Author: Hannah Smith.
Based on initial research and insights by Ismael Velasco.
Reviewers and contributors: Ismael Velasco, Michael J. Oghia, Fershad Irani and Wim Vanderbauwhede.
Additional informal input and advice: Phillip Jenner and Chris Adams.
The core concept of shifting compute jobs to respond to the grid is a smart one. But there are only small-to-zero carbon reduction benefits from implementing most current carbon-aware time-shifting and location-shifting computing approaches.
If such approaches are adopted at scale without implementation constraints, they are likely to increase emissions and destabilise electricity grid systems. This does not improve the tech industry’s contributions to global sustainability, but rather worsens them. It also risks becoming, or is already, a greenwashing effort.
The key failure is never applying appropriate warning labels to draw attention to key caveats. Such as
This work is open source and licensed using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed).
In short you are free to use this work, but you must give appropriate credit to the author and link back to this repo.
https://github.com/climateaction-tech/grid-aware-software.
This body of work is divided into seven distinct sections:
Appendices
The body of work presented here, started after Ismael Velasco posted questions and research into CAT's Slack checking some research he was doing about carbon aware software and asking for input. Hannah Smith, amongst many others contributed to the discussion.
Following some debate on the issue within CAT's Slack, Hannah proposed the idea of working with Ismael to turn his initial findings/musings into a blog post for the wider CAT and developer community. The aim was to take the existing research and make it accessible to those with less experience in the topic.
As Hannah began to do this she thought that the article could go one step further in order to land constructively with the intended audience. She thought it needed to propose some clear, viable alternatives to the problems being highlighted. Afterall, those working on the topic of carbon aware software are doing so with the best of intentions and are all trying to do the same thing - find ways to get the tech sector to reduce it's carbon emissions.
She therefore played around and came up with the concept of 'grid-aware computing' (she's still not sure that title id the best one, but nevermind!). With the help of all the people credited in this article, including Ismael, she fleshed out and structured these ideas into the writing you see here.
If it were not for CAT this work would not have come to fruition on this way - thank you CAT for bringing people together and providing a safe space for people to explore their ideas!
We acknowledge the hard work of many, many people in the climate tech space. Many people who have for years been toiling away in their free time, outside of day jobs, in evenings, weekends and at times when they should probably be with loved ones, to try and shift the tech world into giving a damn and taking action on climate. For all those people who have gone ahead of us, we see you. We respect you and we're grateful to you.
Many of those people might well have contributed to the approaches to carbon aware we discuss and critique in this work.
Being critical about anyone's work is a delicate thing to get right, and we've tried super hard to strike a respectful and constructive tone. To open up debate. To open up possibilities. To make space for nuanced discussion on things we care about. But also to say what we think plainly.
We do not intend to dispirit or put down those who have worked hard to shift this industry. Quite the opposite.
Therefore, please read, comment on and discuss this work in the spirit that it came from - one of respect for those whose shoulders we stand on, constructive debate and progress in the right direction. Thank you.