In fact, you can effect much more change that you might realise…

On today’s episode of Green IO, Gaël is joined by Andrea Learned, a renown communications strategist who’s using her skills to revolutionise the conversation around sustainability. Andrea’s specialty is climate leadership - but that doesn’t mean her insights are exclusive to the C-Suite. As she explains it, all of us have the power to impact our professional workspaces and communities.

And it starts with employing the hidden power of being seen actually living your values.

During this conversation, Gaël and Andrea cover:

▪️Overcoming societal fragmentation
▪️Joy as an act of resistance
▪️Effective micro-influencing
▪️Shifting leadership norms
▪️Resetting our goals

And much, much more.

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.
---

Connect with Andrea
▪️Website: https://andrealearned.com
▪️Bluesky: Andrea Learned | Name & Fame host  Ⓥ 🚲 (@andrealearned.bsky.social)
▪️Podcast: Name and Fame, with Andrea Learned 

Connect with Gaël and Green IO:
▪️Green IO - Podcast and conferences for responsible technologists 
▪️Slack: https://greenio-podcast.slack.com
▪️YouTube: Green IO
▪️Gaël's website: https://www.gaelduez.com

---

Referenced in this episode:
▪️Podcast: Name and Fame, with Andrea Learned
▪️Podcast: Living Change Podcast | Andrea Learned
▪️Book: https://www.book-info.com/isbn/0-8144-0815-X.htm

---

🎁 Want to accurately measure your team’s environmental impact? Try ResilioDB for 90 days. Use code GREENIO26: Resilio Database
📣 Green IO Conferences are back in 2026! Early bird tickets and speaking applications: Green IO | Global Conferences
✉️ Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news on digital sustainability: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📧 Share your feedback & suggest future guests/topics:contact@greenio.tech
🔗 Episode transcript: Green IO 

Or should we be adapting our sustainability metrics to focus on more meaningful elements of the digital streaming supply chain?

Here to discuss many common misconceptions around network energy consumption, is Dom Robinson. Dom is the founder and CSO at Greening of Streaming, an organisation brining together tech providers and media companies with the aim of reducing our environmental impact. He’s steadfast in his belief that we can better engineer and design digital networks to achieve that goal, without hindering speeds, availability or the overall user experience.

From radio to streaming, Dom provides an easy to follow, insider’s guide to the different types of digital networks, and how they consume energy. He also shares insights on how we can better scale our networks and why Big Tech’s digital sustainability efforts are often profit-driven.

Gaël and Dom also discuss:

◼️ Retiring the mantra of ‘use less data to save the planet’
◼️ Do modern networks really use less power?
◼️ How much impact will ‘AI’ have on networks?
◼️ Attribution model vs consequential analysis
◼️ More efficient network design

 And much, much more.

❤️ Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

---

Connect with Dom Robinson:

◼️ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domrobinson/

 

Connect with Gaël and Green IO:

◼️ Website: https://greenio.tech
◼️ YouTube: Green IO
◼️ Slack: https://greenio-podcast.slack.com
◼️ Gaël: https://www.gaelduez.com

---

Referenced in this episode:

◼️ Paper: Position Paper on AI in Streaming Sustainability
◼️ Article: The carbon footprint of streaming video: fact-checking the headlines – Analysis - IEA
◼️ Article: Factcheck: What is the carbon footprint of streaming video on Netflix? - Carbon Brief
◼️ Article: The Shift Project a-t-il vraiment surestimé l’empreinte carbone de la vidéo en ligne ? - The Shift Project
◼️ Interview: The Impact of AI on the Network 

◼️ Talk: The Internet is getting emptier; that's a sustainability problem by Romain Jacob (Green IO Paris 2025)

---

🎁 Want to accurately measure your team’s environmental impact? Try ResilioDB for 90 days. Use code GREENIO26: Resilio Database

📣 Green IO Conferences are back in 2026! Early bird tickets and speaking applications: Green IO | Global Conferences 

✉️ Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news on digital sustainability:
https://newsletter.greenio.tech

📧 Share your feedback & suggest future guests/topics:
contact@greenio.tech

🔗 Episode transcript:
https://podcast.greenio.tech

And much, much more.

❤️ Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

---Connect with Gerry McGovern:
◼️ Website: Home

Connect with Gaël and Green IO:
◼️ Website: https://greenio.tech 

◼️ YouTube: Green IO
◼️ Slack: https://greenio-podcast.slack.com
◼️ Gaël: https://www.gaelduez.com

---Referenced in this episode:
◼️ Book: 99th Day: A Warning About Technology
◼️ Book : World Wide Waste
◼️ Article: Doughnut | Kate Raworth
◼️ Study: (PDF) The information catastrophe

---
🎁 Want to accurately measure your team’s environmental impact? Try ResilioDB for 90 days. Use code GREENIO26: Resilio Database

📣 Green IO Conferences are back in 2026! Early bird tickets and speaking applications: https://greenio.tech/conferences

✉️ Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news on digital sustainability:
https://newsletter.greenio.tech

📧 Share your feedback & suggest future guests/topics:
contact@greenio.tech🔗

Episode transcript:
https://podcast.greenio.tech 

And much, much more.

If you’re listening to this, be sure to check out the full video version on Spotify or YouTube, at the links below.

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📣 Green IO Conferences are back in 2026. Get early bird tickets and apply to speak: https://greenio.tech/conferences

---
🎁 Our sponsor’s gift! With the code GREENIO26 Resilio grants you access to test ResilioDB for 90 days (incl. 50 API calls, 50 webpage requests and the full access to the documentation). 
---

Connect with Chris Adams:

Connect with Gaël and Green IO:

---

Referenced in this episode:

---

Perhaps a radical idea to some, but that’s one of the main aims of Faiphone, a mobile phone maker that’s all about creating systemic change from within the industry.

And as Fairphone Tech Lead Agnes Crepet explains, this goal isn’t just a lofty ambition, but something that is actually being achieved thanks to the participation of chipset makers, suppliers, factories, software vendors and everyone in between.

Since joining Fairphone over seven years ago, Agnes has helped the company deliver on the promise of creating ethical, social and environmental impact by designing and building products that put people and planet first. That means pioneering fairer working conditions, ensuring a living wage, considerations of materials and where they are sourced, and a focus on device longevity through end-user repairability and extended software support.

But, that’s only half the story…

Gaël and Agnes discuss some big topics, including:

And much more.

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.
📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📣 Green IO next Conferences are already planned (Singapore, NY, Amsterdam and Munich): https://greenio.tech/conferences
Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁

---

Connect with Gaël and Green IO:

---

Referenced in this episode:

---

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

---

🔗 Prefer to read this one? Check out the related article and auto-generated transcript at https://podcast.greenio.tech/

And on today’s episode of Green IO, Gaël is joined by Jo Masraff and Sathpal Singh, two domain experts who demonstrate how changing our approach to sustainability can be a key difference maker for businesses across any industry. Jo and Sath also discuss the key findings from the recent Digital Product Sustainability Pulse Report, along with what they’ve seen in the field first hand, and (realistic) hopes for the future.

Other topics that Gaël, Jo & Sath discuss include:

Plus much more.

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.
📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9 - 11. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁

---

Connect with Jo & Sath:

Connect with Gaël and Green IO:

---

Referenced in this episode:

---

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

---

🔗 Prefer to read this one? Check out the related article and auto-generated transcript at https://greenio.tech/70

And much, much more.

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.
📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9 - 11: https://greenio.tech/conference/17/paris-2025-december
Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁

---

Green IO - Podcast and conferences for responsible technologists 
https://greenio-podcast.slack.com
Green IO https://www.gaelduez.com

---

Post: Hidden under all the ‘AI’: Big tech companies are missing their climate targets 

---

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

---

🔗 Prefer to read this one? Check out the related article and auto-generated transcript at:
https://greenio.tech/blog/

This Green IO episode is thus a first: the first ever debate. A polite, constructive and yet incredibly insightful debate where Mark, Wilco and their host Gaël Duez discussed many topics such as:  

And much more!

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9 - 11. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support! 🎁 Reclaim your ticket here: https://greenio.tech/conference/17/paris-2025-december 

---

---

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

---

🔗 Prefer to read this one? Check out the related article and auto-generated transcript at https://greenio.tech/blog/

Fortunately, we have an expert on today’s show to help us make sense of it all. Iuna Tsyrulneva is one of the leading voices in AI and sustainability. Well versed on both topics, Iuna holds a PhD in materials science, and works at Earth Observatory of Singapore with an interdisciplinary approach. She’s full of interesting insights, and brings a dynamic approach to thinking about the larger issue.

For example, did you know that saying “thank you” after every prompt actually contributes to AI energy usage? And they say kindness costs nothing…

As you’ll hear from Iuna, optimisation is the key to affecting sustainability in Artificial Intelligence. And that goes beyond ‘clean code’. Throughout our conversation, Iuna unpacks the end-to-end scope of optimisation, or what she calls her ‘four pillars’ of sustainable AI, that being algorithmic, hardware, data center and usage optimisation. 

In this episode, Gaël and Iuna also discuss:

And much more!

❤️ Like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.
📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9 - 11. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁


---

---

---

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

---

🔗 Prefer to read this one? Check out the related article and auto-generated transcript at https://greenio.tech/blog/

In this episode we bring an academic perspective on these questions with two of the most renowned experts in the field, Dr Shaolei Ren and D’ Mohammad Islam. They conducted an intensive survey in the US and shared many insights about the water consumption of data centers with their host Gaël Duez such as: 

 And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9 - 11. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Transcript (auto-generated)
Shaolei Ren (00:01)

Data centers generally will evaporate 50 to 80 % of the water they withdraw. And on the other hand, if you look at the urban household setting, typically the water consumption rate is around 10%. So the way that we use water and how we discharge water is very different.

Gaël Duez (00:22)

Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

A month ago, I released the episode, Thirsty Data Centers in the heart of Silicon Valley with Mashaika Allgood, and it became instantly popular to say the least. A week later, Google released its report on the environmental impact of a median Gemini query. This report ignited several heated discussions, both on the energy and water consumption figures.

I decided to go back to the force of knowledge or actually to those who made their living in producing scientific knowledge, academics. And when I asked around about the most prominent researchers in the field of the environmental impact of data centers, especially their water consumption, two names popped up at all the time. Dr. Mohammad Atiqul Islam, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas and Dr. Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California. Both have written several papers on the topic. They have not shied away from entering the public debate with clever vulgarization. So welcome Mohammad and Shaolei. It's a pleasure to have you on the show today and thanks a lot for making it possible despite our huge time difference.

Shaolei Ren (01:59)

Thank you for having us.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (02:02)

Thank you and you are most welcome.

Gaël Duez (02:03)

Thank you. So being lucky enough to have two academics with me tonight, or actually this morning for you, we can start by doing the things in the right order. And before jumping into the debate about the scale and the trend, let's define the scope. And actually defining the right scope was part of the alert about the Gemini report that Shaolei shared on LinkedIn. Some key figures were misinterpreted. So, Shaolei, could you tell us how do data centers consume water? What do we talk when we water consumption of data centers?

Shaolei Ren (02:43)

Sure. Data center uses water both directly and indirectly. So the direct water consumption is primarily for cooling. Data center don't have to use water, but water is a very efficient approach to cool down the data center facilities. So essentially we are using water evaporation either throughout the whole year, 24-7 or during the summertime to take away the heat to the outside environment. And this is the direct water consumption. Additionally, when you generate the electricity, especially using thermoelectric power plants and sometimes even using hydropower, there's going to be some water loss into the atmosphere. And this is also considered water consumption or indirect water consumption by data centers. So if somebody wants to take a life cycle view of the water usage, they also look at the supply chain. But ⁓ unfortunately, we don't really have concrete data to have quantitative analysis for the supply chain part. So in most of the studies that I have already seen in the past, they focus on direct and indirect for electricity, not for the supply chain.

In our paper, we call it scope one and scope two, following the greenhouse gas protocol definition. So essentially, we have two scope of water, scope direct for cooling and indirect for electricity generation. And sometimes people show the total number by default. But in our paper, we actually show both the separated water consumption across each scope and also the total number.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (04:18)

That's basically the two different kinds of water consumption that you have. And again, I want to ⁓ emphasize on the fact that you do not have to use water-based cooling in your data centers, but that's the best approach that you can take. If you do not use water-based cooling, it's called dry cooling, and people are actually paying a lot of attention across different industries, not just data centers, to build better dry cooling systems. But again, the problem with those dry cooling system is that they are less energy efficient. So basically to run the data centers, not only the servers that run those workloads and run those computation only take power, but other components in the data center also takes power. So you want the other components to be also energy efficient. A great example would be your own homes, a typical residential cooling system, which doesn't use any water rather use electricity to your home. So basically you can use a similar approach for data centers, but they typically twice as much energy compared to the data centers that use water in the cooling.

Gaël Duez (05:28)

So means that there is a sort of a trade-off between energy consumption and water consumption, if I understand you right.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (05:33)

Yes, and later when we are going to discuss what we can do moving forward, this will come up and I will also want to like discuss a little bit more how this idea of dry cooling can be actually utilized to make data center more sustainable.

Shaolei Ren (05:48)

So maybe I can add some more context for the water consumption because that's actually a technical term. It's defined as the difference between water withdrawal and water discharge. So let's say when we take a shower, we are using a lot of water and that water is considered water withdrawal. It's not by definition, not water consumption because most of the water that we use for showering will just go straight into the sewage system and that's considered water discharge. If you look at the difference, the difference is really minimum. Data centers generally will evaporate 50 to 80 % of the water they withdraw. And on the other hand, if you look at the urban household setting, typically the water consumption rate is around 10%. So the way that we use water and how we discharge water is very different.

Gaël Duez (06:38)

This is the moment I'm going to ask the dummy question. The water on planet Earth is a closed loop, a closed circuit. Why does it matter that water is either evaporated or goes down the drain?

