that's the plan. We'll share all the links to these stories along with anything else that comes up from this. And yeah, that's generally the plan. All right, Molly, should we start with the first story?

Molly Webb: Great.

Chris Adams: Okay, all right, so the first story we have, we know that there was a big G20 meeting in New Delhi, ...

Joining host Anne Currie, is Jo Lindsay Walton, a research fellow in Arts, Climate, and Technology at the University of Sussex. Together they will explore the dreams of a green future inspired by Science Fiction and the practicality of these as solutions to climate change. This adventure will cover interdisciplinary approaches to viewing and tackling climate change and green software from angles of technology, politics, and especially literature. The discussion will touch on the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition and it’s toolkit that can help researchers minimize their carbon footprint, and will revolve around the ASCEND programme as well as other opportunities and missions to attempt the clean and efficient use of data centers in environments like our moon, and the complexities of protecting and cooling the servers, and also the aspect of polluting the moon

Learn more about our people:

• Anne Currie: LinkedIn | Website
• Jo Lindsay Walton: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association | [4:42]
• Data Centers in Space: The Promise of the Moon | [15:26]
• Beyond the Stratosphere: Computing in Orbit | [31:29]

Resources:

• Digital Humanities Climate Coalition toolkit
• UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association
• Communicating Climate Risk: A Toolkit
• Vector: The Critical Journal of the BSFA
• British Science Fiction Association
• Imagine Alternatives
• A Greenwashing Glossary
• Jo reviews KSR’s Ministry for the Future once
• Jo reviews KSR’s Ministry for the Future again

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:

[00:00:00] 

Jo Lindsay Walton: Building data centers on the moon is very productive of fuzzies, but not utilons.

Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes, indeed.

Jo Lindsay Walton: And I also feel like any, any file I saved on the moon, I would also want to save somewhere else as well.

Anne Currie: I think that would be sensible. It's not exactly your ideal disaster recovery location.

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.

Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Anne [00:01:00] Currie. For those of you who are regulars to the show, you've probably heard me on the other side of the microphone, but in this episode, I'll be host, so this is goint to be an interesting episode, because we'll be talking about kind of science fiction approaches to climate change. What's going on and what's actually useful to us to be thinking about and what probably isn't useful for us to be thinking about what we, we might be distracted by? But it should hopefully be a very interesting episode that we have a guest today who is also massively interested in science fiction.

So I would like to introduce to you our guest, Jo Lindsay Walton. So hi, Jo. Welcome to the, uh, the podcast and please introduce yourself.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Hello, Anne. Hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm Jo Lindsay Walton. I'm a research fellow in arts, climate and technology at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and I'm really excited to be here. I'm a relatively new member of the Green Software Foundation and I've really come here via the Digital [00:02:00] Humanities Climate Coalition, the DHCC, which is a kind of community-led initiative, which I guess we'll be speaking about, around digital decarbonisation, around climate justice, and I also do some work on climate communication, how do we talk about climate, bringing in interdisciplinary angles there, games, arts, literature, including science fiction. So this overlaps with my interest in science fiction, including the sort of post cyberpunk fiction of writers like Cory Doctorow, who directly explore contemporary issues around tech, law, and climate as we encounter them today, as well as more classic works by people like Ursula Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, that like to imagine life under better or just radically different social institutions. So I'm really happy to be here.

Anne Currie: Excellent. Thank you very much. Um, so, uh, just a little bit about me for, for people who perhaps aren't regulars. My name is Anne Currie. I am one of the co-chairs of the Green Software [00:03:00] Foundation Community Group. I'm also currently writing the O'Reilly, the new O'Reilly book about green software, co, um, a co-author of that. It's called Building Green Software. It's being published as we go on the O'Reilly website, and I'm doing that with my fellow GSF members, uh, Sara Hsu and Sara Bergmann. Uh, and, and my sci fi, the reason why I'm, I suspect why I'm hosting this episode today is that I'm also the author of a science fiction book series, the Panopticon series.

It's similar in some ways in terms of kind of time in which it's set and, uh, and ideas to, to Cory Doctorow, so it's post cyberpunk. Yeah, and it covers a lot of the stuff that we'll be talking about here.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Including the moon!

Anne Currie: Including the moon, including the whol...

