Carbon-Aware Nomination System for Decentralized Computing is now live

A New Era for Sustainable Computing

Demand for computing power is exploding as AI models, cloud services, and decentralized applications consume ever-greater amounts of energy. But not all energy is created equal. In some regions, a data center might be drawing power from a coal-heavy grid, while elsewhere excess wind or solar power goes unused. For the past decade, tech giants addressed this by buying renewable energy or improving efficiency. But what if we could take a more dynamic approach — shifting computational workloads across location and time to maximize use of clean energy?

Enter Carbon-Aware Nomination, a groundbreaking mechanism from Energy Web that does exactly that. It ensures computational tasks run where and when they have the lowest carbon intensity. This isn’t a standard cloud feature or a typical blockchain project, but a fusion of both: it connects decentralized computing networks with real-time carbon intensity data from WattTime and the Green Software Foundation’s Carbon-Aware SDK. And the best part — it’s going open-source, inviting the entire industry to build a greener digital future together.

The Carbon Cost of Computing: Why It Matters

Computing today has a massive carbon cost. Data centers account for around 1–2% of global electricity use (on par with the airline industry), and that share is rising fast. Some forecasts warn that with the AI boom, data center energy demand could hit double-digit percentages of global consumption by 2030. In short, if we don’t make computing more sustainable, it will hinder global climate goals. Today’s solutions to decarbonize workloads rarely have real-time “carbon awareness.” This means a lot of flexible computing — like batch processing or AI training jobs — might be running at the worst possible times for the planet. Carbon-Aware Nomination changes that paradigm by intelligently routing workloads to times and places where electricity is greenest.

Why Carbon-Aware Nomination Is a Game-Changer

Carbon-aware computing isn’t an entirely new idea, but no one has implemented it the way we have. Existing approaches have serious limitations:

• Blind Spots in Conventional Cloud Sustainability: Major cloud platforms have introduced sustainability dashboards and efficiency tools to help customers estimate carbon footprints. However, these proprietary solutions require you to trust their reporting. There’s no independent way to verify if a given workload actually ran on low-carbon energy. In other words, you might see carbon-saving claims, but you can’t prove them. While Carbon-Aware Nomination is built for decentralized compute networks, its methodology could be adapted for cloud orchestration. However, the current implementation is blockchain-native, ensuring verifiable, tamper-proof sustainability claims.
• Decentralized Compute Lacks Climate Intelligence: Emerging networks like iExec, Golem, and Akash distribute workloads across many nodes, leveraging blockchain for compute marketplaces. Yet, they schedule jobs without considering the carbon intensity of those nodes. A task might just as easily run on a coal-powered node as on a solar-powered one. Until now, no decentralized computing platform has integrated real-time carbon optimization into its scheduling logic.

This is where Carbon-Aware Nomination stands apart. It combines decentralized computing with live carbon-intensity data for the first time. By doing so, it delivers several unique benefits that neither traditional clouds nor existing blockchain compute projects offer:

1. Decentralized & Trustless Architecture: Built on the Energy Web X blockchain, every decision and claim is transparent. There’s no single company controlling the process, and sustainability claims are tamper-proof and verifiable by anyone. This brings a new level of trust to green computing — auditors or stakeholders can confirm, via the public ledger, that a workload ran at a time of low grid emissions.
2. Real-Time Carbon Intelligence: The system taps into WattTime’s API and the GSF Carbon-Aware SDK to get live and forecasted grid emissions data. Workloads are continuously matched to the cleanest energy times in real time. If wind picks up in Region A or solar output surges in Region B, the scheduler knows and can route tasks accordingly. We’re not offsetting carbon with credits or averaging it annually; we’re actively avoiding emissions as they happen.
3. Hybrid Public/Enterprise Nodes: Flexibility is built in. Organizations can nominate workloads to run on public decentralized nodes or their own infrastructure — whichever meets the carbon criteria. For example, an enterprise could use its private servers when they’re running on green power, or tap into a public pool of nodes in another region when local power is dirty. Carbon-Aware Nomination isn’t “all or nothing” — it’s a smart overlay that finds the greenest option across a mix of resources.
4. Verifiable ESG Reporting: Every workload handled through this system generates a digital proof of its execution with associated carbon data. Think of it like an eco-receipt. This proof can feed directly into ESG reports or sustainability audits, backed by blockchain records. Instead of saying “we think our computations were low-carbon,” organizations can cryptographically demonstrate it. This level of accountability is increasingly crucial as investors and regulators demand hard evidence of climate action.
5. Open-Source Collaboration: Unlike proprietary cloud solutions, Carbon-Aware Nomination is being released as open-source software. This invites an entire community — from researchers to startups — to use it, audit it, and improve it. By sharing the code, Energy Web ensures transparency of the algorithm and accelerates innovation. Anyone will be able to plug into the system or even contribute new features (for example, supporting new types of workloads or integrating additional data sources). We believe an open approach is the fastest way to standardize carbon-aware computing across the world.