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (06:55)

So I can take this question. So basically the problem with when you have evaporation based consumption, so you are releasing the water into the air and it actually floats away. And for let's say for example, I'm in Texas and the water that flies away from Texas because of evaporation, it will take hundreds of years actually to come back. Even though we think of the water cycle, the water cycle is actually pretty slow. So the basic idea is it's not like the water is getting away from Texas is going to come back to Texas. Actually it's going to go back somewhere else where they already have a lot of rain, probably going to increase the rain there. So this is actually a water displacement problem that is happening everywhere. That is why we have these drought problems. So if you keep this going on, that evaporation is going on, more consumption is going on, the dry places are gonna get more dry, and wet places are gonna get probably more rain. So that is why to look at the consumption as well, even though the water is never leaving the earth, right? But still, the displacements of water are actually the problem that we want to address. That is the environmental impact of water, basically, for data center, hopefully.

Gaël Duez (08:10)

And for the other scope, indirect scope, is it the same issue? Is it mostly water withdrawal or water consumption?

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (08:20)

In both cases, that's water consumption that we're talking about. So when we calculate the water evaporation, we are also thinking of water evaporation from the power plants. It's not like the water withdrawal of the power plants. There are actually, different ways of cooling those power plants. One of the ways is they do not use evaporation, but rather let's say they get water from

Gaël Duez (08:24)

Okay.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (08:44)

A river and then they run it through their system, the water temperature goes up. This is how they are releasing the heat. Then they're releasing the warm water into the river back. So you have very minimal water consumption. But one of the major problems with those kinds of power plants are basically they need to withdraw a lot more water than a power plant which is evaporated. So that's why even though another big problem with those kinds of power plants are the geographical location you need to be close to a water source which can give you a lot of water plus the temperature difference that you can have ⁓ the discharge water versus the water that you take in it cannot be too high because otherwise it will drastically affect the water condition of the of the water so it's actually heat pollution into the water so that's why right so that's why

Gaël Duez (09:34)

Heat pollution for the biosphere. Okay, got it.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (09:38)

Evaporative cooling is the dominant cooling system across the industry.

Shaolei Ren (09:43)

Yeah, I think besides water consumption, water withdrawal is also a very important metric because that somehow reflects the competition among different water users. Let's say when we plan the public water systems, we have to make sure everybody is using the water, we are able to supply the demand with enough capacity. And in that case, water withdrawal is also a very relevant metric. And also if you look at different users competing for the water resources, not really competing, but they're sharing the water resources. There's some time there's a complex concept called water rise. And that water rise is defined based on the water withdrawal, not necessarily based on water consumption. So in the environmental sciences field, I think those water withdrawal and water consumption are important metrics by default, when we look at the water footprint of certain things like ⁓ hamburgers or data centers, we look at water consumption.

Gaël Duez (10:49)

Okay, got it. And before we go into the scale and we enter the repetition between the scopes and what is at stake, I have one last question. And I'm sorry for my listener if it sounds a bit Eurocentric, but this is something that I hear a lot among European experts. And it goes like this. Yeah, you know, the water consumption of data centers is really a US thing because in Europe, we don't have water cooling and the way we produce our energies is maybe a bit less water consuming. So I will skip the second part because I don't have the ability to judge, but it seems that yes, the fact that we don't use that much evaporation tower seems to be positive from a sustainability angle. And yet one month ago, Masheika Allgood kind of shaked my beliefs on this ground saying that actually not that much and having or not having an evaporation tower doesn't prevent you to a significant amount of water consumption. So could you some lights on this discussion also?

Shaolei Ren (12:02)

Yeah, data center have different options for cooling system. can either use dry coolers and water evaporated cooling or ⁓ natural air cooling with water evaporated systems. So just as Mahammad pointed out, this type of system usually have some trade off between the energy consumption and water. ⁓ It's a regional thing. And in Europe, I would say probably uses less water on average than the US data centers due to perhaps some stricter environmental laws. On the other hand, I think I've seen some documents saying that European data center do use some water and not zero. And also there's more research on waste heat reuse from data centers in Europe than in the US. I think in the US, waste heat recovery or weight heat reuse from data centers is essentially zero. But in Europe, there are quite a few cases, even during the Paris Olympic Games, there was some data center using waste heat from the servers to warm up the swimming pool. But there's no such thing in the US. So ⁓ it's not surprising that the European data center uses way less water or less water, as I would say, than the US data centers. So perhaps in Europe, the water issue is less severe compared to in the US. But I would say, we need more data to understand the problem better.

Gaël Duez (13:36)

And right now, Shaolei, I feel terribly stupid because actually the heat waste and the heat we use is actually a topic kind of high in my mind, especially because of the European energy directive, which now makes it compulsory for data centers above a certain electricity consumption to report on these metrics. But… I've always connected this metric with energy consumption, like don't waste good energy, decarbonized energy. And now that you said it makes absolute total sense that actually if you don't have to cool down your data center, because actually you used the heat somewhere else, actually it should also improve the water efficiency of your data center. So that's my ⁓ humbling moment, I would say. But it makes total sense.

Shaolei Ren (14:24)

There are some challenges with the waste heat reuse. Technical challenges include that the heat from the data centers are typically low grade heat, which means the temperature directly from data centers heat is not high enough to be directly used. But this is a challenge that we can address partially, I would say, at least. ⁓ On the other hand, the challenge is the data center needs to be close enough to the heat users. Let's say office buildings or residential communities. In Europe, this is probably easier to achieve because people tend to live closer and more concentrated living. But in the US, it's more of a real challenge than elsewhere.

Gaël Duez (15:13)

Plus you've got other pollutions like noise pollution, you've got air pollution from backup generators and so Mohammed said right from the start, it's a trade-off all the time. And one last question to define well the scope. What about...

Shaolei Ren (15:18)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (15:30)

The so-called water cooling

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (15:33)

Can take this question. So when we talk about water cooling, basically for the server end, when you are cooling the server, you cannot use water because it conducts electricity. So you are using liquid cooling. I believe you wanted to say liquid cooling, not water cooling. But anyway, people do.

Gaël Duez (15:52)

Yeah, I wanted to say it but I wanted to sound dumb enough so that you will actually lecture me and then you never know if it can be useful for everyone listening.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (16:01)

So, yeah, so when we say we are using water in data center cooling, people sometimes misunderstand that they think, okay, this is actually the liquid cooling that people talk about when we talk about GPU cooling. So liquid cooling, first of all, again, it cannot be water when you are touching the electronic components. And there are different ways of cooling. One is called immersion cooling where you are putting the whole… Electronic components the GPUs and the CPUs everything is immersed inside the liquid which is taking the heat away from those components But there are also other kinds of coolings called our cool plate cooling. So basically instead of immersing the system into this liquid what they have is they have mechanical components which carry the heat using liquid from those chip, GPU chip, CPU chip away from the system and they are typically much more efficient and most importantly they can carry more heat than air. In the past we will use air flow to take the heat away from this component but now if you use any kind of liquid cooling the amount of heat that you can carry away from the system is higher so that eventually the result is you can put more servers or more GPUs in a smaller area. So basically these days the power footprint of server rack is now 30 to 40 kilowatts it used to be like 7 to 10 kilowatts and there are actually some limits how much you can get away like take away using air it's about 15 kilowatt for a rack because you need to have enough airflow and then air has a limited capability of like how much heat it can carry.

So you are carrying the heat from the servers away. Now this is where you can use water when you are taking it away. So you have a liquid that doesn't carry electricity. And then that hot liquid can be now cooled using water while it's not touching the water. So basically there is a heat exchanger which transfers the heat that those liquids is getting from the microchip and the GPUs and then it releases to the water and then the water actually carries it away from the server room to outside. Typically there is actually another loop outside that this loop that carries the water from the server room to outside. This is also closed loop. The same water runs through the system. You do not expose this water. And then there is another heat exchanger outside for evaporative cooling, which now transfers the hot water heat to the cold water heat and that outside loop sends the water into the cooling towers and that outside loop is actually losing water. And this inside loop for getting the heat from inside the data center to outside, this is actually very commonly used. It's not just data center. Even my school, we have a centralized system where we are generating the heat and all those different buildings, they get hot water from the central system. And then they are transferring the hot water heat into, let's say, our heating system.

Gaël Duez (19:18)

Okay, so three different circuits. The first one will be the liquid cooling one, which is a closed loop. The second one, which is another closed loop, which is the heat exchanger between this liquid cooling and the evaporation tower where actually the water consumption, because it's evaporated, happens. Am I getting it right? Okay.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (19:41)

Yes. And in the third loop, you have the most, you know, the control or the option. So basically, instead of use, so again, the second loop transfers the heat to outside the third loop, right? Now it doesn't have to transfer the heat to outside water loop, it can release the heat into the air. So then it becomes air cooling. You can use mechanical chillers to take, extract the heat from those, like the closed water loop, and then it becomes mechanical. So this is where you have the control and typically ⁓ evaporation based cooling has strong tie with the weather condition that you have. So basically outside temperature, the humidity that plays a big role. Sometimes the weather condition is such that you cannot use even even use evaporative cooling. And typically in those kind of system, you have to use hybrid cooling. So certain months of the year, you will have to use a different way of cooling.

Gaël Duez (20:09)

Okay got it.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (20:38)

And typically that happens when actually it's outside this two code.

Gaël Duez (20:41)

Too cold, not too humid.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (20:42)

Yes, if it's too cold and because when it's colder, your air's water carrying capacity goes down. So the same amount of water in the air will actually cause humidity to go up when your temperature goes down. That means when you want to use evaporative cooling, you cannot evaporate as much when the outside actually is colder.

Gaël Duez (21:03)

Interesting, a bit counter-intuitive, but it makes total sense now that you explained it. Okay.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (21:04)

So there is like a evaporative. But the good thing is when you have, like you cannot use the evaporator cooling because it's too cold outside, free air cooling would be the best option because now the air is cold, right? So you don't have to. So this is actually a typical combination that when it gets too cold, you wanna use free air cooling and then when it's like a regular temperature, then you use evaporator.

Gaël Duez (21:30)

Interesting this mix of technology. And now let's move maybe to the second big topic that we need to discuss and how bad is it doctors because we discuss techniques here and having a better understanding of what is at stake, the different scope, the different components that consume or withdraw the water but is it bad? And maybe my first question would be between the direct and indirect water consumption, what has the most weight? Because I used to remember, it was, I think, three years ago, one of the very first episodes of Green IO, that I was shocked to learn that, once again, in Europe, so I'm not saying that it's case everywhere around the world, that actually the water consumption from data centers was mostly coming from energy production rather than direct water consumption. But it seems when I read some articles that A, it might be not the case anymore and B, it's definitely not the case everywhere around the world. So maybe can one of you explain first this difference and then what numbers are we talking about? Because is it such a big deal or not?

Shaolei Ren (22:51)

Yeah, I think in general you're right that the indirect water consumption is a more significant part compared to the direct water consumption. So if you look at the US, we're looking at one tech company, US average data center, and the ratio is about 87 of the total water is coming from the electricity generation part. And this ratio varies case by case. In certain places, the ⁓ direct water consumption ratio could be higher, but I would say in general the indirect water is more significant.

Gaël Duez (23:29)

Do you have any examples where this ratio is reversed and that is actually more the direct water consumption that prevails?

Shaolei Ren (23:38)

It's not necessarily reversed, but I think if I remember correctly from the 18th location that we studied, Arizona has a higher portion for direct water consumption due to the higher temperature. And I think that data center is also using evaporative cooling during much of the year.

Gaël Duez (24:02)

Got it. And so my

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (24:03)

And sometimes, you know, it's not only on the direct cooling side, but rather if you have more renewable generation with zero water footprint like California, they tend to have a little bit less indirect water consumption. So they could be more comparable. Again, not reversed, but lower than many other places.

Gaël Duez (24:24)

Okay, got it.

Shaolei Ren (24:25)

Yeah, probably we'll be talking about what is the problem or what is the issue with water usage? when we discuss that part, I think we will point out that ⁓ water is never a single number. So if you look at the overall number, it kind of misses a lot of information. we also need to look at when the water is used. So for some data center, are using, if they are using natural air, evaporated cooling with the water evaporation system. They don't use water 24 7, but they are using water during the moments when the other users are also using water most. For example, during the really hottest week of the year. look at the overall numbers, minimum doesn't seem to be any trouble at all. But if you look at the window data center is using That's probably the worst time of the year. And that's going to be pressuring public water infrastructure. in certain cases, been reported that certain data centers are even requiring more water than the entire county's usage during certain days.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (25:28)

I want to add another thing because Shaolei is talking about when. So when in my opinion has two components. One is the rate of water consumption that is happening. That is one when basically for the same cooling depending on the time of the day or depending on the season you may consume more water for again cooling the same amount of heat or getting taking out. So this is one of the when. Another one would be if you look at the availability of the water. So in different time of the season, you will have different availability. So when you have a lot of rain, maybe you may care a little bit less about water than when it's like a dry season. So these are the two kinds of when that plays important role. And then I believe you can already connect this when also relates to where, right? Because at different places you have different kinds of stress. And the dynamics of when you are more water efficient versus when you are less water efficient also varies with location. So these are a lot of different things that are happening that we can look into and also we can actually utilize in our advantage.

Gaël Duez (26:39)

And just to get some proportions, so you studied 18 locations for data sensors in your paper, am I right?

Shaolei Ren (26:47)

Yes, including the US average by one tech company.

Gaël Duez (26:53)

Including the US average, thanks. And for these different places, do the data centers create significant water stress or is it something neglectable? Are we talking about, I don't know, 5%, 10%, 15 % and on top of it, everything that you just explained, which is it depends on the what, the where and the when. So I'm trying to understand. All these figures and with all these components and this complex explanation that you provide, and thanks a lot because there is no shortcut, I guess, with this question of the water stress. But yeah, is it serious? Because if we think in Olympic swimming pools, sometimes it sounds massive, sometimes it doesn't sound that big. So when is it an issue and what can we say to assess when it's an issue and when it's not?

