Overview of Environmental Indicators in the Cloud
Reports follow one another, and the observations remain the same: In march 2023, ADEME and ARCEP, in May, the Shift Project , the environmental impact of digital technology is spiraling out of control.
The “business as usual” scenario estimated by ADEME in its 2023 prospective study predicts the carbon footprint of digital technology in France to reach 49 MtCO2eq in 2050, compared to 17 MtCO2eq in 2020 (equivalent to 2.5% of national emissions at that date).
The digital sector’s share would account for over 60% of the total national emissions by 2050, assuming the country manages to achieve “carbon neutrality” (with an emission quota of around 80 MtCO2eq)!
Faced with this observation, how can we take action? Let’s consider the specific case of your cloud provider. Can they be a partner in your Sustainable Digital approach? What can they offer you?
Datacenter Environmental Indicators
The datacenter industry has long offered an energy efficiency indicator called PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). More recently, water consumption indicators (WUE) and carbon intensity indicators (CUE) have also gained attention.
Let’s take a look at these indicators for the GAFAMs and a few French cloud players.
PUE | Power Usage Effectiveness
While PUE is a familiar term, there are ongoing discussions about its calculation method and its usefulness in comparing datacenters and Cloud providers.
PUE measures the energy efficiency of a data center by comparing the total energy consumption of the building to the energy consumption of the equipment (it has no unit). The closer it is to 1, the better, indicating that most energy is directed towards active equipment.
However, PUE does not consider the carbon intensity of the electricity used, equipment utilisation rates, location impact, etc. Therefore, it cannot be the sole decision criterion and provides only a partial view of data center energy efficiency.
Furthermore, the PUE standard comes in 4 versions, from PUE0 to PUE3, based on granularity and methodology. It’s often challenging to determine which PUE providers are referring to, especially American ones. These methodological biases are highlighted in this podcast by Yann Lechelle, former CEO of Scaleway, who underlines the differences in calculations between American and European players.
State of the Market
The evolution of PUE over time is well documented, notably by the Uptime Institute.
PUE has significantly decreased over the years. (from 2.5 in 2007 to 1.67 in 2019 and 1.58 in 2021), which has helped keep data center energy consumption growth to just 6% between 2010 and 2018.
How Providers Compare
Except for Scaleway and Oracle, PUE values are usually communicated only in aggregated and annual forms, hiding potential disparities in time and space (location, host, seasons).
All providers fall within similar ranges, between 1.10 and 1.30, well below the benchmarks for traditional private ddatacenters as reported by the Uptime Institute.
Scaleway has made a further effort to improve transparency, publishing a complete dashboard on the behavior of each datacenter, including real-time PUE (the two PUE values for Scaleway concern older datacenters -before 2018- and newer ones -after 2018-) :
WUE | Water Usage Effectiveness
Introduced in the early 2010s, WUE highlights the amount of water used relative to the electricity consumed by equipment. Its unit is l/kWh (liters per kilowatt-hour), and lower values are better.
While PUE and energy are at the top of the list of indicators observed for Datacenters, recent months have seen a rise in concerns about the sometimes gargantuan water consumption of Datacenters, notably by Google in The Dalles, and in general about the risks associated with drought.
The 3 American hyperscalers have announced a whole range of “water-positive” commitments: by 2030, they will be giving back as much water (or more, in the case of Google!) as they use for their operations.
State of the Market
Since WUE is not as well known and adopted as PUE, there are no similar historical data. Nevertheless, according to the US Department of Energy (DoE), the average US datacenter consumes around 1.8 liters of water per kWh.
How Providers Compare
All the French and American players are positioned well below the market standard with the exception of Microsoft, which tops out at 0.49 l/kWh, and Google, for which no figures seem to be available.
CUE | Carbon Usage Effectiveness
The last indicator to be reviewed, after energy and water, is carbon of course!
The CUE relates the quantity of CO2 emitted per kWh of energy supplied to the equipment, so its unit is CO2eq/kWh. Like the WUE, both of which were formalized together in the early 2010s, the more it tends towards 0, the more it means that the amount of carbon emitted will be optimized.
Paradoxically, at a time when press headlines are bursting with the injunction to reduce emissions, this indicator is conspicuously absent from all cloud publisher publications, with the notable exception of OVH.
In its place comes an avalanche of commitments of all kinds: “carbon neutral”, “100% energy renewable”, “carbon free energy 24/7”, “net zero carbon” and “carbon negative”!
It’s hard to know how serious these commitments are, given that carbon accounting authorizes a wide variety of different methods (market-baset/location-based, GHG Protocol, BEGES, etc...), with widely varying perimeters taken into account (the famous scope 3). Others have already carried out this analysis, and I strongly recommend that you read it (for example, here at Carbone 4, with the webinar version available here in video, or at our friends from Boavizta).
