How carbon-free is your cloud? | C2C Community

How carbon-free is your cloud?

  • 22 March 2021
  • 3 replies
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Userlevel 6
Badge +13

Did you know that Google Cloud customers can select Google Cloud regions based on the carbon-free energy supplying them? 

As Google works on increasing the CFE% for each of the Google Cloud regions, you can take advantage of locations with a higher percentage of carbon-free energy. You must also consider your data residency, performance and redundancy requirements, but there are some good ways to reduce the associated gross carbon emissions of your workload.   Read the details here

Is this topic important to you?  Do we have objectives in reducing the amount of energy that our operations utilize over time?  Do we set goals on minimizing carbon footprint and impact to data center operations?  Let us know if we should provide more discussion on this area of sustainability.  


3 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +15

The idea is great, and I’m happy that Google  is the first on this topic. However, this announcement is a “fake”. Not because it’s not real, but because only the data of 2019 are available.

 

I expected an API for that, real time CFE% of my app, monthly summary as I have with the billing…

It’s a good step in the right direction, but more a marketing one that an operational one. Let’s see what Google Next 21 in October announcements will be on that topic!

Userlevel 6
Badge +13

Thanks for your insight @guillaume blaquiere. It’s important to understand how this can impact customers in reality, and we all will be tuning into this year’s NEXT event to see what progress has been made.   Good point. 

Userlevel 6
Badge +15

I think that it can impact the customers and change their opinion when to deploy in a region or choose a Cloud Provider.

For a region, some customer can be ready to pay more to have a greener energy. It could be a requirement for some certifications, or to achieve some commitments (for marketing, customer, investor,...)

About Cloud Providers, it’s harder. A third party and independent company should audit all the cloud provider to measure the same things and thus to have a possible comparison. AWS and Azure don’t seem concerned about that question and if there isn’t data from their, comparison will be difficult. I don’t know what will be the real impact in the next few year in the choice of the customers...

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