Shaolei Ren (27:45)

I think overall at the state level or at the national level, the water usage by data centers is really modest, probably less than 1%. But for individual communities, unfortunately, we don't have the concrete numbers in our paper. And I still don't have the concrete numbers yet, because it's really hard to get the total public water supply for each individual communities. My guess is that ⁓ it still varies a lot depending on how large a community is. For certain smaller ones, the data center water usage could be really substantial. We've seen some reports, I mean, it's not verified yet, but some reports says certain data center could use more than one third of the local public water supply. And in this case, we're talking about direct water withdrawal by the data centers, and also the public water system. Public water system is supplying water to residents, to homes, and to businesses.

Gaël Duez (28:51)

And that one third might not occur during the entire year, but actually might occur at the moment where everyone needs water the most. Especially we're talking here about residential, but also a lot of about agriculture, I guess, no.

Shaolei Ren (29:07)

No, actually the public water supply is not for agriculture. because it's the water from the faucet, from tap water that we can drink directly. So agriculture uses a different type of water and that actually comes to a more complex issue because water not only has different scopes but also has different colors. The water that we're talking about here is...

Gaël Duez (29:08)

No? Okay.

Shaolei Ren (29:33)

By data center directly, direct water consumption that's mostly drinking water. for data center cooling, for generating electricity, generally that's water. It's the water from the rivers, from the lakes that humans can use. And for agriculture, they also use a lot of green water. That's the water in the soils to be used by plants, by crops. And that's… not usable by directly by humans. it's a yeah, that's more complicated. I guess we probably don't want to go to go into that part. But the agriculture is separated from the one third number that I mentioned. electricity water is not considered in that case. And we're just talking about the water which are directly by data center and also the overall communities, drinking water resource.

Gaël Duez (30:26)

But that's an important point because I heard quite a lot the tension, the local tension, because as you rightfully explained, it's a local community matters. It might be completely neglectable having a data center in your neighborhood in some areas where water is plentiful. that's not a topic to debate. in some communities that can create massive tension. And quite a lot what I hear are these two things. Because of the data centers, we don't have enough water to drink. Because of the data centers or agriculture is at stake. And actually what you're telling me is that maybe the second part of the narrative is not really relevant because agriculture and data centers, don't consume the same water. The first one would consume green water, the second one blue water, and they don't tape into the same aquifer or am I missing something here?

Shaolei Ren (31:23)

I think when we talk about droughts, the agricultural water, regardless of the water usage, it all matters. And of course, agriculture is really probably the largest water user in many places. But if you try to look at the pressure on your community's water infrastructure, agricultural water usage is probably not relevant at all. regarding your first comment that you've heard, some people say they have no drinking water if there's a data center. I think this is probably too exacerbated. I think we should be objective, the one third number that I said from my ⁓ report is I wouldn't say that's representative of many places. First, most places don't have data centers. Secondly, if they do, I think 130 is still on the higher end in most cases. If you're talking about ⁓ using up all the water, I can't see any such cases in reality There was a report earlier this year saying that in Newton County, Georgia in the US, ⁓ one data center is asking for the amount of water that is more than the county's entire usage. But that's just a request. It doesn't mean the data center is already being built and they are taking away the water. So we still have time to build more infrastructure to plan for the supplies. So that people are having no water just because of data center. That's probably not something that we want to deliver to the public. And Mohammad, maybe you can chime in.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (33:09)

Yeah, basically, yeah, I think I totally agree with Shaolei that we absolutely should care about water consumption of data centers, but yet we do not see that data centers are taking away water from people's faucet yet. There is a stress. That's why the utilities are very careful when they're approving new data centers. I know many data center projects in Dallas that they're waiting for utility approval both for their energy and for their water supply. That means actually the local communities are aware of the problem and right now the infrastructure everywhere is not adequate to actually sustain the growth. So at this moment, the data center water consumption is not causing the problem, but ⁓ if we do not look into it, we are not careful about it, it might create problem down the road.

One of the problems that I know in my local ⁓ North Texas area that we do not have any natural lake around us. So we built several lakes using dams and they had to now build another one because again, it's not just for data center actually, North Texas is growing really fast in population as well. But this now kind of like puts ⁓ data center in the mix as well that now also Dallas is actually one of the hotspot for new data centers as well. So that's why it now becomes ⁓ a competition between a public utility and then the data center that, okay, who should we prioritize more, right? And this has become a topic of discussion. But again, we do not want to say that they are taking away water from people's.

Gaël Duez (34:54)

That's why I love talking with academics because you tend to have a much more balanced approach and also providing multiple aspects and multiple parameters for a single equation, which is very satisfying from an intellectual perspective, not always necessarily very easy to leverage for decision making, whether you're someone working in a data center or a politician for public service for instance, and just rephrasing all the components because I want to make sure that I got it right before we move to what we should do and we already started to tape into this questions, but let's try to rephrase it. But before that, the multiple angles of this discussion and I'm… I'm parroting you here. Water consumption of data centers is not the number one issue when it comes to water consumption at the moment in the US. might not be the case in some places. So where matters a lot? When matters a lot? Either from a seasonal or daily perspective, but also waters stress is happening. And all these components plus the trade-off with energy versus water, plus the different technical choices, you blend all this and then you've got a good problem to solve, I would say, and to optimize. Am I right to putting these different parameters in the equation?

Shaolei Ren (36:29)

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. So we need to ⁓ understand the problem, but we're not fearful of the problem.

Gaël Duez (36:29)

Okay, that's an interesting one. And so what do we need to understand the problem and what should we do? And that maybe would be the last questions of the show and how should we act? And I know maybe this is a moment you want to discuss about the lack of transparency, at least the perceived lack of transparency is what I've heard. I don't live in the U.S. from main operators and also the technical solution and basically also what us as software practitioner could do. So there are multiple approaches to a very simple answer, which is what are the solutions? And of course, I'm sure that you've got plenty of things to

Shaolei Ren (37:14)

Yeah, think we need to understand the problem and there are multiple scopes of water usage. They have different impacts. They also require different solutions. But if you don't really have a clear understanding of different scopes and different type of water, then you might not even address the right problem. For example, think the direct water consumption and even water withdrawal is more relevant to the local public water infrastructure planning and the indirect water consumption is more relevant to the policy making because when we try to allocate the water resources among different sectors, the indirect water consumption will play into a significant role. But at this point, there's no standardized way of discussing the water usage. Some people prefer to talk about the direct water usage only, which is fine. But we also see different or sometimes even misleading comparisons of different numbers across different scopes. And that could mislead the discussion and give not accurate information.

Gaël Duez (38:27)

And Shaolei this is sort of the elephant in the room, because what you mentioned is you raised the alarm about the Gemini report from Google is that they didn't use the right number and that the result was the opposite of what they claimed. But maybe I would love to hear it directly from you because I want to be sure I didn't misunderstand what you wrote.

Shaolei Ren (38:51)

Yeah, I mean, we were first we were not planning to talk too much about that particular case because we don't want to make them look bad. That's not our intention. But we if we talk about the facts, the fact is one paper released in August this year, use their direct water consumption, average direct water consumption to compare with our highest total water consumption across 18 locations. And if you read our paper, we actually present both direct and indirect, and also the total separately. So we have three numbers for each location. And if you look at the US average, look at the onsite water only versus their presented onsite number. It's not orders of magnitude difference. Plus, our estimate was done in 2023, but the paper's number is for May 2025. They also acknowledged that their number was 33 times higher back in May 2024. So if you look at their May 2024 number, that number was even higher than our onsite average number back in 2023. So I'm not arguing that their system has improved the efficiency during the past 12 months or one year. That's definitely a remarkable improvement. However, doing this direct comparison is not really meaningful because it sounds like the estimates, including our number were wrong. Well, I think their number doesn't support that claim or that suggestion. the number that we presented doesn't support the claim that their system is more efficient than other systems that we study because we're looking at different things, different models. We're looking at GPT-3 175 billion parameter model, but they are looking at very different system and they are not even talking about the actual output lens. So I don't think the direct comparison is really meaningful give some constructive messages.

Gaël Duez (41:19)

And if I may, know, the main takeaway that I take from the discussion you had is peer reviewed papers. I mean, I don't know. I'm not in anyone's mind at Google. I don't know what happened, but I'm pretty sure that usually when you enter into a peer-reviewed process. This is exactly the sort of discussion you have. And even if you stick with your analysis, this is the moment usually as far as I remember and as far as I've experienced at home, because my wife is a researcher, this is a moment where you clarify your hypothesis. you say, well, maybe we picked this number for this reason and that reason. And I think the main issue at the moment here is that we've got part of the main reports, one of the most important sources of information that are going away from the scientific method of publishing with open data, peer reviewed, etc. And for me, this is really an alert. I don't question at all the fact that most of the people writing this paper, they want to do good things in the world and at least in the tech industry. But it's just that 500 years ago, we built the scientific method to avoid this kind of mess.

And that should be a good thing to stick to it until we've proven that there is a better method. And as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, because after all, you're the scientists, I'm not. There is not. And this is really the issue with not having enough open data, enough transparency and enough peer reviewed paper, even coming from the best intentioned people. The facts are that this sort of debate should happen before it comes public because then the numbers are strung away and it's like running after a while. You cannot really get back the number and say, by the way, they were a mistake, you know, and actually that should have not been analyzed that way. It's too late. It's in the public debate and it will mislead a lot of people, including decision-makers. But that's, I would say, the transparency angle and it's me rambling. That's not the point of this podcast.

So actually, Mohammad, I know that you also wanted to talk a lot about the technical approach to solve this water stress, both from withdrawal and consumption and all the trade-offs. We've listed the trade-off between energy and water. But actually, there might also be even a trade-off between which kind of energy do we put into data centers, because obviously the energy coming from solar or wind might need much less water consumption than the one coming from ⁓ fossil fuel or nuclear or even hydro. So could you tell us what we can do, what we should do to reduce the water stress coming from data center?

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (44:08)

So there are different ways we can look into what kind of solutions we have. One of the things that we can do is how we can make data center water efficient. So basically we want to run the data center. At the same time, we want to consume as less water as possible. If you look at direct water consumption, now then you can go into water cooling systems that use less water. basically things like dry cooling, based, outside air based cooling, things like that. But again, as I mentioned before, they are more energy intensive. So what may end up happening is that you are reducing your direct water consumption, but because you are consuming more electricity from the grid. Now, if the grid has worse water efficiency, your overall water consumption where you both considered indirect actually may go up. So that means if you go for a solution where the direct water consumption is going down but you are trading it off for more energy consumption from the grid, you need to really look at the grid's water footprint. So that now ties your decision to which location you are at, what kind of energy sources that you have in the power grid.

So this is the way that you can improve the direct water cooling and overall water consumption. Other things that we can look into is water harvesting. Basically, there are challenges in water harvesting because of the intermittent nature of rain and other sources that you are going to use. But if you tie this water consumption or the water harvesting with some techniques that

the way that you control your data center. So basically you can control how much energy you consume and that directly reflects on how much water you consume in the data center. So now you can look at software site solution as well. If we are careful about what kind of work that we're doing in the data center, then we can actually now complement our water harvesting, which is intermittent. So the source may go up and down. So that means we can do the smart scheduling of a workload or smart planning of the workload that we're doing to improve the water efficiency of the data center. And another thing actually, this is something is completely my own opinion. I talk about this whenever I get a chance. I see a future where we can have zero water data center and the future would be you have a data center and you have ⁓ renewable energy source right next to it. So maybe, maybe a wind turbine or a combination of wind turbine and solar panels so that you are generating the energy that you need right next to you. You are not getting anything from the grid. So zero water from the grid. Solar is considered almost zero water. You do need some water to clean the solar panels, but that's very minimal. And now you can also combine it with dry cooling because you are getting the energy from water free source. Now you have dry cooling and the solar panel right next to each other, right next to the data center, you now will have a zero water data center. And not only zero water, it actually will be also zero carbon data center. So this is something we can absolutely do.

Gaël Duez (47:42)

During the use phase, because if we put a full life cycle analysis with all the minerals needed both for the IT equipment and the solar panels, there will definitely be a few tons of water per kilo of a solar panel. But you mean during the use phase, a zero water data center should be something okay.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (48:06)

And I'd

Shaolei Ren (48:06)

I fully agree.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (48:08)

Like to add one thing here as well. So basically ⁓ there is a interest of utilizing nuclear power plants because when you are putting data centers in many different places, one of the constant is not that we do not have enough energy to power those data centers. The US power grid infrastructure is not strong enough to carry the… energy or electricity generated at different locations of those power plants to the data center. So the infrastructure limitation is also actually also stopping new data center growth. So that's why people are thinking what if we put a nuclear power plant next to a data center. Now the data center gets all its power from the nuclear power plant. doesn't run through the weak or not weak. Constraint power grid infrastructure anymore and now we can have more data center where we utilize the data center for ⁓ larger computation. Now this works in favor of solving the energy crisis that we do not have enough energy to build new data center, but nuclear problems typically consume a lot of water. So this solution doesn't work if you look at both water and energy crisis. So this is something I want to bring it up because there is a lot of interest. Among many companies, we are now having new contracts with existing power companies to pair a data center with a nuclear power plant. In some places it will absolutely work, especially if there is no water stress in that particular area and you have a nuclear power plant. Now, if you build a data center next to it and the data center is just run by all the nuclear power, then it should be great solution because nuclear also have ⁓ zero carbon emissions.

Gaël Duez (49:57)

This is something that in France we experienced first hand that because of climate change, that were supposed to be water stress free are not anymore and this is why two years ago we experienced the very first time being net importer of electricity and France tends to be a rather big exporter of electricity for the entire Europe because the drought was so crazy that a lot of nuclear plants had to scale down activity because of not enough water being available. So thanks a lot for bringing the topic that nuclear plants might be a solution for decarbonization, debatable under the full life cycle, but yet definitely better than power plant, but definitely also an issue regarding water consumption from the nuclear plant.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (50:52)

Is the interest in nuclear power plant in the US especially avoid carbon emission, but actually it's rather that we do not have enough energy that we can supply to the new data centers that the IT companies want to build. Again, there is actually another dimension to it. It's not like we do not have enough generation capacity. In most cases, we even have enough generation capacity. The problem is the infrastructure that you're going to use to carry that energy from those distant power plants to the data center that infrastructure is actually not capable in most places in the US. So that's why is an interest of utilizing nuclear power plant next to

Gaël Duez (51:36)

Yes, thanks Mohammed. Shoalei you wanted to say something.

