Build Sustainably on Google Cloud Platform

cloud.google.com

17 points·nealmueller··7 comments

In order to really say something about sustainability not only the amount of renewable energy should be taken into account, but also how effective the energy is used (how much of the energy goes to IT processes, instead of cooling or other processes) and the way in which the energy is reused (in the form of heat).

Like described in article: https://eehpcwg.llnl.gov/documents/infra/06_energyreuseeffic...

And applied by cloud providers like Nerdalize who use their servers to heat homes: https://www.nerdalize.com/

> Reduce Compute Emissions to Zero By moving compute from a self managed data center or colocation facility to GCP, the emissions directly associated with your company’s compute and data storage will be zero.

So basically, you are still contributing to emissions, just not directly. Still, it is nice to see this problem addressed by Google. Does anyone know of a similar promise to use renewable resources by AWS?

Yeah, AWS has five regions that are classified as carbon neutral, listed near the bottom of this page: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/

> So basically, you are still contributing to emissions, just not directly.

I'm not quite understanding your point. They're just contracting exclusively with wind farms and solar energy. Is there a point I'm not seeing here? Sure, you might be burning non-renewable sources for your dev offices, but they have no control over that.

Does anybody know if this is truly carbon neutral, or just paid for with carbon offset credits?

Does only buying electricity from wind farms and solar energy count?

If you click through the first question mark in the first section of the announcement, it explains it very thoroughly.

Yeah, nice!

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