Re: How many emissions in a GB?

Hi Ismael, Frédéric, and the rest of SustyWeb,

Thank you so much for sharing this, and thanks Frédéric for the added
comments onto the thread. This is really helpful and I hope it only sheds
light into what could become the KPI or methodology moving forward to gauge
the impact of websites onto the environment. I've been meaning to
contribute for a while but several things got in the way, so apologies for
the delay (and not sending some resources earlier to some of you!).

I mentioned it on our first meeting, I also attempted in the past to
evaluate the state of the art in Q3 2021 of the different calculators and
what their limitations could be wrt offering a reliable, accurate, and
helpful KPI for developers, as I was always quite surprised that the only
factor considered for a website's carbon footprint was the data transferred
over the wire.

   - Here's the document with 2021 state of the art surface analysis on Web
   carbon footprint measurement
   <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F_dHlIaw76qTGYpC2_D-L1RnBnHjQzP_nN8L6Ncz4HU/edit?resourcekey=0-mFte36dWgl_qjisTaNaUrg>
   (*very* outdated at the moment!).

I'm not a sustainability expert, so my approach has always been married to
the synergy between web (and mobile) performance and sustainability, and
being able to offer actionable advice. It feels like the approach of
current calculators don't have a holistic approach (e.g. not including the
end user's device into consideration, or the user's behaviour on the site),
and are considering scalar values for factors that might have more of an
impact (e.g. backend). There's also advice offered that it's not even
directly quantifiable as impactful with those methods (e.g. javascript or
animation optimisation for browser energy consumption reduction, or dark
mode).

With the help of the folks at Ryte <https://en.ryte.com/>, who also have their
own sustainability methodology
<https://en.ryte.com/platform/sustainability/>, we're trying to run a
benchmark of existing calculators and compare it with a baseline offered by
the carbon footprint measurement service
<https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint> that GCP offers (methodology
docs here <https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint/docs/methodology>).
Using that as a baseline, with the caveats that it entails, we'd like to
answer two questions: *how much deviation do the calculators offer vs a
measurement*, and h*ow much impact do the recommendations that any of us
advice have on actually reducing carbon footprint*, even if it's just on
the backend.

   - We'll be running this with the most popular calculators (listed in doc
   above), happy to share all details publicly for review, and *if anyone
   has another methodology or calculator, a set of recommendations they'd like
   us to test, or would like to get involved personally please do let me know*
   !

Another point of consideration which I believe is also covered by
Frédéric's comments is that network energy requirements aren't necessarily
correlated with data transfer. My original understanding towards some of
the tradeoffs made by current methodologies was that the energy consumption
on the end user's device was orders of magnitude lower than the energy
required for the data transfer, but considering that recent research
on Electricity
Consumption of European Telcos
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358833774_Electricity_Consumption_and_Operational_Carbon_Emissions_of_European_Telecom_Network_Operators/fulltext/622b33ab9f7b32463421fc93/Electricity-Consumption-and-Operational-Carbon-Emissions-of-European-Telecom-Network-Operators.pdf>
evaluates these factors at a subscription level and not at a transfer
level, or the fact that on networks such as fixed broadband CPE the energy
consumption is constant regardless whether there is any actual data
transfer by empirical measurement, which leads to question current models.

I would love to have a more in-depth conversation on the topic, if
possible. The lack of a KPI/measurement is one of the biggest obstacles
when it comes to being able to offer actionable advice or building a
standard, and any bit of discussion brings it a bit closer to becoming a
reality.

Best,
Zoe

P.S.: I try to keep my links as accessibility friendly as possible, but if
you have any feedback please let me know.

--
Zoe Lopez-Latorre
mSites Specialist Engineer @ Google
marialzlatorre or mariazoe@google.com

