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Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability
To make sense of our world, we often form incomplete, yet still useful mental models of how it works. Most of the time these are helpful, but when we are dealing with complex systems, what might feel intuitively right, can lead to outcomes totally at odds with we were initially aiming to achieve. This post…
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Hydrogen datacentres – is this legit?
Part of my job at work is to stay up to date about the options for decarbonisation of the digital sector. I listened to a podcast yestersday where there were a load of claims that seemed well.. too good to be true, even with my developing knowledge of the sector. I’ll outline them below, because…
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How much power do hyperscalers use, and how much would it cost to go fossil-free 24 / 7 ?
I found out today that the Carbon Disclosure Project allows you to register and download their questionnaire responses. This means for companies that conveniently leave absolute energy usage figures out of their annual reporting, it’s possible to get an idea of what they might be – something I care about in the context of figuring…
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A new Californian law on offsets goes a long way to making them more transparent
This came up on one of my feeds recently. Emphasis is mine from the original text on the Californian legislation website detailing the bill: AB 1305, Gabriel. Voluntary carbon market disclosures. This bill would require a business entity that is marketing or selling voluntary carbon offsets, as defined, within the state to disclose on the…
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Listening notes: zero carbon cement on the Volts podcast
I listen to quite a few podcasts, and as an experiment in Jan 2024, I’m going to try to share the notes from ones that stand out for me. This is partly as a way to retain what I learn, and share with others, but get better at writing quickly. The first one is an…
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Fixed broadband growth is slowing down
In my line of work, it’s common to see charts of ever growing internet usage, and projecting growth rates forward to reach eye-opening levels. It turns out the data in the last few years suggests that at least for fixed broadband, this isn’t happening as much people might think. This quote from a post by…
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2023 in Review
I’ve always been impressed by people who manage to get their annual “year in review” posts each year, and the first time in years, I think I might actually have a chance to get one written before the year closes. I don’t have long, so off I go…
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TIL: buildpacks can rebase to save needless compute work
CNCF buildpacks have a nice trick that if you work with dockerfiles a lot you might appreciate.
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I had no idea Nigeria had so much off grid energy
While doing some research for a coming episode of the Environment Variables, I ended up looking up information about Nigeria’s power grid – I knew grid coverage was patchy, but I had no idea, there was so much off site generation. Look at the map below, from the IEA page! Most of the time these…
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Half formed idea: energy gravity and an energy gradient
I’m sharing this idea in half-baked form, because increasingly, when I think about electricity grid, I want to visualise it in this way to help understand the differences between various ways a power grid can be structured. If you think of energy has a gradient in the Z-axis where resources (as in generation) are peaks,…