[Context] Choice of signal for I

[jawache]

Created a context document to provide a central place to put background, context, motivations, research, lore - all the contextual information which is needed to properly discuss a topic.

This is not intended to form part of the spec.

[ciril-emaps]

Some thoughts from my side:

The overall goal of this document is to provide a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the discussion and the important aspects of it. As far as I have understood, this document should inform the discussion around what carbon intensities to use as signals in the SCI. To this end, I believe it would be helpful to clearly specify why the discussion was started and what the implications of such changes would be. To facilitate this, I suggest the following:

• Clearly state the topic of discussion and what the intended change is in the beginning of the document. (I proposed a first pass)
• Focus only on providing information that is relevant to this discussion. I do believe that it is important to raise the limitations of the GHGP and today's version of Scope 2, but I do think this can be done in a much shorter, more concise way. We are discussing which signals to use and not why Scope 2 is ineffective.
• More prominently position the pros and cons of multiple different signals and provide sources.
• Provide more information around which use cases would benefit from which signals and why.

This topic is vast and complex for everyone to keep an overview and I believe it would be helpful to focus on information that is helpful in this specific discussion.

[ciril-emaps]

I do think that the precise topic of discussion needs to be clearly stated at the top of this document. My suggestion for an addition is:

Topic of Discussion

The reason why this discussion was opened is to have a conversation around which emission factors should be permitted for use in the SCI. As PR #353 raises, it is unnecessary to restrict the SCI to a single carbon intensity metric and it therefore recommends to open up the SCI to allow for multiple, equally relevant signals. Removing this restriction enables the application of the SCI to more use cases and thus supports the adoption of the SCI.

[GadhuNTTDATA]

Comments from me:

• A vast majority of the intended audience for SCI will be software engineers who will not have a good understanding of the intricacies around selecting the correct signal and hence the standard should provide appropriate guidance
• Since there is an ongoing debate in the academic world that is likely continue until further research happens and there is some convergence of views, the GSF should not take sides at this point
• The GSF should provide options for use of signals for the I value in SCI and encourage the audience to use the at least one of them consistently as opposed to ignoring it because it is difficult to calculate or the data is not available.
• Based on the above, I recommend extending the options to use not only LRMER, SRMER or AER but also to Annual National Averages where more granular data is not available
• The standard itself should contain a very short description of the signals but detailed guidance should be available for how the different signals can be used for different scenarios. The scenarios should reflect practical decisions that the intended audience will be able to control, for example:
  • What signal to use if you have to choose between two data centres operating in two different countries
  • What signal to use if you are considering implementing temporal load shifting within a data centre for workloads that run on a daily basis so that it is scheduled for least emissions impact.

[Henry-WattTime]

'i' shall be the carbon intensity of the grid that evaluates long and short term change in emissions.

'i' shall either be the short run marginal, long run marginal, or average emissions grid intensity.

'i' shall be the carbon intensity of the grid.

Leave it as it is (i shall be the marginal grid emissions intensity)

Abstain

[Henry-WattTime]

Straw poll results

[Henry-WattTime]

Action item for @ciril-emaps and @Henry-WattTime to integrate the change for option 2

[Henry-WattTime]

WG approved pull request https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/sci/pull/358 which addresses this.