Carbon Emissions Calculator— a small step towards Carbon Neutrality
This article was originally published on the Version 1 website here. You can read it here Discover Your Carbon Emissions Savings with our Calculator (version1.com)
A quick check of your time-line, stories, news feed - it is very likely that you’ll find “global warming”, “carbon neutrality”, “green emissions” or related terms showing up.
The global spotlight on the annual COP summit is yet another indicator that humankind is not ignoring the consequences of global warming, at least not some of them.
Information and Communication technologies span most, if not all, sectors of commerce, and is expected to contribute up to 20% of the global electricity consumption in 2025. Leading firms have realised the impact of this and made the following claims:
By 2030, we’ll be carbon negative, and by 2050, we’ll remove our historical emissions since our founding in 1975. — Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability )
We’re on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. — AWS (https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud?energyType=true)
On a positive note, Cloud service providers (CSPs) are geared to play their part, promising to reduce an organisation’s carbon emissions by moving their workloads to cloud. Customers and other organisations are keen to learn more, and achieve their own net zero emission targets, but is there a way to accurately quantify these reductions?
The cost benefits can be ascertained with in-depth cost-analysis, but what about the carbon emission savings? CSPs currently provide some form of carbon footprint tooling to give their existing customers a measure of the carbon emissions as a result of their workloads running on cloud.
- Microsoft — Emissions Impact Dashboard for Azure
- AWS — Customer Carbon Footprint Tool
- Cloud Carbon Footprint(CCF), an open source tool to measure and analyse your carbon emissions, offers the ability to integrate with the 3 major CSPs.
Organisations can utilise these to identify their progress towards greener operations with their current cloud workloads. However, what if you are yet to move to cloud, but want to know the potential savings as a result of the migration?
AWS claims up to 88% reduction in carbon emissions, where as Microsoft stakes this at 98%. Microsoft does provide another tool that takes in few parameters with regards to your on-premise workload and gives you an instant report, but this calculation doesn’t appear to take into consideration your servers’ running times, utilisation, or memory. Neither does it consider the on-prem power usage effectiveness and carbon intensity values, key factors in determining your carbon emissions from IT workload.
With this gap in mind, we here at Innovation Labs in Version 1, inspired by the work done on the tools listed earlier, have developed an API which can consume a detailed set of your current workload and migration recommendations to work out your potential carbon emission savings. With the help of another bespoke supporting tool we periodically update datasets, that are used to estimate both on-prem and cloud emissions, from publicly available sources.
We went further and designed a Power BI app to visualise the output of the API.
The API and the visualisation will enable customers see the potential benefits of moving there on-premise workload to cloud, even allow them to compare between different cloud regions, and even suggest alternative regions to move to, understandably, subject to jurisdiction and latency concerns.
In conclusion, the Version 1 Carbon Emission Calculator can fill in gaps that other calculators fail to account for such as the effectiveness of your on-premises IT power usage and carbon emissions resulting from them. And more importantly, our calculator takes into consideration key metrics such as server running times, utilisation, and memory, that existing calculators do not consider.
Keeping in mind that Cloud migration and cloud operations pose their own challenges, cloud servers are key to developing IT infrastructure that is scalable, secure, and sustainable for decades to come.
Learn more about Version 1’s migration carbon emission savings calculator here.
About the Author
Arun Pillai is a .Net Azure Technical Lead, and works at the Version 1 Innovation Labs.
To read more about Version 1 Innovation Labs click here.