How It Works (In Simple Terms):

1. Checks Carbon Data: A group of computers (nominators) analyze real-time electricity grid data to find where energy is greenest.
2. Finds the Best Spot: The nominators select and agree on the cleanest available computing resources to execute the workload and qualify for rewards.
3. Runs & Verifies: The selected computers can accept and execute the workload, and the blockchain records proof of completion, ensuring eligibility for rewards.

How It Works (In detail): The Carbon-Aware Nomination Pool

So, how does the system actually orchestrate a “greener” workload? Rather than a central scheduler deciding where tasks run, Carbon-Aware Nomination uses a decentralized pool of worker nodes and nominators that collectively determine the optimal execution plan. Here’s a high-level look at the process:

• Live Carbon Data Feeds: Using the Carbon Aware SDK, the system continuously pulls real-time and forecasted carbon intensity data from WattTime’s service. This data covers different regions and grids, updating as conditions change (like when a big solar farm comes online in the afternoon or when a coal plant ramps up at night).
• Normalized Comparison: Because “100 gCO₂/kWh” means different things on different grids, the scheduler normalizes carbon intensity across regions. This prevents it from always favoring the same region and ensures a fair comparison. In essence, the algorithm knows what “clean” means for each location and time — a form of smart context.
• Energy Web X Worker Registry: All participating compute nodes (whether run by individuals, companies, or data centers) register on the Energy Web X blockchain registry. They publish metadata about their location, hardware, and efficiency. This on-chain registry is like a directory of available computing resources, with info crucial for carbon-aware decisions. It’s also transparent — anyone can see which nodes are available and where they are.
• Green Nomination Process: When a workload needs scheduling, a separate group of decentralized nominators, independent from the compute nodes themselves, evaluates the available options. These nominators analyze live carbon intensity data (from step 1), assess each node’s performance and capacity, and rank them based on sustainability. Essentially, the nodes compete, but not on price or speed alone, on verifiable carbon performance. The system then nominates the best-suited, lowest-carbon node to execute the task, ensuring a trustless and tamper-proof selection process.
• Workload Execution & Proof: The chosen node runs the computation. During and after execution, it logs the energy used and the carbon intensity at that time. This information is reported back and recorded (for example, as an attestation on Energy Web X). The result is a verifiable proof that “Task X was executed at Time Y in Region Z with carbon intensity Q gCO₂/kWh.” If someone doubts the claim, the proof is on the blockchain for anyone to verify.

Continuous Optimization: Over time, the system can employ incentives to improve efficiency. For instance, node operators who consistently provide low-carbon compute (by perhaps adding their own renewable energy or load-shifting) could be rewarded. Likewise, if the network notices certain regions becoming cleaner (say a new wind farm installed), it will naturally start shifting more workloads there. The feedback loop encourages the whole ecosystem to move towards cleaner operations, as sustainable nodes get more business.

In practice, this means a company using Carbon-Aware Nomination could submit a batch job and know that the job will run at the best possible time (perhaps an hour later when a green energy surge comes) and in the best location (maybe on a server one country over where it’s a windy night), all without manual intervention. The heavy lifting of “when and where to compute” is handled by the decentralized logic in a transparent way.