Shaolei Ren (51:39)

Yeah, I think I just want to add that building these transmission lines to carry the power from the power plants to the end users like data centers is really an expensive investment. And that's why we're seeing a growing interest in co-locating data centers with power plants like nuclear power plants, and even natural gas turbines in certain cases. Additionally, would like to bring up the point that ⁓ drought is more like a slow earthquake. comes and goes. It can hit any places now. I think in my point of view, no matter how much water you use, you should view this water supply as a supply chain resilience. So let's say we have a small data center using water evaporative cooling in an area, but the water pipe could be leaked or could be due to drought. There is less water pressure. Then essentially the operation will be interrupted by those events. So if you view this as a resilience problem, think essentially we're living under a water stressed world. Maybe not today, but certain time of the year.

Gaël Duez (52:53)

Next of the sense. Okay, that was an in-depth discussion on all the aspects. I'm pretty sure we actually barely scratched the surface on everything that you know, but at least for the professional audience listening to the Green IO podcast, I think it will be a pretty packed episode regarding all the dimensions of water consumption, water withdrawal, and all the different colors of water. So maybe my last question, and Mohammad you already shared a very optimistic view that maybe a future of zero operational water data center is possible, but would you care to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability and maybe even IT sustainability?

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (53:38)

I'm really excited to see these days is that data center, whenever we talk about data center, energy consumption or the energy need comes up. But in the last two years or so, I'm seeing every article, they're also mentioning water usage. So that means this consumption of data center has become issue that people care about and this is where I actually want to share one of my own opinion and you are free to get rid of it from the anyway... I believe the responsibility falls more on us to be environmentally sustainable and to pressure or put pressure on the lawmakers to

Gaël Duez (54:11)

I won't.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (54:27)

create laws that will put pressure back on the companies who run data centers. Now the data center companies or these IT companies who have running these data centers, they are doing everything within the law and their job is to maximize their profit. If they care also about environment, that is good and many companies actually do, but we should not just expect that they will be the one who lead this effort, but rather we should be the one that leads the effort. And we ask our lawmakers to create laws that will preserve the rights or that will preserve the environment for us. So we should not only ask the companies, IT companies who are already actually have to make big decisions, like they're spending hundreds of millions of dollar investment they're talking about, right? And this large amount of investment, they need to be getting more about the benefit or the profit they can get out of it, right? So I believe we should ask our lawmakers, we should encourage our lawmakers through asking them or letting them know what are the problems that we are facing. Also as a researcher, I believe we are doing our part, but the lawmakers can ask for more transparency from those companies so that we have a better picture and we can look into what are the different ways we can improve the system. And that is something we also want to inform our lawmakers so that they also know that these are the ways actually available to the IT companies. One of the research areas I'm looking into is how can we, it's not about transparency to the public. Like after a year, I publish a report of my yearly water consumption. What if we were, we are letting the people know your hourly water consumption? And then, as people, now have information about our water footprint. Now we have the means to actually make some changes in our behavior. This is something that is not available right now. I understand that it's a very challenging problem to let someone know that if you are using a certain product of a certain company, you are using this. Actually, this is a very technically hard problem to solve as well. But I see if our lawmakers make the effort to push the IT companies, they will the resources to build those systems and let us see what is happening so that we can also contribute to this solution.

Gaël Duez (56:53)

Thanks a lot Mohammad for this. Shaolei, you want to share something? Yeah.

Shaolei Ren (56:55)

Excellent point. I mean, I agree most parts, but whether we should use the word pressure the lawmakers, I don't really want to pressure them. I just want to do my part. My part is to present the numbers, present the facts. And I want to understand the problem.

Gaël Duez (57:13)

That's funny because this is one of the big discussions happening within labs at the moment, whether scientists should stick to facts and just present neutral facts to policymakers and let them do what they have to do. And another proportion of the scientific world saying, actually, we need to go out from the labs and apply some pressure and be part of the general public discussion because there are so many lobbyists and so many public relations budget overwhelming everything that we say that we need to sort of lose our neutral stance that used to be the way scientists do and I don't have any opinion on it I just can see that the debate is happening pretty much everywhere.

Shaolei Ren (57:57)

Well, yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's a hard decision. I think I'm okay with going out of the lab and doing this outreach or generally public engagement activities. I'm fine with that. But at the same time, it's really hard to stay absolutely neutral, like 50%, 50%. But if you're staying around the… a reasonable range, I think around the neutral position. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. We can reach out. We can do this public engagement. We can do the outreach. At the same time, my bottom line is all these activities should be based on facts.

Gaël Duez (58:51)

Hmm. I think that's a beautiful closing word. Or I think that's a beautiful closing sentence. Like all this activity should be based on facts. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining, for taking the time to explain, to enter in great details all the different components of this water stress issue with data centers and remaining, as far as I can see, absolutely neutral. So a big thanks, making your time available for all the podcast listeners. And I hope that we will continue this discussion. I hope that maybe… one or two of you will have a chance to attend Green IO New York and explain a bit of this on stage But once again, thanks a lot for joining and taking the time.

Shaolei Ren (59:38)

Thanks.

Mohammad Atiqul Islam (59:39)

Thank you, Gael. It's nice talking to you.

Gaël Duez (59:42)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or a like on YouTube.

Sharing this episode on social media or directly with colleagues working in the data center industry seems also a good idea to make sure we'll have enough water to drink and water our crops. ⁓ now you know that one of those two assumptions is not true. In our next episode, we will welcome Iona Tsyrulneva, a respected Singaporean expert on AI who will try to answer the billion tons of GHG question, can we be optimistic about AI sustainability? Stay tuned.

By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter and check the conferences we organize across the globe. London was a blast last week and the next one is in Paris on December 9th to 11th. As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9-11. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

Gaël Duez (00:03)
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

This episode is a special one brought to you in partnership with Architect Tomorrow. These nine interviews were recorded live from Green IO London a week ago by Oliver Cronk, who I warmly thank for his collaboration. The sound quality isn't as good as you have been used to, but the quality of the guest is as good as ever. Enjoy the episode.

Speaker 1 (00:51)
Gail, hi. Welcome to Green IO London, your conference that you put on all around the world. So I guess, you know, we wanted to recreate hopefully a little bit more professionally what we did last year. Hopefully with better audio, fingers crossed. Hence audio mic.

Speaker 2 (01:03)
Pretty an amazing job last year.

Speaker 1 (01:05)
So if you've not checked out last year's, can go and have a look at last year's. But yeah, what we wanted to do was give a little bit of a summary of what happened today at Green IO. So perhaps for those that are new to the Green IO brand and concept and thing, podcast, community, can you give everyone a quick summary? ⁓

Speaker 2 (01:20)
Well, basically Green IO was created to connect responsible technologists. That really the main, I would say, North Star, even if I don't like that much single metrics, they can be very misleading, but the mission is there, like connect responsible technologists. And it all started with a podcast where I wanted people doing things in the green IT field. So really focusing on how to reduce my environmental footprint as a technologist, not focusing that much on the other part, which is how can I bring technology to do good things in the world because I believe that there are a lot of great materials, resources, podcasts, conferences, show, whatever about this, there is not that many shows and resources for technology saying, know, I'm every day at the office or behind my desk, what can I do? I want to reduce the environmental footprint, what can I do? And I realize that people in different line of works, whether they're design, ops, obviously, dev, et cetera, et cetera, things but they were not necessarily aware of what each other were doing and it's also happened across countries and even continents so it was like okay let's share the news and this is how the podcast was created and then two years ago, yeah two years ago now, I had the opportunity to partner with API Days who has been very committed in the field of sustainability, inclusivity, etc etc but all this I would say human centered and planet centered ⁓ fights and they offered me the opportunity to create my own conference within the big API Days conference and I said okay yes because I'm still a strong believer that in-person meeting is crucial. And the philosophy of these conferences were really based on three values, respect the planet, respect science, respect people. And what we do for this is we bring an international perspective, cross-disciplinary perspective. We connect people as much as we can because we do this meeting in person. And we respectfully agree to disagree. And that's really something that matters.
last year in London, I don't know if you remembered, you had on stage Mark Butcher saying that basically some tech companies were bullshitting, greenwashing, et cetera. You know Mark, old man yelling at the cloud. And a few talks later, one of these big tech company was explaining its own perspective and it was done respectfully. And so people in the room can have a healthy debate and understand, okay, I understand Mark's point of view, I understand this tech company point of view, I make my own opinion, but without yelling at each other, without this stupidness of a social media bubble and all of this.

Speaker 1 (03:59)
Yeah, that in-person sort of communication is very important for that, isn't it? It's easy to get sort of, almost take away the human aspect of communication when it's online. But I mean, so look, Gael, you've taken this conference now all around the world. What is it about London and perhaps today that you're most looking forward to on the agenda?

Speaker 2 (04:13)
I think we've been blessed to have, despite I wouldn't say communication embargo, but communication strict

requirements from their top management. A lot of the government's people joining, so we follow their rules, like there will be no Q &A, no interviews, no recordings, but they did the effort to come and to share what the civil servants have done in the UK. And to be honest, except for France, I didn't see that level of commitment anywhere around the world. think the UK folks are leading the charge when it comes to providing access

sustainable IT services for the population. They're very into it and I think we will have like maybe 50, 60, if not 100 participants coming from the civil sector. And that's great because my main goal is that when the average techie joining, not maybe Green IO, but like API Days or Generation AI conference or any other conference, when they see a Green IO conference, they might be curious

they might attend one talk and if this talk is the government saying we've done something when he or she comes back in the office and say hey boss you know I think we should do something about green up I think we should do something about sustainable design if the boss pushes back and say wow

that's green stuff, that's Greenpeace talking, we're doing business here. they know, actually the government has done it, or this big corporation has done it, or NHS has done it. Suddenly, it creates a lot of credibility and it can change the momentum internally.

Speaker 1 (05:52)
Great. And so look, this episode, a special episode of Architect Tomorrow in collaboration with Green IO will give a bit of a... you so much No worries. I love this conference and I love what you do. It's amazing. And so hopefully this episode will give people a flavor of what was discussed. Clearly we probably can't cover much on the government side for those reasons that you just described, but I really hope there that people find this is a good introduction to Green IO and then they go and discover more.

Speaker 2 (06:15)
would say that

will have lot of people doing GreenOps on a daily basis, achieving things. But I think this year seems especially interesting because it's good for the planet, good for business, question mark. And the question mark is important here. And this is all the juice of a green IO. Because we will have both people achieving great things with GreenOps,

Speaker 1 (06:33)
Okay.

Speaker 2 (06:37)
that's good to start. A journey needs to start. It needs to start in an accessible way. If you want to reach the star from day one, obviously it's a recipe to disaster. my point is, I think tomorrow what we will see is this dialogue between, this is what you can do on day one, but don't fool yourself. Don't fall in the

of greenwashing by pretending that because you started GreenOps you solved every problem in sustainability in your company or in the world. Start the dialogue, start the discussion, see where you can improve and do it in a very respectful way for planet, people and science.

Speaker 1 (07:13)
Awesome,

well hopefully I'll grab you at the end of the conference to get your sort of in summary. thanks again.

Hi, my name is Amel, Chief Executive Officer at Rezileo, a Swiss startup, 25 people working on the environment footprint of ICT, trying to reduce it, data tools and services. The workshop I'll be running this afternoon is exactly about the data part. So how do you use the data we produce to reduce the footprint of the services you operate? And is it specifically device carbon footprints? Is that what it is, like the technology products? Give everyone a flavor of what specifically it is.

Speaker 2 (07:30)
using

how you get the data.

Speaker 1 (07:50)
that Resilio does. So if you go and check on db.resilio.tech you'll see that indeed we have a lot of equipment, hardware products, but we also have services such as cloud services, virtual machine storage, and we're increasingly adding new... We are releasing today the news that we just completed a partnership with Electricity Map and be able to provide data on...

Speaker 2 (08:04)
services. electricity also and region

Speaker 1 (08:15)
more than 200 countries

on this planet, up to five minute granularity. So that will be a huge part also. yeah, devices, electricity, and cloud services. Hi, thank you so much for having me. My name is Magalie and I lead the international expansion for a company called Soft. Soft, is a platform that allows organizations to measure and decarbonize IT in a holistic way. Brilliant. And it was great catching your talk earlier.

For those that weren't able to see it, how would you give a fairly quick summary of what you were talking about? Yeah, absolutely. So the objective of this session was to do a deep dive on a particular topic ⁓ in the green IT space that is looking at the growing use case around applications, with the number of applications exploding, especially due to AI, the storage and the infrastructure behind applications also.

increasing and therefore looking at how GreenOps can help organizations really maximize their environmental gains by taking an infrastructure level view of applications as well as maximizing their cost reductions. Brilliant. So kind of using GreenOps to look at application usage and that sort of things. Amazing. And have you had a chance to take in much of the other sessions today? Have you got any sort of key takeaways from the event today? Yeah, absolutely.

So Soft is a French based company and many of you know that the green IT ecosystem in France is quite strong. But I think the conclusion of this event is that we're getting some competition. But also demand, I would say, in the UK market for sustainable and green IT. Absolutely. That's really good to see.

