Category: work
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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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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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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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Do tech firms need to report their revenue from the oil and gas sector now?
At work, we’re building some open source software to make it possible to parse corporate disclosures that a growing number of companies need to publish for the world to see. These are largely being driven by new laws passed around the world about corporate transparency, and I’m sharing a question here that I’d like some…
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2025 is the year that the RE100 change how they recognise green claims
I’ve been following Flexidao for a while, and they recently published an interesting post about updates from the RE100, and the new way the recognise claims around Green Energy. I figured it’s worth sharing here as I think it has implications on how people talk about green energy in datacentres – a long running, and…
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Why talk about monopoly in the context of climate change?
This came up in a recent conversation about sustainability in the digital sector, because the answer isn’t immediately obvious. To understand it, I think you need to understand why we have antitrust or competition laws in the first place. When they were first brought about bout in the first half of the 20th century, there…
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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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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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Options to make software greener without changing the code, and how to remember them
I’ve been doing some research into carbon aware computing, and I’m trying to find a memorable way to talk about the choices available to you when you want to deploy computing resources in a responsible way, but can not change the underlying code of the application. This post summarises a couple of recent papers, and…