How Carbon-Aware Nomination Fits into Energy Web X

Carbon-Aware Nomination is a component of the broader Energy Web X (EWX) ecosystem. EWX is Energy Web’s new architecture for decentralized solutions, and it supports multiple “nomination” methods (i.e., scheduling and matching mechanisms) for every single compute workload of their solutions. Carbon awareness is one powerful approach, but not the only one — some applications might optimize purely on cost or latency, for example. Within EWX:

• Solutions can opt-in to Carbon-Aware Nomination if minimizing emissions is a priority, or choose other nomination modules better suited to their needs. This flexible architecture means EWX can cater to different preferences (greenest vs. fastest vs. cheapest, etc.), and Carbon-Aware Nomination is available for any solution that cares about sustainability.
• Even for applications that prioritize performance, Carbon-Aware Nomination can run in the background or as a secondary filter. For instance, if two nodes are equally capable, why not pick the one on cleaner energy? In this way, the carbon-aware mechanism can enhance other scheduling strategies by adding a sustainability lens.
• All of this happens while leveraging the security and transparency of Energy Web’s blockchain. The nominations (scheduling decisions) and the resulting proofs are recorded on-chain, which aligns with Energy Web’s mission to use open digital infrastructure for the clean energy transition. EWX provides the trust layer that makes Carbon-Aware Nomination’s claims audit-proof.

Decentralized Nomination: Trustless, Transparent, and Resilient

Unlike a traditional cloud scheduler (where one company’s software decides where your job runs), Carbon-Aware Nomination operates without a single controlling entity. The decision process is distributed among many participants and governed by open algorithms. This decentralized approach brings several advantages:

• Trustless operations: You don’t have to trust Energy Web or any cloud provider’s claims — you can verify the outcomes yourself on-chain. If a workload was supposed to run on green power, anyone can check the records and confirm it did. This is crucial for companies that need to report emissions reductions to regulators or want to avoid greenwashing.
• Transparency: Every step, from the carbon data used to the final selection of a node, can be made transparent. Community members could even watch a dashboard of live nominations happening, seeing in real time how the system is chasing the lowest-carbon resources. This level of openness is unheard of in proprietary cloud scheduling.
• Resilience: Decentralization also means there’s no single point of failure. The nomination process can continue even if one node or one data feed goes down. Multiple nodes participate in making decisions, and the blockchain ensures a canonical record. It’s much harder to corrupt or game the system — doing so would require attacking a broad, global network of participants.

For users, this simply translates to peace of mind. You get a robust service that not only optimizes for sustainability but is also inherently reliable and tamper-proof.

Why Open Source Matters

Energy Web is committed to open-sourcing the entire Carbon-Aware Nomination system. By making it freely available to developers, enterprises, and even competitors, we aim to set a new industry standard for carbon-aware computing. Transparency is a core value here — anyone can inspect the code to understand how decisions are made and suggest improvements. Open source also accelerates innovation: a global community can adapt the tool for new use cases (imagine carbon-aware scheduling for edge devices or for other batch processes like rendering and scientific computing). We’re releasing this under an open license so that this carbon-aware logic can proliferate everywhere, not just within Energy Web’s ecosystem.

Ultimately, climate change is a shared challenge. We believe that by open-sourcing this solution, we enable network effects — more contributions, more adoption, and more emissions saved. No single company can decarbonize IT on its own, but together, we can make carbon-aware computing the “new normal” for all data centers and devices.

Join the Movement

Carbon-aware computing is the future. Whether you’re an enterprise managing thousands of servers, a blockchain enthusiast, or a developer hacking on weekends, you can start integrating Carbon-Aware Nomination into your workflows to make a tangible impact. This isn’t just an Energy Web project — it’s a call to all cloud providers, decentralized network operators, and software platforms: join us in running workloads on clean energy. Imagine a world where every AI training, every render job, every transaction validation automatically seeks out the greenest energy available. That’s what we’re building, and we invite you to build it with us.

The code will be open-sourced on Energy Web’s GitHub (and accessible through our developer portal). We’ll be hosting community calls and tutorials for those who want to implement it or contribute. By working together, we can ensure that the digital infrastructure of the future not only powers our economies — but also heals our planet. It’s time to decarbonize the cloud, one workload at a time.