So you're keynoting at Green IO London 2025. I am. I'm very excited to be keynoting. I'm one of the authors, along with Sarah Sue and Sarah Bergman of O'Reilly's book, Building Green Software, which we wrote to kind of like set the scene of non-controversial. Everybody's going to agree this is what we're aiming for. And today I'm going to be talking a little bit about how AI fits into that model. And I'll be taking us back in time

to say, where did AI come from? Modern AI, not AI kind of like in the 50s, modern AI come from LLMs and chat-chip-y-t onwards. Why is it so successful? And how do we align it with climate change? Because I think that if you don't understand the context, everybody's read building green software, I'm quite obsessed with context and stepping back and understanding where things come from. And so that's what I want to do a little bit. There are lots of things we could do, but given the

of AI, modern AI, what's likely to work and what would be less likely to work? How do we focus our efforts in the right way? So it sounds like trying to find a pragmatic path to using AI but doing so sustainably. Absolutely, yes. Is there anything that you like to look up on the agenda? Well I have to say I'm really looking towards all the talks today. There's a lot of talks from the British government. thought you'd be coming.

Oh, that's a shame. So I'm looking forward to those, not least because I'll be haranguing governments around the world a little bit in my keynote, so we'll see what effect that has. Look forward to that. Anne. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Hello, I'm Mark Buff. So I work for OVO as Digital Sustainability Manager. So I'm overseeing the carbon footprint and other environmental impacts of our tech and digital products that we create and use there. And today we're talking about

collaboration that I've done with Heater around running devices on the hot water cylinders in our OVO customer homes to heat their water but also run compute for us. So yeah, it's quite interesting. Hi, I'm Charlie, I'm a commercial director at Heater. We are building radically more sustainable infrastructure than a typical data center and the way that we do that is by reusing the waste heat from servers and using it for hot water.

Speaker 2 (12:04)
I'm Charlie.

homes for the future of our library to help them with their customer.

Speaker 1 (12:18)
And today we're talking about our technology and our kind of vision of our AI infrastructure, but also our collaboration with OVO to reduce their cloud emissions and also...

It's amazing I'm a big fan of heat recovery I think it's a bit of a no-brainer that we're not tapping into and I've spoken to other people like deep green and others who are looking at it so it's great to get heater I talked to heater as well possibly rounds out most of the people in the space looking at it so no big fan of that Charlie so yeah I guess is there any other sort of thoughts observations from the day that you've kind of picked up? Yeah it's always great to hear from Alan Curry, he's a great speaker I think yeah that the whole AI

interesting to see where that race of AI using loads of energy and then the ramp up of renewables are they going to line up together or is one going to be the other. yeah, interesting to see where that goes. Yeah, I'd say enjoyed especially the end of Anne's talk where she talked about kind of fate being in our hands. We have to make the changes that we want to see and I think we're in the room with the right people to make that. And then also watching Natalie talk, having worked

Speaker 2 (13:23)
happen.

Speaker 1 (13:26)
with lot of big enterprises before.

Speaker 2 (13:29)
trying to help them on this journey.

Speaker 1 (13:31)
I'm also familiar

with the struggles of making change happen, so it's interesting to see how HSBC are managing to make a difference. Amazing, yeah, so ⁓ I'm Dryden, I am the CEO of Carbon Runner, and what I'm into is making some action, especially around bringing my love for sustainability and technology together. It's kind of why we built the tools that we build, and yeah, with Carbon Runner, we're really looking at focusing on shifting cloud compute, be it AI training or GitHub actions.

to low carbon regions to lots of emissions, 90 % emissions. Yeah, I'd love to talk about the combination of looking for lower carbon hosting and running workloads where it's cleaner, but also the cost savings. was really interesting. So just give everyone an idea of what, beyond just carbon saving, carbon is delivering. Yeah, so traditionally, especially like CICD or continuous integration, it's just focused on two pillars, which is price and

performance you know does it run really quick and is it cheap it turns out that github's a great platform but it's actually most of your stuff is super slow and it's really expensive too it's probably the one or most but they have it it's sticky so you use it and you get loads of tools and we you know it's a great service but we want to add two more for modern age which is you know resilience can we run these jobs across multiple clouds in the lowest co2 regions like yeah you can do that it's super easy to do and ⁓

Yeah, and the last one is like that resilience piece, adding resilience and sustainability to those four pillars of a modern CI CD. Awesome. What have you sort of learned or sort of seen that's impressed you today at Green IO? Is there any sort of takeaways or anything that's particularly sort of you found interesting? Yeah, I liked it today because it was more, it feels a bit more action based. I really like, I loved the talks yesterday, but I was very, here's our dashboard, here's our report.

here's an API and I think that's why I kind of came and I was super excited to do the talk because it's like, yeah it's cool and I get it like we need all of those things too but it's like actually how we make change, that change is possible sometimes not even that hard and you can make some great benefits so I really liked it there and also it's just nice to get yourself out of the screen and meet people in real life. Yeah I know it totally is isn't it? I'm really impressed by what you're doing so it looks like you've got reasonable traction like can you give us an idea of numbers?

that word. we're actually actively fundraising at the moment. So when we talk to VCs, they're normally like, come back to us when you have like a million ARR. And we're like, but why would we talk to you if we had that much money? So they're always looking for traction. We kind of deal in minutes and jobs. So in the last month or two, we run 60,000 jobs for a multiple, you know, we've got, we focus on enterprises and kind of like quite large enterprises in interestingly, many different sectors, energy being one of them with our work.

the pilot with Hito with OVO. But yeah, it can really range to the customers that we have, but we're building like a super healthy wait list, doing some partnerships and adding more clouds. We can now go like five cloud regions. So we're just trying to make it double down, kind of worry on the things that we can control and just build the best product like we can with our sustainability in our minds as the the top pillar, but appreciating that maybe it's not the fundamental one at enterprises. So we have to really have

a multi-pillar offering. Well it's really interesting to see what you're doing and thanks for talking to me on Green IO and Architect Tile. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

It is super fun to be here. My name is Hannah, Hannah Smith. I work at the GreenWeb Foundation and I'm Director of Operations. If you haven't heard of the GreenWeb Foundation, we are a non-profit based in Europe. We have a mission to see a fossil-free internet by 2030. If you've ever tested the carbon emissions of a website, it's very likely you'll have used some of our infrastructure somewhere along the way, maybe our data set or maybe our open source package.

Today I'm talking about a new project that we've got on called Carbon Text. We are trying to find clever, innovative, but simple ways to address the lack of data transparency within the sustainability field. So we have this really simple idea. Why can't everybody just share the sustainability data at a well-known standardized location on their websites like web address, greenweb.com?

It's a dead simple idea, but often the most simpler ideas are the most powerful ones. So for those that know about web development, there's things like robots.txt and other files that are put at the top of the website. So something similar like that, which, yeah, OK. Yeah, that's exactly the idea.

trying to do is just to take away that difficulty in finding information that many companies have to publish by law, but it's just scattered all over the place. Aside from making the data more discoverable, we're also looking at different ways of making the data more machine readable or more standardized as well. So that's another aspect of Carbon Text. And of course you know quite a lot about this project, don't you, because we've done some collaboration on it together. Yeah, thank you for that segue. I was going to throw in.

this is something that we've been collaborating on with the Tech Carbon Standard. So I'm really proud that we've been working together and that Carbon.Techs can point to someone's Tech Carbon Standard sort of data. So yeah, this is something that I'm certainly put some links to Carbon.Techs and Tech Carbon Standard and what we're doing together. So it's great to see you here talking about it today, Hannah. So great to see you. Thanks for jumping on to give us a bit of a summary about what you're doing. Absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Hannah. So we'll obviously start this off with a comedy. Hi, Ollie. Hi, Ollie.

It's the two of you at Green IO. So yeah, thanks for taking some time to talk to me on Architects.morrow slash Green IO. Kick us off with telling us who you are and who you work for. I am Ollie and I am the co-founder of Root and Branch. We're a digital sustainability and software development consultancy based down in Brighton.

I came across you because you do the green software Brighton or have I got the name of that wrong? No, that is completely correct. Yeah, yeah, we actually started with that community and then it grew into something much bigger than we thought it was going to be and we wanted to just spend all of our time in this digital sustainability space. So me and my co-founder Adam, we set up Root and Branch and we haven't looked back. And so what have you been talking about at Green IO today?

Well, we've been doing some work on the software carbon intensity standard, which came out of the Green Software Foundation a couple of years ago. And what we've been doing is expanding that ⁓ foundation so that we could apply it to web applications and websites, which is what we've done. And we've written an academic paper on how we did that.

we're here to just share that work with the wider community. What have you found fascinating? What sort of piqued your interest over the last couple of days? I really liked what Dryden's up to with the carbon runner. The community's been talking about carbon aware.

computing for a long time and there have been some progress made in that area. All these things are really practical isn't it? actually, he's actually doing it. It's really practical, it's such a simple idea and it's often the simple ideas that work and it's a foundation on which we can build more.

more things. So I really like it. I'm definitely going to be checking out later. That's one. Yeah, I It's exciting. I agree. Awesome. Thanks very much. Cool. Cheers.

Speaker 2 (21:12)
Yeah

Speaker 1 (21:13)
Hi Ian, welcome to the Architect Tomorrow podcast. Can you perhaps start by giving us bit of an introduction? Hi Oliver, I'm a senior lecturer in sustainable IT based at the University of the West of England in Bristol. But most of my career has been management consultancy. I was in IBM for 10 years and was their sustainability leader on the DEFRA outsourcing. So I've got quite a bit of history with green IT. Fantastic, and what are you covering today? So today I'm doing the last session. Green IT is good, but it's not enough.

We're going to hear about lots of wonderful green IT stories today and I want to celebrate those, but we also need to be going after the bigger benefits that we can deliver on wider environmental, social and economic effects of sustainability. And of course, we need to challenging ourselves about what's happening with AI, with the huge amount of extra compute being rolled out, how are we going to do that environmentally and sustainably.

And by the other effects, I guess we see a lot of people talking about energy usage and carbon. Are you exploring the material impacts, the water? What are the other dimensions that you're talking about? When we talk about green IT, we typically mean the life cycle of the IT itself. And so I want to talk much more about what are we doing with that? What are the applications? So the industry loves to talk about tech for good, and there are lots of ways in which we deliver social benefits or environmental improvements through, for example,

Speaker 2 (22:34)
section.

Speaker 1 (22:34)
But who's going to talk about tech for bad? Perhaps that's for an academic to do. If you've got the greenest possible IT, but you're using it to extract more oil and gas, perhaps that's tech for bad. And enabled emissions is something that's being talked about. awesome. Well, I really look forward to your talk. And thanks for being part of Green IO. Great. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (22:53)
You did it? You promised me last year that we will be twice more. You did it. Good relation. You passed the exam.

meet you next year. For some, about 400. Seriously, so I didn't plan to do any closing remarks. I'm literally standing between you and a of beer or whatever as you're poisoned. So I guess it's a really dangerous situation. That's my wall. But I wanted to thank you again for joining, for taking the time to learn, to network. I hope you had a good time. If you had...

I have a zero marketing budget. I don't intend to give any money to any Meta or other company. So make some noise on social networks. That works. And just grab someone and make sure that he or she will be with you next year. I think that may be the most efficient way to grow our network and to learn and to be stronger together. Once again, a massive thanks to all of you who joined A massive thanks to our sponsors, whether they are for

profit on profit and all the volunteers. I've never seen that many white t-shirts. I love London. And I think we've still got some stickers. Okay, so weaponized. But the good way, don't leave any booklets there. Drop it at the coffee machine, drop it on the CTO desk, drop it on the CIO desk, use them, they're bit of carbons in this order, so use it. Take some stickers as well.

Be proud of them, put them on your desktop, put them on your smartphone, put them on your laptop, Put them on this asshole who is always denying climate change. But use it. This is a space for you. Make good use of it. And now let's have some fun. Thank you, everyone.

Gaël Duez (24:43)
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, the guest profiles, as well as the transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed these interviews, please share them either on social media or directly with relatives working in the IT industry. It will help them see that a strong momentum is ramping up across professionals and that's good news. 

In our next episode, we will be back in the US discussing water consumption of data center again, but this time from an academic perspective. We will have the pleasure to welcome two of the most renowned researchers on the topic of data center and environmental sustainability, Mohamed Islam and Shaolei Ren. Stay tuned. 

By the way, Green IO London was a huge success last week and you can expect Paris to be of the same quality. December 9th to 11th are the dates with an amazing lineup to discuss how we can build European green IT learning from each other's best practices and feedback across all the continent. As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world "one byte at a time".

Gael Duez sat down with them to cover multiple topics such as: 

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

ROSS COCKBURN (00:01)

Recently the game changer for everybody in Elaine and I's world has been solid state drives. You can take a solid state hard drive and we have done this already, a Core 2 machine which is 20 years old and that machine will perform as quickly as a lot of people's brand new laptop.

Gaël Duez (00:21)

Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

Today, I'm going to share with you one of my secret recipes. When I deliver a keynote or talk about the environment of footprint of tech, I often ask the audience if they have a smartphone. They tend to laugh. I'm not sure why. Then I ask them to take it and to guess its weight. After a few seconds of auction style interaction, I deliver the right weight, which is around 70 kilo, because to build a smartphone, need around 15 kilos of fossil and 55 kilos of minerals. And this doesn't take into account the tons of water needed to extract the components and manufacture the device. And this doesn't take into account all the greenhouse gas emitted during its life cycle or the pollution emitted, including during its end of life phase, better known as e-waste. These numbers are the reasons why our guests today hate recycling. They know firsthand about our computers and smartphones life. The wasted opportunities to better use the precious resources Elaine Brown is the CEO of the Edinburgh Remakery who refurbished 295 laptops last year. She's also a keen expert on the right to repair issues. Ross Cockburn is a trustee of Reducing IT who has been dealing with repaired devices from Africa to Ukraine over the last 25 years. So welcome to the show, both of you. It's a pleasure to keep on exploring the rich and vibrant

Elaine Brown (02:12)

Thanks.

Gaël Duez (02:23)

British ecosystem of IT sustainability. I didn't say English because both of you, you're based in Scotland. Welcome to the show.

Elaine Brown (02:31)

Thanks, lovely to be here.

Gaël Duez (02:33)

My pleasure as well. And bonjour. If we go for French, guess quite a lot of the listeners will be a bit lost, but thanks for making the effort, Ross.