What’s more, these commitments do little to hide a vague definition of what neutrality or offsetting can be, particularly at company level. On this subject, read Ademe’s July 2021 note on the scientific and methodological reality of carbon neutrality: it can only apply to a state or a planet, not a company. Similarly, recent studies tend to show the inanity of offset offers currently on the market (see, for example, these Guardian articles here and here).
State of the Market
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as an average or typical CUE in the literature (unless I’m mistaken!).
How Providers Compare
Only OVH publicly displays a CUE of 0.20 tCO2eq/MWh.
No other figures for any other player are available. In view of this scarcity of measurements, let’s try to summarize the various commitments made by suppliers:
If we summarise these commitments, we can see that the various players share a number of common points:
- “Carbon neutral” : This point of passage seems to agree on a definition where emissions are offset by compensation projects (avoidance and/or capture). For Microsoft, this means “offsetting their emissions with payments either to avoid a reduction in emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere”.
On this first point of passage, we note a few absentees, such as AWS. - “100% renewable” : Contrary to what you might think, this is not a commitment to consume 100% renewable electricity, whatever the time of day (see Google’s peculiarity on this subject below).
Rather, it’s a commitment that for every kWh consumed, 1 kWh of green electricity will be produced, but probably elsewhere on the planet.
Consequently, you cannot deduct from this commitment the actual carbon intensity consumed by your services during their use, as it is in no way representative of the carbon intensity of the electrical network to which the datacenter is connected. - “Net-zero carbon” : this commitment is clearly linked to the objectives of the Paris Agreement and of global carbon neutrality by 2050. In this case, no offsets purchased on the market, but carbon emissions naturally absorbed by the planet’s natural capacities.
It is clearly in this commitment that the contradiction highlighted by Ademe in its note is most evident.
As confusion reigns over the methodological definition of these objectives, it is not impossible (or even probable?) that each player has its own definition of what it means by these various terms. However, as these definitions are never clearly spelled out, these commitments are obviously to be taken with a great deal of mistrust and caution.
In addition, some providers are displaying particularities that are rarely found among the others:
- Google and Microsoft have committed to a real, 24x7 consumption of green electricity wherever they operate by 2030. This is an improved, “real-time” version of the previous “100% renewable” commitment.
Both Google and Microsoft are signatories to the Go Carbon Free 24x7 initiative. - Microsoft, for its part, has the most ambitious objective, since they consider that by 2050 they will have removed from the atmosphere all the carbon emitted by the company since its creation…
“Promises only bind those who believe them” !
Conclusions
The exercise of collecting and comparing environmental indicators and commitments from different Cloud providers is made tricky by the vagueness of the methodology and the grandiose claims made by certain players.
Clearly, these industrial players are demonstrating a certain efficiency in the management of their Datacenters and services, with PUE and WUE levels achieved that are without exception far better than those of ordinary private Datacenters.
We are convinced that a reasonable and informed use of Public Cloud services is an important ally from an environmental point of view, but that the requirements necessary for this “reasonable” use are unfortunately not yet in place.
Using one of these providers in no way relieves you of your responsibility to make a “fair” use of the resources you deploy.
The Cloud, beneath its alluring trappings and ethereal elasticity, is based on a very real materiality.
Even before deploying your first resource, you can make structuring choices, notably in the choice of region (carbon intensity in France can be more than 15 to 20 times lower than in Ireland), before using your supplier’s resources without falling into the usual pitfalls (over-quality, lack of measurement or compulsive hoarding!).
Similarly, it’s up to us, as members of the ecosystem gravitating around these Cloud Providers, to lobby them more than ever to obtain greater transparency and leverage from them.
References
AWS
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/four-trends-driving-global-utility-digitization/
- https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/aws-water-positive-methodology.pdf
- https://press.aboutamazon.com/2022/11/aws-makes-water-positive-commitment-to-return-more-water-to-communities-than-it-uses-by-2030
- https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud?energyType=true
AZURE
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft-measures-datacenter-water-and-energy-use-to-improve-azure-cloud-sustainability/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft-measures-datacenter-water-and-energy-use-to-improve-azure-cloud-sustainability/
- https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/21/microsoft-will-replenish-more-water-than-it-consumes-by-2030/
- https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/
- https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/07/14/made-to-measure-sustainability-commitment-progress-and-updates/
GCP
- https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2022-environmental-report.pdf
- https://sustainability.google/commitments/water/#water-at-google
- https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/carbon-neutrality-by-end-of-2007/
- https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/environment/meeting-our-match-buying-100-percent-renewable-energy/
- https://sustainability.google/progress/energy/
META
- https://sustainability.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Meta-2021-Sustainability-Report.pdf
- https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/restoring-water
- https://tech.facebook.com/engineering/2021/4/renewable-energy/
- https://sustainability.fb.com/climate/
OVH
- https://corporate.ovhcloud.com/fr/sustainability/environment/
- https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252491498/OVHcloud-doubles-down-on-sustainability-with-carbon-reduction-pledges