Decarbonize Software 2023:

• Decarb.greensoftware.foundation 👈 REGISTER HERE 

Learn more about our people:

• Adam Jackson: LinkedIn 
• Chris Skipper: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Electricity Maps [6:47]
• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [14:09]
• Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131) | Linux Foundation Training [14:09]
• Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel [16:49]
• State of Green Software | Green Software Foundation [17:38]
• Meetup Program | GSF [17:54]
• Amadeus [20:15]

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:

Adam Jackson: But really this year's event is about our community and the stories they have to share. We're interested in seeing what people have done with green software in 2023. But yeah, the theme is about, the theme of the event is about empowering software practitioners to decarbonize sotware and to build communities and we want to see what people have done.

Chris Skipper: Welcome to this episode of Environment Variables. I'm your host, Chris Skipper, and in this episode, we will be discussing the upcoming Decarbonize Software 2023 event with the Green Software Foundation's Community Project Manager, Adam Jackson. Hello, Adam, and welcome to Environment Variables.

Adam Jackson: Hi, Chris. I'm really excited to be here.

Chris Skipper: Great, good to have you, and Just before we dive into the meat of this podcast for our listeners, could you please introduce yourself?

Adam Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Adam Jackson. I'm the Community Project Manager at the Green Software Foundation. Really excited to be here, as I said. I've been with the Green Software Foundation a few months now. I've also got my own little company helping tech companies connect their communities. And I've recently been involved in setting up a bunch of green software meetups around the world.

Chris Skipper: Awesome for those who don't know me, I'm Chris Skipper. I can't say my name apparently. And I'm the podcast producer of Environment Variables. And a veritable noob when it comes to green software, and in fact, all things software. Um, but I feel like I have acquired a lot of knowledge about the subject that would hopefully make me a good addition to any pub quiz team.

Now, before we dive in, here's a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So, to kick us off, I've got a really simple question for you. Let's talk about what your role is like at the Green Software Foundation. I know you've said, how long did you say you've been part of the Green Software Foundation

Adam Jackson: Now, four, four and a half months now.

Chris Skipper: four and a half months, so relatively green to the Green Software Foundation, but then again, the organization itself is also quite young. What does being the community project manager at the GSF entail and what are your responsibilities and goals in the role?

Adam Jackson: Uh, yeah, sure. So it's, it's quite a broad role, um, because community is a very big part of the Green Software Foundation. Um, but essentially it's helping to connect people to the resources of the GSF. So, um, some of the things I'm involved in include the, um, running the events. At the G S F working very closely with my colleague Namrata, um, that includes our Decarbonize software event that's coming up in November, includes our hackathon that'll take place in the first half of next year, and a bunch of other events as well.

And then I run the meetup project, so that's about getting tens of thousands of people connected with local Green software Meetup community groups around the world. I'm also helping our organizations, we have member organizations in the GSF, um, helping them to build their internal green software communities.

And then finally I'm building a new program, which I can't actually talk about too much today, but hopefully that'll help highlight and celebrate some of the people around the world who are making a huge contribution to green software. And there's some really amazing people out there, so we want to highlight the great work that they're doing too.

Chris Skipper: Awesome. So this, uh, secret project, I guess you could call it, um, is more of a, I don't know, you can't tell us that many details about it, but when's the sort of, what sort of, what's the sort of target launch date for that? Little

Adam Jackson: Oh, Decarbonize Software. Oh,

Chris Skipper: Oh, that is

Adam Jackson: converges. Yeah, yeah, no, but the, yeah, yeah, we're going to be making a couple of exciting announcements at Decarbonize Software, so that's why I don't want to spoil it for our audience today.

Chris Skipper: All right. We'll definitely dive into more detail about Decarbonize Software. But first, let's just talk a little bit more about you. Where did your journey with green software start? And how did you come to find yourself at the Green Software Foundation?

Adam Jackson: Yeah, Chris, I love that you describe yourself as a green software noob because that's that's sort of me as well. Um, I'm very much reliant on, um, these a lot of experts in the Green Software Foundation telling me how these things really work, but, um, but I'm passionate about the environment, but, um, anyway, I, um, I guess my story in this sort of space really began in my previous company, so I've worked in Microsoft for about 12 years.

maybe a few years before joining the GSF. And my first job with Microsoft was actually an intern in Legal and Corporate Affairs, n...