ROSS COCKBURN (02:41)

Well, good.

Gaël Duez (02:43)

You know that Green IO London is actually in one week. And the topic this year is good for business, good for the planet with a question mark because we will discuss this assumption. And when we were preparing the episode, actually something struck me, it is possible to save money while doing cleverly decommissioning of IT devices, because more and more it costs money. So it could be the case of good for business, good for repairing IT devices.

ROSS COCKBURN (03:14)

Clearly if you've got devices running your business and they are five years old and you're going to replace them but you give them six years then that's going to go for your business isn't it? It's going to be good for the bottom line. You're going to save money. So there's two sides to this good for business, know, good for the planet. There's profit making and there's saving money and the two quite often don't sit very well together. They're uneasy bedfellows as we would say because you'll have accountants saying we need more sales and then you'll have accountants saying well actually we need to reduce some of the cost here in the business because if you reduce the cost effectively if you half the cost you double the profits

Elaine Brown (04:05)

I think it's a no brainer. Of course, being sustainable with your tech is good for business and good for planet. And that is the basis of what the Edinburgh Remake is based on. It's really driving those businesses to understand that the tech that they have, they have to have it. We understand that it's a digital age. But what they can do is the end of life of their tech and their journey in that business is not the end of life for that tech. And that's where businesses sometimes have that mismatch. think, we don't want it, we don't value it, you know, and we'll just buy some new. But what they can do is in that buying new stuff, they can think about what they are discarding. And if they donate it to the remake, we… are sort of Scotland's leading social ITADs, But different to other ITADs is that the key is on the social layer because it's the ESG is. Donate your end of tech, you don't want it, but there are millions of other people for whom that tech has still got life and we can do amazing things with it and it's that ESG piece. And for us, it's created our business. So it is good for business for us because it's created green jobs and it's great for the planet because it's tackling that e-waste, but it's also doing something magical around the social. It's about giving that gift of connectivity to other people. And for the businesses themselves that are donating the tech, it's good for their business for them because their consumers more and more are demanding that they become more sustainable. That's important to them. So if they can demonstrate that they're doing that, that's great for their bottom line because they're going to get more consumers, more customers choosing their service rather than another company because they know that they've got sustainability at heart. So for me, your title of your conference coming up in London is spot on. It is good for business and it's good for the planet for our communities.

Gaël Duez (05:57)

That's an interesting feedback, Elaine. There is just something that I'd like to clarify. Obviously, if you're a B2C company or if your enterprise customers pay a lot of attention to sustainability, yes, there is a clear benefit of running a more more sustainable business and letting people know about it. But a lot of companies are not under this kind of pressure, let's be honest. Most of the economic world is about B2B exchanges and the pressure about sustainability is not that high. Still, I guess you can save money because, and this is where I would love some clarification from both of you, it costs money actually to dispose a company e-waste. Am I right? At least in Scotland or maybe in the entire UK, I don't know.

Elaine Brown (06:43)

Yes. Yes, some ITADs will do it for free, but then they'll add on costs. And it does cost them because they've got to make sure that they're complying with environment legislation. So waste transfer notices and data wipe costs money. And that's often why businesses are reticent to do anything. They'd rather just stuff things in cupboards and deal about it later because they are worried about the environmental legislation that they need to comply with when they give it away and also the cost. And so that often makes them inactive. Those two things seem insurmountable. So let's just forget about it. And I'm sure most businesses have got those cupboards of doom, as I call them, where they're just stuffing old stuff in their cables, whatever, to deal with it another day. But the day is now.

ROSS COCKBURN (07:38)

Thank you

Elaine Brown (07:39)

And we've got to deal with it now.

ROSS COCKBURN (07:42)

You have to realize now that the whole ITAD is an industry, it's a business. The big guys, in the larger users, the NHS, are my biggest donor. They're a huge user. They have 19,000 in Edinburgh devices alone, of which we get one fifth of every year being replaced.

Elaine Brown (07:46)

Yes.

ROSS COCKBURN (08:06)

Now for me as a sustainability activist trying to give people digital inclusion, that is fantastic. They're doing what I would say is best practice in the sense that they're making sure that anything that they are discarding is no longer of any purpose to them. It's going to get a longer happier life helping me educate children in Africa, Ukraine or wherever, or supporting charities in Scotland with low cost tech. So they've tipped that box massively. The alternative would be for those devices to be dismantled. Some of the recycling companies or the ITAS don't even dismantle them. They shred them. The money and the amount of electricity and probably water involved in shredding e-waste, turning it into granules that they can then be either hydro or pyrometallurgically all the minerals are extracted it must be massive absolutely huge I'd love to give you a number right now but I can't.

Elaine Brown (09:12)

Seen it firsthand, just having visited an ITAD and a lot of the companies that demand that these ITADs shred it is because they're pitching it on security. We want the whole thing shredded because then our data cannot be shared anywhere. That is rubbish and that is an absolute disgrace. So to me, that should just be stopped because there is ways to wipe data without shredding the entire machine.

ROSS COCKBURN (09:22)

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ It is. Again. It's a debacle basically and then you've got the leading leading company that provides Wiping solutions Blanco, I don't mind naming them because they've bought up all the other wiping software companies out there and They actually say that you know Maybe maybe their own software isn't the right thing to use if they put the seed of doubt, but they say that. All other software is not good enough. You need to use Blanco. And you get people just project fear. It was the reason that we are no longer in the EU. It's the reason that we voted to leave. It's that we spin fear into society. And then people make rash decisions based on so most businesses feel that it's not possible to wipe drives. It is certainly more costly as Elaine said because a, Blanco will not give you their software for nothing, you pay for a wipe and it takes time because you have to take the drives out, you have to load them up so the labour cost in doing the right thing is a lot greater than doing the wrong thing and therefore most organisations will do the wrong thing purely and simply because of the economics.

Gaël Duez (11:00)

Okay, so let me pose here. So first of all, ITAD, can you just explain the acronym?

ROSS COCKBURN (11:06)

You're late.

Elaine Brown (11:06)

It's IT asset disposition. So it's basically tech disposal service. So these ITADs will come into big companies and say, you know, we'll take back all your least items, we'll take back all your end of life items, and we'll deal with that. And we might charge a little bit, but it's a problem solved for you. And then these ITADs often then sell those items. And then they will give the company sometimes a proportion back of that sale and then the business feels like we've done our bit, you know, but they don't know the journey of that tech, they just are feeling like, well, we've done our bit, we've got rid of our tech, we can now, and we've got some money back, so we can now buy in more tech, and they don't want to know the story. And I think that they need to know the story and they need to understand the story and it needs to be a better story if they understood that, would be a no-brainer for them to use people like ourselves who are transparent with the story. We're not shredding, we're doing community. We don't use the word recycling in the remake array. It's all about repair and reuse. is the key thing. So these ITADs are massive. They are massive. And about money. They're about money on the proportion that they're saying that they're doing the right thing, but Ross and I would probably say that, are they really? But it's a business. It's a business that's been born out of the need for people to get rid of their tech, to bring in more tech. That's where it comes from.

Gaël Duez (12:34)

Is it a business that actually save money for end user company or cost money? I've got a bit of a understanding because do they have to pay ITAD to take care of the tech or do they actually get some money back from ITAD once the tech has been resold?

Elaine Brown (12:41)

So it's a bit of a mixture. Most will say, we'll do this for free and we will get your proportion back because it's like a 70-30 split and so they'll give some money back to the provider. But sometimes for certain items, so some items will be free, they'll do that service for free and then they'll give money back. So it seems like brilliant. But then there'll be bits where they will charge for additional services. So it's all about where they can see where they can get money from those companies. So it's a bit of a mixture, you know, but the key thing is that the business that's donating thinks, we'll get some money back, but there'll be some costs along the line as well.

ROSS COCKBURN (13:33)

Having been the IT manager of a huge electronics company, and the start of my journey into this world came from being on the other side of the fence. I was tasked with getting rid of 500 computers that were in a high-based storage area for finished product. So the finished product that our company manufactured had to go into this storage area. At the price moment in time that I was taken through to that storage area, I was told… We need all this space. Get rid of all these computers. And the business was not really, they didn't care. They were just like, we just need the space. You just get rid of the things and let me know when I can use the space for a finished product. The only thing I would say most companies are really, well, they have to by law, they have to make sure that they just don't dump it in the ground. It can't go into landfill. So that is the bottom line. That's the baseline. And that's why SIPA, the Environmental Protection Agency in Scotland are a very important organization and you can get yourself into a lot of bother if you breach their rules and regulations. So both Elaine and I will be SIPA registered because we're handling this material, we're moving it around, we're transferring waste. We sometimes hate calling it waste because to us it's precious new computers for young mums children who are digitally excluded. I think the bottom line is that most companies will just be thinking not to landfill, get it out of here quickly because we need the space. We can't put new computers on the desk while the old ones are there. So it's move quick and get it out. I know Elaine said that there'd be lots of cupboards, but I would say most of the big guys, they just move very quickly. They subcontract companies to come in, 10 engineers come in, and in a weeks period, they will completely clear an office building of all the tech, put the new tech in, and the old tech goes off to an ITAD, and then we don't know what happens. Well, we sort of do, but.

Gaël Duez (15:45)

But just to finish on the financial side of things, so obviously there is this opportunity cost of having a space which is used only for garbage stuff. In the sense of the company, obviously we do know that these IT equipments are not good for the bin yet. But if they give this IT equipment to you, they will not have any issue regarding regulations, that's for sure.

ROSS COCKBURN (15:52)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (16:12)

But they will give it to you, they will not get any money back. So where is the financial incentivization for them

ROSS COCKBURN (16:18)

No, and I, we reward them with social good. You pick remake array or reusing IT, you know that you've gone beyond the sustainability right for the planet bit. You're massively taking the social good. But you're also double-edged sword, that...

Gaël Duez (16:36)

Okay.

ROSS COCKBURN (16:43)

We're going to keep that device running as it was fit for purpose, as it was designed to be used. Potentially for another five years, in my case sometimes 10 years. If that's not good for the planet, what is?

Elaine Brown (16:58)

Yeah, and again, I come back to why businesses are sort of starting to think about it is because the environment, the ESG, the environment, social and governance is becoming more important sometimes than the money aspect because of tenders and procurement. And what it is, is legislation and the need for money that's driving them to do it. It's not out of the goodness of their heart. It is because it does make business sense ultimately for them because of their ESG. And I've heard this firsthand from businesses who now donate to us and said, yeah, we could get some money back for this. But actually, the money part is not the important part now because for our business to survive, we've got to be in the market for procurement. We've got to be in the market for bids and tenders. And ESG is becoming the key thing, not necessarily the bottom line instantaneously. But by doing the right thing, we will get the bottom line up. So that's why they're doing it, but they're being dragged to do it because it's a business sense.

Gaël Duez (18:02)

I got it. I think we should now try to size and better understand how positive this impact is. And you mentioned several times a social aspect. So I've got actually two question now the first one is the size. mean, how many perfectly functional devices are thrown away or disposed away?

roughly speaking in Scotland or in the UK, just to give a sense of proportion. Do we have these numbers actually?

ROSS COCKBURN (18:28)

I think there was something like 17 million was UK wide. ⁓ If you wanted to try and Pareto that diamond is how big is Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK? You could probably get around to a couple of million, maybe even a million devices, but that could include laptops, desktops, phones, you name it anything anybody needs but it will be in the millions.

Gaël Duez (18:55)

The order of magnitude is in the millions. ⁓ We're talking about a lot of devices. And then, how efficient is reusing approach of yours? Ross, you mentioned something about Ukraine and the fact that computers were used in Can you tell us a bit more about it and how long the lifespan is extended? Is it like one, two years? Is it 10 years? I'm very curious about it.

ROSS COCKBURN (19:12)

Cool. So recently the game changer for everybody in Elaine and I's world has been solid state drives. You can take a solid state hard drive and we have done this already, a Core 2 machine which is 20 years old and that machine will perform as quickly as a lot of people's brand new laptop. People say, well how do you do that? And I say, well… Microsoft is basically a monster truck filled with everything that you want to have if you were going out on the biggest adventure. You're going to have all the tools, everything is in this monster truck. And that's great if you're off into this wilderness where you don't know where you're going to get things from. But if you take a completely different approach and fling out half the stuff that you don't really need or never gonna use, and you think in the open source world, then you can take a Linux build and you basically say, what do we want to do? So you reverse engineer it and you say, well, I want to send an email, I want some word processing, I maybe want to do some presentations, I've got email and yet biggest thing, I want a browser, I need a browser. If you just put those four or five functions onto a machine, we've got those machines running in Ukraine on 15 gig, on the of devices that the NHS and the Department of Work and Pensions, so these are for thin clients, they're tiny little boxes that people stick on desks, they're used to access a server where all the applications are and then the short term processing is done very quickly by the thin client. We've realised by working with our friends at St Andrews University that we could actually get an operating system onto these as a standalone machine. And people said, you'll not get an operating system on 20 gig. It's on the motherboard. I said, no, we can. We stripped down Unbuntu and LUnbuntu and it took up 10 gig. There's still 10 gig there for files, other things. I have now got 9,000 of these out in Ukraine, in the eastern part of Ukraine, going into schools in Ukraine, keeping children safe and educated while there's drones and cruise missiles flying overhead. The normal course of action in the West with these devices, once they'd stopped being thin clients, would be to destroy them, because we don't have a use for them. We don't think about open source. We don't think about extending the life of those devices because we don't need to.

Elaine Brown (22:04)

Ross is like me, know, when businesses start to sort of think three to five years, they're going to get rid of them. But for us, these devices are still got a lifespan. So probably anything from three to five years, they'll be getting from businesses. ⁓ But they are still of use.

Gaël Duez (22:12)

Yeah. Okay.

