COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
It sounds like this project is for their own operations. Have you guys thought about how to offer this closer to a turnkey cloudops SASS / API? What kinds of abstractions would you present to developers building non-time-critical compute loads?
Could be a great differentiator for GCP vs. AWS (I have heard of some companies choosing GCP over AWS due to Google's green energy cloud). And for you guys, the only thing better than Google being a customer is all of Google's customers being your customers.
If a data center has (roughly, to a first-order approximation) fixed compute capacity at any point in time, and we assume that any capacity not being used by Google themselves is made available to GCP, then wouldn't Google reserving the "green" hours for themselves drive the remaining "dirty" hours onto the GCP spot markets?
Is there a cloud market design that addresses this tension between maximizing utilization and having desirable or 'premium' compute hours?
I wish there would be more countries covered (in particular Switzerland), but I guess you depend on the live data being provided in these countries.
Unfortunately, the crux is data availability and reliability from system/transmission operators. For example, there is no online data available for the Northern Territory of Australia, so you can't build a parser for it. Some data providers have frequent data outages for different regions (ENTSOE), as there is no SLA or contractual obligation for providing data reliably.
If you're aware of a region that has live data available and is not yet live on electricitymap.org, please consider contributing a parser [1]! If you live in a region without live data, please consider politely requesting such data be made available through utility and system operator contacts, or explore requiring such data be made available by law (if public policy is your thing).
[1] https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib#adding-a-n...
Given that the 28th Mar 2019 has long passed, I am not very optimistic that the feed will be restored anytime soon... and unfortunately I don't know of any other (e.g. primary) public source, either.
Would you mind commenting on what your tech stack is like? Looking at your github repo it seems like you're combining a lot of data sources. Can you comment on your approach? Also, considering this collaboration, are you running on GCP?
Also, feel free to join our Slack at https://slack.tmrow.com to ask your questions!
Somewhat related, the presentation has a lot of math, which illustrates some of the points made in the recent HN discussion of the impact and effects of math instruction in Russia (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144). Some comments pointed out how French schools rely on math for entrance exams, and this video a clear demonstration of a software startup having a math background. In fact, the startup probably wouldn't exist or even be conceived without the math and modeling of the data they provide.
I personally think the documentary doesn't go far enough about the cultural aspect. I'm speaking specifically of the social norms of conformity, sociopathy and narcissism in the decision making classes. We have fucked future generations for short term gains and the only hope the tech community can come up with is to pretend that we will build rockets to go to Mars. When the kids of the billionaires pushing this horseshit get preventable cancers or tangled up in a class war - maybe then things will change (albeit I doubt it). Until then, it's all bean bags, idiocy, shiny tech toys and fluff. Enjoy it while it last. The magic bullet of nuclear fusion doesn't seem to be likely and the social organization to leverage what we have in a responsible manner doesn't either. We will keep doing what we are doing until nature bitch slaps us and we have to change. Hopefully I'm wrong. I want to be.