Saving CO2 using location and time shifting in Azure | Hacker News Reader

Saving CO2 using location and time shifting in Azure

devblogs.microsoft.com

34 pointskomape30 comments

Love the ElectricityMaps shoutout [1]. For those who may say, "why?", consider orgs that are climate/carbon aware as well as upcoming supply chain emissions reporting obligations (US SEC [2] [3] [4] [5]). If you can shift your workloads to lower carbon intensity time slices, please consider doing so!

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map?wind=false&solar=false

[2] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-46

[3] https://www.sec.gov/securities-topics/climate-esg

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/secs-climate-disclosure-rule-is...

[5] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/audit/articles/sec-cli...

(no affiliation with any org mentioned)

The link 404s and should be updated to https://devblogs.microsoft.com/ise/saving-co2-using-location... instead

Neat use of data. Probably not possible for Azure to do this but the way to drive this kind of change would be dynamic pricing of compute based on the localized generation cost. Lots of road blocks to implement this including quantifying how the DC is getting charged but I think interesting and the most probable way to incentive companies to do this.

In general ESG reporting is pretty lackluster since its hard to set the acceptable metrics.

CO² tax would likely be effective here.

Reminds me of iPhone Clean Energy Charging - making small adjustments to charging patterns across all iPhones to have a (hopefully) measurable impact

Is the impact actually even measurable, let alone meaningful? Or is it simply green-washing to sell more product to a consumer base primed for such marketing?

https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-charging-...

> The latest version of iOS has a new daemon (a process that runs in the background) that collects carbon emission data from the local load balancing authority (like the US EIA) based on the device’s location. Then, iOS also downloads a carbon emission forecast from a server. With all this data combined, the system controls when Clear Energy Charging goes into action.

> As a result, iOS 16 will wait to charge the iPhone at a time when power grids are less constrained and more clean energy capacity is available. With recent concerns about power grid capacity in US states like Texas and California, this feature couldn’t come at a better time – and will certainly be very useful for other Apple products as well.

Consider how broad efficiency measures (Energy Star, LEDs, etc) have kept electric demand flat in the US; that is generation that will never have to be built.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/us-electricity-demand-flat-since-2...

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/2/27/1705248...

(if I can find objective measures of this Apple feature, I will start a new thread)

That doesn’t really address the concern.

Genuine question: What's the concern? An iPhone doesn't charge as fast or as much as it could? It is an opt in feature that can be trivially turned off. No one is buying into the Apple ecosystem or an iPhone because of clean charging. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and the whole "Apple doesn't really care about the environment, these are just platitudes" is a tired argument not worth having.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108068

also:

> When Clean Energy Charging suspends charging, a notification on the Lock Screen says when your iPhone will be fully charged. If you need to have your iPhone fully charged sooner, touch and hold the notification and then tap Charge Now.

There is something like 135M iPhones in the US, for scale. Each device is immaterial, but that is a material amount of aggregate load that can be orchestrated. And all we're saying is "heh! if you don't need to charge right now, wait until the local grid carbon intensity is forecasted to be lower." Same as we do for EVs, thermostats (Nest "rush hour" and similar load shedding ops), etc.

The concern is diverting or otherwise mitigating attention to climate change on impressive-sounding, but ultimately meaningless distractions, all the while flamboyantly bragging about it and bolstering one's self image.

I do not see demand side management as a meaningless distraction.

People are already accustomed to the idea of running their laundry or dishwasher based of time-of-day electricity pricing.

Apple is introducing people to the idea that they can also change their electricity usage patterns based on how “green” the marginal electricity production is. The familiarity people gain here can be build upon for laptop, which have a bigger energy draw, and eventually for their electric cars.

You say it's not a meaningless distraction, but fail to make a reasonable argument for how it "saves" the environment, or whatever. Running laundry or charging an AV at a different time of day doesn't materially impact energy usage and emissions, it just increases the bottom line of the utility company.