Elaine Brown (22:24)

We in the remake rate encourage behavior change. So we are selling to customers refurbished tech that's come from businesses. So those businesses think they don't have a life anymore. They absolutely do. We refurbish them, bring them back to life and then sell them to customers. So that to try and get people to think that you don't have to buy the brand new shiny thing that comes in a package that's all, you know, looks lovely. And as Ross says, it's got millions of things on it that perhaps you don't actually need. So we actually pride ourselves in the remake rates. We don't upsell. If you go into certain shops in the retail world, when they go in, they're based on selling you bells and whistles that you don't need. Whereas we sit and listen to our customer. And very often, they need just the basics things. And again, those refurbished kit can actually do that. A cost point that is not, it's going to be good for their pocket.

ROSS COCKBURN (23:19)

Okay.

Elaine Brown (23:21)

But also great for the planet and it's keeping that device in use longer. So it's just about people valuing things differently. And we always say at the remakeery, second hand is not second best. It's actually the cool thing to do. It's the thing that we should be so proud that we have got this refurbished bit of kit. And we should be so proud to say it's six years old, it's seven years old. That's where we're trying to get to rather than people saying, I've got the latest gadget, you know, and I'm going to keep it for a year and then I'm going to get rid of it to get the next one. That should be, you know, holding your head in shame. That's where we need to get to. ⁓

ROSS COCKBURN (23:58)

That's one of our biggest challenges is people's perceptions and buying habits. And we're all going to have to work really hard to change this. And if you don't mind me swearing, but I say that we live in the now and new fuck you generation. Because Amazon have given us delivery, I can order something and I'll get it later on today. So I want it now. And I want that new thing now. And do you know what? I don't care about the planet, about the amount of fuel that was taken to get that delivered. You know, we have to change people's buying habits, consumer habits. We have to make, make do and mend what the remakery are all about. We have to make that cool. That's what people do. You know, I grew up in a time, which was the seventies, where we went to a thing called Jumbo Sales. That's where I used to get my next set of clothes was from the clothes that were getting thrown out by people elsewhere. My next door neighbour, we got hand made downs, I got a second hand bike, I did my bike up, And if society doesn't change all that thinking, then all the things that you're doing with Green IO, all the things that we're doing will not be worth a drop in the ocean.

Gaël Duez (25:14)

And actually that's a very fair point, Ross, because that's something I wanted you some clarification about. So on one this change in consumption and how Elaine framed it, like, yeah, you know, let's go back to the basics, what people truly need. I understand for some users, but I think there is a bit of the elephant in the room with gaming, and we know how… the massive share of people playing online games. I mean, I'm part of them. You cannot really run steam on a five years old or 10 years old device. Yet this is the main use for many people. So how do you foresee the future of reusing IT devices also with this huge pressure from the gaming industry?

Elaine Brown (26:02)

So yes, so it's back to, we can't get away from the fact that people will buy devices that meet their needs. that's fine. And we're not saying you can never buy anything new, you can never buy the latest thing. That would be bonkers and we're in this digital world. But what we can educate these gamers to, and this is what we do at The Remaker all the time, is when they no longer want that gadget because they're moving on to the new thing, that they realise that they have to be sustainable about they are giving away and that is the key thing, you know, that they don't want it, that the parts, the amazing treasure that's in those devices can still have a life beyond their gaming life. And then equally at the Remakery, we have a wall in the Remakery with a Retro Tech and it's full of gaming devices of 20 years vintage that are all still working. They are all still working, beeping and making fantastic retro tech noises. And we engage those gamers in coming in to see so that they can understand the rate of the pace of change.

ROSS COCKBURN (27:00)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (27:13)

But those devices still have a place and they absolutely love those devices. know, they're geeking out on them and whatever. But it's an education piece for them to sort of say that, you know, the devices that you're using today are going to be the retro tech of tomorrow, but they still have a place in our planet. They still have a place that we should preserve them and nurture them. So we're not about don't buy anything new ever again. We're about thinking differently about what's inside that tech and nurturing it and

ROSS COCKBURN (27:41)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (27:43)

Passing it on the future.

Gaël Duez (27:44)

And this is quite funny because we've noticed over the last years, I would say, a tendency in the gaming industry also to push new games with a retro style or some sort of older user experience. think of the Obra investing massively in the gameplay rather than the visuals.

ROSS COCKBURN (27:57)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (27:58)

Yeah, just buy some retro tape from

Gaël Duez (28:06)

Just to get you right about the sort of secret recipes that you refurbishing. I heard two things, but correct me if I'm wrong. The first one is open source, which is a magical wind to extend the lifespan of a lot of devices. The second one is and the fact that today we have tools to avoid shredding the hard drives and making sure that we wipe them crystal clean, I would say. Is this right? Am I missing something here?

ROSS COCKBURN (28:36)

You're absolutely spot and I think what you were saying earlier about, you know, were discussing buying habits. Elaine and I both want people buying new computers, new devices, because if they weren't buying new computers, we wouldn't have devices to give away. What we want to make sure that they are doing is doing the right thing with the old device. You know, it's not stop progress, it's not stop buying. We want all this. But what we want is the right thing done at the end of life in terms of, and I hate the word disposal. It makes it sound like garbage and it's not. It is somebody's new computer. It's just, you just have to look at it in that way. And we do a lot of education with a lot of the donors that we have in and around us because when we were going into some of the bigger institutions to collect things. The desks and their offices and cupboards have been cleared with no thought of reuse. Everything had been put into a quick disposable metal cage so it could be rolled out to our vehicle and quickly repurpose it. said, look guys, you're the start of this process. If you don't help me here and all these TFT monitors are scratched or all these laptops are dented. What chance have I got in making sure that we can re-engineer all these things? So the education has to go back into the businesses in beyond the simple, it would be great for you to give us your stuff. Well, now you've made that decision. How do we do the material handling that preserves it and gives it the best, greatest potential chance of becoming a reused device?

Elaine Brown (30:23)

That's the key thing because a lot of these businesses see it as waste. They see it as waste. And Ross is spot on there. It absolutely breaks my heart. We've got some businesses who are literally flinging, flinging monitors into metal cages and things and going, here you are. Like we're some sort of garbage disposal service. saying, but we are about reuse and repair.

Gaël Duez (30:24)

So that...

ROSS COCKBURN (30:28)

Yeah. Good. Yeah, yeah,

Elaine Brown (30:48)

That is the waste hierarchy, the top of the waste hierarchy. What you're giving us becomes non reusable. And the other thing that annoys me is a lot of companies, again, because of data security, they're sending us things that are remote locked or bios locked. And that means that our potential to actually reuse that item becomes impossible. And so therefore, they've just given us a piece of waste that we're going to take for part.

ROSS COCKBURN (31:11)

Yeah, they're bricks basically. They're you know, iPad or Macbook that's four years old, that's MDM locked and I can't do a thing with it. And then it takes you about six months to find the person that can unlock the thing. And it's so frustrating. But we probably like you, have a set of, we have almost like a contract now that we hand out terms and conditions. If you want to work with reusing IT, remake it, here's all the things you need to think about when you are decommissioning. That's the word for it just makes the whole process a lot smoother. And the exciting thing is that I think as more and more young people come into higher positions within companies, so they're becoming the decision makers, then we're finding

Elaine Brown (31:40)

Yes.

ROSS COCKBURN (32:03)

And Elaine will back me up on this. They're making the right decisions. So one of our biggest ones recently was a huge financial organization called Agon. And the gentleman in Agon who wanted to give reusing IT their laptops, he had already decided before he met me that this was going to happen. We just had to work together to get all the other parts of the business to sign into this because he was 100 % convinced that getting £50 per laptop back from Dell as a rebate was not worth more than the opportunity to let that laptop carry on doing its job, educating someone.

Elaine Brown (32:42)

And it's the stories that those reused devices bring that is money in the bank. That is money in the bank. And more and more the companies want those stories and that's what we provide to them. They want the stats of tonnage diversion from landfill and CO2 emissions saved. They do want that because that is part of their journey and their ESG. But what they are asking more and more from us are the stories and they want to be part of that story.

ROSS COCKBURN (32:46)

Absolutely.

Elaine Brown (33:10)

So when people, businesses donate their tech, a proportion of what we refurbish we sell to make money to help us do it, but a proportion we gift to those that are facing digital poverty. Now, Ross does amazing work in gifting those devices to war-torn areas. But here in Scotland, we've got over 800,000 people who are facing digital poverty. Digital poverty means that they don't actually have a device.

ROSS COCKBURN (33:31)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (33:37)

So they can't connect in the digital world, or they have a device that's not sufficient to live in this digital age. It's maybe a mobile phone for a family of five trying to connect digitally to this world. That is digital poverty. So again, the devices that we then refurbish for gifting helps to tackle that digital poverty piece. So we work with over 60 other charities here in Edinburgh who identify the beneficiaries, who identify these families that are… needing to be digitally included into our digital world. then we donate on behalf of that business and the businesses want to come in. They want to be part of that gifting story. They want to meet the people and that is what they want. They want the stories of what their devices have done for people in our community. And we provide them with those wonderful stories that then they put into their annual reports, they put into their tenders. That is money in the bank to them because they have done amazing good. And they're quite shocked the fact that here in 2025, we've got that amount of people in Scotland, a wealthy country, who do not have the ability to engage in the digital world. It's a scandal. It's a disgrace. And that is where our reused IT is doing amazing work, because it's bringing that gift of connectivity to people who didn't have it. So it's great for the planet amazing for these people who can then take part in life here in Scotland.

ROSS COCKBURN (35:07)

There

Gaël Duez (35:08)

That's closing the loop. And just one side note, Elaine, because you're also someone who knows how to communicate, as you rightfully said, or was it Ross? I don't remember. Disposal is an ugly word. And because the IT word loves acronym, I suggest you could use UITA, which means nothing, but it will be unused IT asset. And by using the word asset rather than disposal, it changes completely things in people's perception because an asset is an asset is something that you either sell, you buy, it's got value.

ROSS COCKBURN (35:41)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (35:46)

It does. It's got value, yes. It's about terminology. We've got very good over the last 20, 30 years of using the word recycle. So you'll hear everybody sort of say, oh yes, I recycle and what have you. As though this is it, they've done it, game over, they've done their bit for the planet. And it's just that terminology, but recycle is actually not the good thing, you know? And so what we're trying to do at The Remaker, it's all about using language to get your message across. And so we just bang on about repair and reuse. And then people start going, yeah, I remember, you my grandparents used to repair things and we bring the joy of repair. We run a repair cafe every Friday here at The Remaker so people can come in, get a cup of tea, slice a cake, lovely.

ROSS COCKBURN (36:24)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (36:41)

And they bring in their tech hardware for repair or their textiles for repair. But the difference is they stay and they watch that repair happening and they learn how to do it themselves and they see the magic of repair and repair is magical and people get this real feeling of joy when they walk out the door with a bit of kit that they thought, I'll never get that fixed and they fixed it and it's going to last and they feel a pride in the fact that they've repaired that themselves and they're going to value that differently. So it's getting that word repair out there. So we want to get away from recycling because that's going to evoke the wrong feeling. We want to get into the reuse and repairs terminology because that's going to give you a warm glow.

ROSS COCKBURN (37:25)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (37:25)

And people and assets yes we use that word all the time because it is a value.

ROSS COCKBURN (37:31)

Have a big part to play in this, all governments have, because the agency that manages a lot of this from our perspective is SEPA. They call it waste. That's not a very good definition to start. I hate it when we go to a donor or a client and say, can you give me a waste transfer note? And I go, it's not waste. It's somebody's new computer.

Elaine Brown (37:51)

Okay.

Gaël Duez (37:53)

So I.

ROSS COCKBURN (37:56)

I think we need to redefine things and I

Gaël Duez (37:59)

I got it. Naming things is crucial here. And there is a massive investment to do in communication and even a bit of marketing to make repair sexy again and stop using the word recycling, et cetera. And it seems that you run pretty much a business operations because if I… gather the different pieces of information that you provide. Basically your three secret weapons are, as we said, open source safety and also education of your donors, to make sure that they handle the devices properly. So I understand better. And I also understand better social impact because I was not that much into it. mean, the numbers about digital poverty and the amount of people around the world still needing digital devices at cheap or zero price. Yeah, it makes a difference and this story can be appealing to a lot of companies or individuals. So I got it about how the repair industry is taking off and very fortunately taking over a bit about this myth of recycling because we all know in IT, recycling doesn't exist. We have a bit of down cycling, which is managing to extract a few resources from the massive amount of resources used to build an IT equipment and used not to the same purpose, but to a purpose where it will be less pure and less valuable. So for instance, using the plastic from the case for housing construction, but it is definitely not to build another case. Now I've got an amazing news for both of you, because as you said, you need new laptops and devices to feed this process So I've got a great news for you.

ROSS COCKBURN (39:28)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (39:42)

And this is not a joke, Microsoft has decided to terminate Windows 10 support and thanks to Microsoft. Thank you so much, Microsoft. We're gonna have millions, dozens of millions of new devices that will be ready to enter your process. isn't it such an amazing news?

ROSS COCKBURN (39:42)

Thank you. Well, on the one hand, on the one hand, I'm crying for the rest of humanity and big businesses. I'm going, what a shame. But on the other hand, I'm going, yes, because, you know, certainly the scale of the operation we have in trying to help children in Ukraine, Africa don't even get started. I mean, there are millions, tens of millions of children who are not.

Gaël Duez (40:04)

hahahaha

Elaine Brown (40:06)

Thank

ROSS COCKBURN (40:25)

You know, we thought the digital divide was something between the West and Africa. We found out during lockdown that we have a big digital divide in our own country. we want one of the reasons I'm doing any of this is I want to get, but I want to get the Scotland, Ukraine, the Western world sorted out digitally included, sustainable, all the rest of it, so we can focus on trying to help children in Africa. But Windows 10, great. mean, Microsoft's made that decision. It's created a whole new source of devices for us. It's not great for the planet. Nope, definitely not. It's probably not great for big businesses having to spend all the money. I'm sure they're not overly delighted. And it is actually starting to backfire on Microsoft because the Danish government have now said, for certain departments, we're not using Windows anymore. We are going open source. There's an article that we recently published on a blog that we do about inclusivity that was all about the Danish government moving across to Libra office in certain departments as a trial. And they've said, Microsoft office, bye bye. You've had enough money. So there's a lot of change happening. no, I and Elaine probably agree with me, know, the Windows 10 thing, shame for business, but great for us.

