Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.
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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…
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Wow tech firms STILL need to report their revenue from oil and gas sector, even after reporting standards have been ‘simplified’?
In Europe, I’ve been tracking the passage of a set of reporting standards that a significant law, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) uses to layout precisely what a information large companies have to disclose. Even after an effort to gut reporting laws, it looks like companies STILL have to report their revenue from the…
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Are the big hyperscalers reporting power consumption in Germany like the laws say they’re supposed to?
I noticed something recently that I can’t find an clear explanation for, so I’m posting it here to help understand what’s going on. In the European Union, there is a sort of law called the Energy Efficiency Directive, which I’ve written about before, and this relevant when we think about data centres and decarbonising the…
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Default to calling it ‘carbon pollution’, not ‘carbon emissions’, when talking about climate change
I’ve heard a few people use this specific framing of greenhouse gas emissions when talking about climate change, but it hasn’t become a real habit for me. This is a quick note for me to refer back to later. There is a now lots and lots of peer reviewed research, and advice from communications professionals…
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Can you phase out oil and gas in the UK with CFDs at 14 GBP per MWh?
This is a quick note, because a report I was keeping an eye out for is now in the public domain. As I understand it, it was commissioned by Dale Vince of Ecotricity, and presented at the UK Labour party in September, and lays out a ‘mid-transition’ argument for effectively bailing out oil and gas…
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Even with proprietary GenAI models, you can influence the environmental impact of use through supplier choice
I came across an interesting paper, How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference via a post on social media by a friend of mine, Asim Hussein, and one of the details surprised me enough to want to capture it here. What was worth writing down then? It’s on page…
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Google’s expenditure on AI is eye watering
Before I saw this chart, I knew that the hyperscalers had been spending huge amounts on datacentre infrastructure, but I had some vague idea that Amazon was spending the most, followed by Microsoft, then and Google. Boy was I wrong. Google has been outspending the other huge hyperscalers since 2018 This chart is from an…
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AI the tool vs AI the project
It’s the weekend, I’m trying to close down a bunch of tabs, and one tab I hadn’t realised I had open was this piece by Andy Masley about AI-generated images he’s been creating with Midjourney. Before it disappears into the either, I figured it was worth jotting a few thoughts down. Here’s the quote(s) that…
Got any book recommendations?