> Running laundry or charging an AV at a different time of day doesn't materially impact energy usage and emissions,

Doing it when there is surplus renewable capacity has beneficial impact on emissions compared to doing it when marginal demand is met by fossil fuel sources, even though it doesn't impact total energy usage.

Everyone's heard about the "duck curve". Part of that shape is due to demand. The demand associated with people leaving for work and coming back home. [0]

> Running laundry or charging an AV at a different time of day doesn't materially impact energy usage and emissions, it just increases the bottom line of the utility company.

This is objectively false. The non-uniform nature of the energy demand necessitates, currently, natural gas peaking plants. Time of use pricing, and demand side management allows us to spread/shift those peak to times where the peaking plants would not come online.

And those peaking plants are very expensive, since their contract with the utility company includes getting paid for idling those plants waiting for the peaks to occur. Getting rid of these plants, lower the price to the consumer AND lowers emissions generated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

The concern is that it’s a bullshit distraction that doesn’t do anything. It’s like farting into a hurricane to reduce how far it goes inland.

EVs and thermostats make complete sense because they dominate energy consumption.

I think 10 minutes less of air conditioning will probably offset the entire lifetime of my iPhone’s energy consumption.

We are in an attention constrained world and people focusing on shit like this to make themselves feel like they are helping when they should be replacing insulation in homes or building solar is a real issue.

It’s the same thing as making restaurants ask before providing water to “solve the drought”.

It is probably not very impactful alone, however Apple is very good at setting trends that everyone else wants to copy, for better or for worse (TouchID, the notch...). Apply the same heuristic to bigger appliances, cars or servers as in the article and it starts to be impactful.

They have set trends, but not good ones: abusive labor practices abroad, implication in spying and surveillance, behaviorally conditioning people to buy new devices every year, while also slowing down and breaking old ones. To think Apple does anything, let alone green-washing, for a purpose other than marketing is naive.

An iPhone battery can maybe hold 20Wh. 1kWh of electricity produces maybe 500g CO2 assuming the current power generator mix in the USA. Even a typical european easily causes 30kg of CO2 a day. 10g of that would go to charging an iPhone once a day. So the impact is completely negligible.

The tragedy of commons at work. Each individual iPhone is a very small consumer of energy, but Apple has 2 billion active devices in the wild. 10g x 2 billion devices is suddenly quite significant and worthwhile. It's an interesting win that probably didn't actually take that many resources to implement. It won't come close to solving climate change on its own, but it's certainly not doing any harm and I'd much rather Apple implement it rather than not bothering.

No, it's not more significant or worthwhile if you compare it to the emissions of 8 billion people. It's still negligible.

There is a reason reduce is the first R. Not consuming energy in the first place is less carbon emitted today and less generation capacity that needs to be transitioned. It really is an 'every little bit helps' situation. Dismissing solutions as too small ignores the fact we need hundreds of thousands of small solutions along with many, many big ones.

Eating an animal-product based lunch will use more energy than years of iPhone usage. This is certainly not a "every little bit helps" situation - it is about managing our attention on things which actually matter, when there is a war going on to distract us from it.

There are over 100 million iPhones in the US...

And over 300 million people. What's your point? The percentages stay the same. Or even go down.

My point is they’re still preventing carbon emissions. It’s not like it took the whole company halting work to get it done.

The question was whether it's a meaningful contribution to climate change. I showed with my back of the envelope calculation that it's not. I did not say that it shouldn't be done.

But that you're saving a minuscule amount of carbon still doesn't change the fact that it's feel good activism that does nothing about the real challenges, which lie in transportation, agriculture and infrastructure. These contribute to huge chunks of our emissions, are indispensable and at the same time cannot be solved simply by switching to green electricity. Every time we feel good about saving 0.03% of our emissions gives us a reason not to feel so bad about the 70% of our emissions that are the real problem for which practically anyone has not even a good idea yet.

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