Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.
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How could you extend YANG to verify clean electricity claims?
These are some notes put together, after attending the two day IRTF “Sustainability and the Internet” workshop in Passau, Germany, on learning that there was a IETF hackathon that had a focus on the provenance of energy readings. There will be a broader follow-up post about the IRTF event, but I am dashing this one…
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Is this *really* a good reason to triple datacentre capacity in Europe?
As part of my day job, I end up thinking a lot about the decarbonisation of the digital sector. Recently we have seen laws proposed to prioritise building a bunch of massive datacentres in Europe ahead of actually following the science and taking the steps to clean up the economy. Some information has come available…
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Understanding the potential of solar & batteries for getting off fossil fuels for electricity
I came across an astonishing long read / report on Friday that I’ve linked below, and if you have any interest in the energy transition, or moving on from fossil fuels, I really recommend you spend the the time to read through it and play around with visualisation in each section. Here’s the link: The…
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Running WordPress on SQLite – part 1
Earlier this week I switched my personal site, this WordPress site, to run on SQLite instead of MySQL as the backing database for it. You might be wondering why. Well, this post explains why. In then next post, I’ll explain how to do it. I had initially planned to jump straight in with a guide…
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On using solar & batteries to provide 90% of the world population with 90% of their electricity demand for below 90 €/MWh
I came across this wild stat today, from an energy modelling friend, Tom Brown, who had another modeller refine it to provide the 90/90/90 framing, that I want more people to know about. Basically, at at 2030 prices, solar and batteries can provide 90% of the world population with 90% of their electricity demand for…
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How to use GenAI models if you care about the energy they consume
This is (was?) a short post, to collate some of the work I’ve been doing over the last few months, to better understand the environmental footprint of using various generative AI tools, particularly for coding. I’ve already written a little about the tension between AI the tool and AI the project – generative AI is…
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If 24/7 clean energy matching is good for the company buying it, is it good for anyone else too?
I’m jotting this down because I made an abortive attempt to write a blog post about this property of 24/7 fossil free / carbon free energy a couple of months ago, and I was hunting around for the draft for quite a while before realising that I must have deleted it or lost it somewhere.…
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Is this EnergyNet thing legit?
The other week I learned about the existence of the EnergyNet project. It’s essentially a project to, in the words of David Roberts in a recent podcast, “Make the electricity grid work like the internet”. I’m jotting a few notes here for others as it took a bit of searching to find them, and having…
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How I think of decarbonising the energy used by datacentres on the grid
At work, we’re rethinking how we represent the steps organisations take to transition away from fossil fuels powering the datacentres they use. One thing making it more complicated is that the current way of recognising people using clean energy has all kinds of issues, so there is a new, more rigourous approach being developed. These…
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Takeaways, trends and notes from Green IO Paris 2025
I just got back to Berlin tonight after being at Green IO, a conference in Paris in its third year, that is dedicated to the fields of digital sustainability and Green IT. Before I forget, I figure it’s worth sharing a few takeaways from sifting through about a bajillion pics of slides, and all notes…
Got any book recommendations?