On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 10:01 PM Ismael Velasco <ismaelv.dev@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Salut Frédéric!
>
> I've had a chance to look at the excellent work in the repo you shared,
> and in the Neoctet site (and share it with others!). The French community
> continues to do fantastic work in this space, and I hope you are able to
> increase the translations for wider visibility.
>
> Reading the comparative study of in person vs virtual meetings was
> fascinating and counter intuitive in some respects. Bravo.
>
> I would definitely be interested in reading any work you can share on your
> estimations from the LCA of the French site with the parameters you cited..
>
> Would also be interested in learning more about how your LCA database
> differs from the Big Ones that have become mainstream among LCA
> practitioners.
>
> Finally, I wonder how your estimates would account for providers like
> Google, who claim full carbon neutrality,  and who have introduced, like
> Cloudflare,  options to use exclusively renewable energy powered zones at
> any given time.
>
>
> On Mon, 22 Aug 2022, 02:43 Frédéric Bordage, <info@greenit.fr> wrote:
>
>> Hello Ismael,
>>
>> Thanks for this try.
>>
>> There are several important points to notice.
>>
>> 1. No linearity
>>
>> Network.
>> There's no linearity of environmental costs for fixed lines (DSL, fiber)
>> and HDD. That means that we should better not divide a number of GB
>> exchanged by the environmental cost of the infrastructure. This is
>> nonsense.
>> One the other hand, environmental impacts of 4G / 5G are much more linear.
>>
>> Storage.
>> Same situation for storage. We should better not divide the environmental
>> cost of producing and using an hardrive disk (HDD) by its capacity of
>> storage. This is non linear.
>> One the other hand, environmental impacts of SSD are much more linear.
>>
>>
>> 2. LCA methodology
>>
>> From a methodological perspective, one should better use the Life Cycle
>> Assessment (LCA approach) which is based on standards (ISO 14040 and ISO
>> 14044) and is commonly used in most of the world to assess environmental
>> impacts. In Europe, where I'm based, you must use this methodology to
>> assess the environmental impact of digital stuff. See
>> https://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/smgp/ef_methods.htm
>>
>>
>> 3. NegaOctet and EcoIndex
>> As part of the NegaOctet.org and EcoIndex (see https://github.com/cnumr/)
>> projects, we already calculated an average environmental cost for a web
>> page.  The first approach (NegaOctet) is based on an LCA modeling peer
>> reviewed by a French public research body. The second project is based on
>> another LCA of one of the top 10 French website.
>>
>> Environmental impacts already calculated:
>> Write, send and read an email
>> Watch 1 hour of streaming video
>> Download or upload
>> Store in the cloud
>> Set up a webconference
>> Set up a audioconference
>> Search for an information
>>
>> For each of these functional units, we have several scenarios based on
>> different parameters. And for each scenario, we provide 29 environmental
>> impacts - Global Warming Potential, Ionising radiations, Abiotic resources
>> depletion, Water Usage, etc. - based on international and european
>> standards (ISO 14040/44, PEF, etc.).
>>
>> If it's of interest for the group, I would ask my partners if they allow
>> me to provide some web environmental impact factors to this working group.
>>
>> Best,
>> Fred
>> +33 6 16 95 96 01 <+33%206%2016%2095%2096%2001>
>> GreenIT,.fr founder
>> We provide data about the digital world's environmental impacts.
>>
>>
>> Le lun. 22 août 2022 à 01:13, Ismael Velasco <ismaelv.dev@gmail.com> a
>> écrit :
>>
>>> I thought this might be of interest to the community, in terms of the
>>> need to choose metrics for measuring the carbon impact of the applications
>>> we design.
>>>
>>> https://ismaelvelasco.dev/emissions-in-1gb
>>>
>>> I've written a blog that goes into the range of factors involved in
>>> determining the CO2 emissions of data transmissions.  I've all of these
>>> referenced in various articles, but haven't come across one that references
>>> them all in the same place, with tools and strategies for choosing how to
>>> evaluate and monitor emissions from data.
>>>
>>> TLDR: There is no straightforward metric available (possible?), and the
>>> emissions of 1GB will vary by hardware, software, use case and grid
>>> intensity. More particularly the emissions will vary by source, device,
>>> model, signal type, transfer protocol, active software, use case and grid
>>> energy source at a particular moment.
>>>
>>> I give a brief intro to each in my article, and recommend the focus be
>>> on improvement over exactitude, emission reduction over precision tracking,
>>> iterating over time to improve and refine metrics.
>>>
>>> This would be relevant when it comes to issuing guidelines, or
>>> integrating emissions tracking into browsers, in dev tools or more
>>> prominently. Likewise when it comes to green web certification projects..
>>>
>>> Appreciate any feedback!
>>>
>>