Elaine Brown (41:52)

It's a double edged sword really. It's back to just enforcing obsolescence again, which is already there anyway. So yeah, and for small businesses, because Scotland is made up primarily of SMEs, small, medium sized enterprises. And for them, that's a huge cost to their business. So it's kind of educating them that perhaps they could go with the refurbished kit and use a different system, Linux or whatever, you know, and that might drive our B2B business, you know, through refurbished, because I'd love businesses to start buying refurbished from get go. That would be great. And we do that a lot with a lot of our charities around here and social enterprises when they set up their businesses, we encourage them to buy refurbished kit right from the beginning of their business, it's good for their pocket etc. But yeah we're doing a big campaign around the end of 10 at the moment to try and get those businesses to do the right, you know if they're going to have to change because of it then do the right thing with the end product the

ROSS COCKBURN (42:58)

Exclusive for you, Gail, that like everything else with Microsoft and the spin, it's not the whole truth because 10 isn't completely going. There are essential security updates will be continued to be supplied to those customers that are so large that they are not moving to 11. So Microsoft has said, right, OK, we realize you're such a big customer. We will continue to support you until you're ready to move with essential security updates. They will also support education at a cost, one pound per machine per year, with essential security updates for Windows 10. So they're not completely killing it. They're just saying, we'd rather you move to 11, but if you can't or won't, we will keep helping you. It's not the sales pitch. The sales guys go, no, shut up. Don't tell them you can sort of use it. It's it's all or nothing.

Gaël Duez (44:01)

But I was a bit sarcastic when I was introducing the Windows 10 scandal, But what is your stance from the Right to Repair movement? And I know, Elaine, you're quite invested into this initiative. What does it say about the maturity or the pitfalls of the Right to Repair in IT?

ROSS COCKBURN (44:07)

No.

Elaine Brown (44:22)

Well, for a kick off, it doesn't include laptops and what have you to a huge degree. that's the thing, you know, they're concentrating on tumble dryers and washing machines and everything. Great, fabulous. But, you know, e-waste is driven by a lot of the technology that we have. So it's missing a trick there. And again, I'm hugely invested in the fact that I don't want words on bits of paper. You know, we've had directives, we've had route maps, we've had investigations. Lovely. Makes for beautiful bits of paper and legislation that looks like you're doing the right thing. But here we are. I it was talked about in 2021 and here we are in 2025. No really further forward in my opinion around laptops. In fact, for the last two years, I've attended the Repair Cafe in, well, this year it was in the House of Lords, last year it was in the House of Parliament where we took the right to repair. So we took our repair cafes down to the actual Houses of Parliament, down to the House of Lords and got MPs etc to come and see what repair cafes, what

ROSS COCKBURN (45:21)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (45:35)

Right to repair means and getting them to sign the declaration and they took their moment of glory where they're signing the declaration for we support the right to repair they get their photo opportunity it's lovely we've had a nice trip down to London but where are we we're still no further forward so you know in principle it's a great idea but again it's not widely forecast to the customer so that they don't know their rights to demand bits to be open it you know that

ROSS COCKBURN (45:45)

Yeah.

Elaine Brown (46:02)

Tools to open devices, the right to repair and not get their warranty out of date, what have you. So it's not broadcast widely to the consumer, it's not being to the manufacturer, and it's still in my opinion words on bits of paper. That's position.

ROSS COCKBURN (46:17)

Yeah, I totally agree. Gael, I've got a great idea for a television program and it's going to get teams of people and you stick an iMac in front of them and you say you've got half an hour, can you get into the iMac and take out the memory or the hard drive? And I swear to God, would be a bunch of them that eventually would just hit the thing with a hammer because

Elaine Brown (46:39)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (46:40)

What you just mentioned is absolutely pivotal years ago, France was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a law against planned obsolescence and for the right to reaper. It was pushed very hard by an association that I admire a lot which is called HOPE it's Alt a l'obsolescence programmée so it means in French stop to planned obsolescence and one of the most vocal members of this association is Laetitia Vasseur and she has petition, has lobbied, she managed a lot in this field. And recently she was debriefing this massive achievement and she dropped a number that was astonishing for me. There are three cases waiting to be judged by the French justice. Once I think it's canon. The other one is not HP. The other one is Apple and I cannot remember the third one. And the problem is that there is a low there are association and a department of the French government suing these companies and there is no court actually kickstarting even the trial. And it has been seven years. So what is the message here and why? And I can understand unfunded and not expert enough, I would say, court and people of law to deal with their super technical trials. But that says something about, let's pass a bill. Let's look all shiny on the newspaper. But actually, it won't move really the needle and we will not really face big businesses because we will not sue them.

Elaine Brown (48:16)

Until big businesses and manufacturers are held to account and perhaps fined and it really sort of knocks them where it hurts in the pocket, will they move to do it? Because everything about their business model says, well, we don't want people repairing stuff because that's going to mean that they're not going to buy stuff and we don't want to give them the tools. So they're not advertising, hey, people out there, you know, we've got the tools if you want to open up your. It's back to, there you are, there's legislation, it's lovely, but it has no teeth, it has no teeth and no driver.

ROSS COCKBURN (48:47)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (48:51)

It has no teeth.

Elaine Brown (48:53)

You know, we started this conversation talking about education But equally, what we've got is circular economy skills gap here because here in education. No student at primary school, no student in secondary school, no student at college or university will ever learn the skills of tech hardware because it does not exist in our curriculum. So there is a skills economy gap right away. There are jobs to be had in the future in this area, but we are not equipping our education to upskill these people. And when kids come in and do a bit volunteering with us, they're like,

ROSS COCKBURN (49:22)

Yeah. Yeah.

Elaine Brown (49:32)

Why are we not getting this at school? This would be cool, but we're not teaching it. So we are really far behind. If we're talking about we are racing against time now, for our planet. Our education system and our curriculum system is not identifying the gaps that we need to fill. And that worries me.

Gaël Duez (49:50)

So thanks a lot because Elaine, actually, you closed the loop of the podcast. We started with education. We finished with education. We learned a lot all the way during the podcast. It was interesting, the discussion also about the Windows 10 scandal, because as you say, Ross, it's a bit more subtle than it looks like. And it also explains things on

ROSS COCKBURN (49:57)

Yes!

Gaël Duez (50:13)

How much the right to repair is still a wishful thinking more than an actual law applied to everyone starting with big corporations. So thanks a lot for this. Is there any final piece of positive news that you would like to share with the listeners, even if you already shared quite a lot of good numbers and positive trends?

Elaine Brown (50:34)

Yeah, I always like ending on a positive and whilst it sounds like in our podcast we're sort of saying, we're going nowhere, we are because we have to keep having that voice and here at the Remakery our strap line is, waste less, live more. And I believe that there's opportunity for us all to do that if we truly waste less. We're going to live better lives, we're going to have a better planet and it is doable if everybody just gets the message and you know I'm sure we can improve the planet one refurbished laptop at a time. let's not lose hope, there is hope. Would you agree Ross?

ROSS COCKBURN (51:03)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (51:12)

IT items at the time. I love this one.

ROSS COCKBURN (51:17)

I have a bit of an adage that I sometimes like to look back in time to see what I should do now because we're human beings and not one problem or one situation hasn't already been. We just have to put it into context. so recently I discovered Ada Lovelace and she was a mathematician she's sort of widely claimed to be probably the first computer programmer. 1815 she was born her approach was poetical science and I thought poetical science what's that and basically it's when you merge imagination and intuition and the poetic spirit with logic and analytical rigor and mathematics and thought. And I think that the hope for all of us is that the businesses, the numbers people adopt a little bit of this poetic spirit, this love of life, they become dreamers. They want to go back to the simple things that we all shared when we sat around campfires and we just helped each other move on. You know, humanity, wisdom, all these simple things that we had in the early, early days, was when we all we had. And if we can get back to that more and use that as our philosophy and our thinking, then yes, there is hope for us all. And we will have a green future. We will save the planet. But I think we have to go back in time, back to the very early days and look at things and learn lessons from our ancestors that are calling us from the depths and saying, guys, don't give up. You know, it'll be OK. We got you here, so now just go don't go fuck it up basically.

Gaël Duez (53:08)

So Ross, thanks a lot because now we know that we have the biggest army because the dead are more numerous than the livings. So that's maybe the best news since the beginning of the podcast. Anyway, thanks a lot both of you. That was a lovely podcast. I learned a lot.

ROSS COCKBURN (53:16)

Lord of the Rings, we're here! We got the wee tea poured out, we're

Elaine Brown (53:19)

This is putting into walking day tonight.

Gaël Duez (53:33)

And I'm pretty sure the listeners will do as well. We don't talk that often about hardware and IT equipment, at as much as I would love to, but thanks to you, that's a gap that we reduced a bit today. So thanks a lot.

ROSS COCKBURN (53:40)

Thank you for asking us. Bye. Au revoir. Bye bye.

Elaine Brown (53:49)

Thank you. Bye.

Gaël Duez (53:51)

Bye.

Gaël Duez (53:55)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it either on social media or directly with relatives working in the IT industry, it will help them see that a strong momentum is starting around repair and that's good news.

In our next episode, we will be back in the US discussing water consumption of data center again, but this time from an academic perspective, we will have the pleasure to welcome two of the most renowned researchers on the topic of data center and environmental sustainability, the Dr. Mohammad Islam and the Dr. Shaolei Ren. Stay tuned. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter and check the conferences we organize across the globe. London is next week. September 23rd and 24th are the dates with an amazing lineup to discuss the question, good for business, good for the planet?

As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

Preparing her forthcoming keynote at Green IO London, she went all the way down into the rabbit hole of AI and energy efficiency. She investigated from OpenAi to DeepSeek and open source models, what a software developer using these models can and cannot do to reduce energy consumption, and so on. 

In the second part of this episode, Anne Currie et Gaël Duez discussed:

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Anne (00:01)

But the likelihood is you're doing most of your work through a hyperscaler. You're doing it through AWS. You're doing it through Google. You're doing it through. And the answer there is the answer that all of us in the industry have been saying for nearly 10 years now, which is that you've got to demand it. You've got to go to your supplier, your AWS and say, look, I want AI that runs on renewables. What is your story here? And how do I make sure that my AI is trained and at the inference runs on renewables? Because you can't really make that change yourself. You can only get them to make it. But if you do say I want it and this is part of my decision making process, they will make.

Gaël Duez (00:43)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

Do I really need to introduce Anne Currie to you? She's the co-author of the acclaimed O'Reilly book Building Green Software, a pillar of the Green Software Foundation, a veteran in the cloud industry, and also a science fiction novelist with a series of Panopticon books, And we will have the honor of having her as a keynote speaker at Green IO in London on September 24th, where she will talk about AI and its energy consumption. And there's something to know about Anne. She's a thorough speaker. When you give her a bone, she will go all the way down into the rabbit hole. This is exactly what happened on this topic of AI and efficiency.

This is the second part of this episode. In the first part, Anne provided quite a lot of context on the generative AI momentum and also why DeepSeek was a pivotal moment in AI. Not necessarily because of the energy efficiency of the model itself, but for the interest it raised on the topic. The second feature, which made DeepSeek's launch so pivotal, was its licensing policy. DeepSeek being an open source model, it led to many implications for potential future efficiency gains. But these implications don't come without issues.

Anne (02:31)

DeepSeek has not solved the problem. There are two things that we need to be thinking about. The first is that efficiency will mean that we just use a lot more of it, which doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. But it doesn't necessarily mean that in and of itself on its own is going to solve the problem. And that's the usual thing that always comes up, Jevons paradox. Now, I'm a big believer that Jevons paradox could be fixed and Jevons paradox is the definition of economic growth in many ways. But ⁓ I think there's a different problem here that will be solved in a different way, which is to go back to what I said before, hyperscalers gonna hyperscale. That's the AI scaling law where AI will just keep getting better as you pour more more money into it did not go away. We decided, know, a certain enterprises, vendors said, you just don't need to keep going up this. We're happy here. Just let us off and we'll take the roots, the DeepSeek roots and all of the models that have been spawned by DeepSeek. We'll take that route because it's good enough now. And we don't need to go, we don't need to keep going up. But the hyperscalers, the OpenAlias of the world, the Googles of the world, good simultaneous translation in headsets was never going to be enough for them. They wanted, and they've always wanted, or have wanted since the AI scaling laws became obvious to them, they wanted AGI, artificial general intelligence. They just want more and more clever models.

Gaël Duez (04:16)

Yeah, but that's. Sorry to interrupt you, Anne but that's absolutely fascinating the way you present things from more a marketing perspective than a technical perspective. Because if brute force approach was the best interest of hyperscalers, because hyperscaler, the scale, as you say, the moment we've actually proved that a significant chunk of the market doesn't want more, which threatens the very essence of the business model. Could we allow ourselves to say that they elaborate something to justify the endless growth to capacity.

Anne (04:57)

Yeah, so We're now in a space race, a kind of semi-militaristic race for who's going to have the biggest artificial brain. as a sci-fi writer, this is just astonishing. This is still the idea that if we can turn electricity into thought, and we can turn enough electricity into some amazing thought and it will just become clever and clever and clever. And the first person who gets that will have the biggest brain working for them, although will it be worth it? Anyway, whether or not this is the right thing to do, I would suggest that it isn't, but I don't think that any of ours is going to stop that happening. The hyperscalers, Google, OpenAI are going to compete to produce this enormous at X, X AI going to keep competing to produce this this big brain, this big artificial brain. ⁓ But it one thing has happened that I think we absolutely do need to talk about here. Sorry, I realized there's so much stuff here. But anyway, the ⁓ other thing that's happened is that, yes, we've got all of this interest in just scaling up forever and producing the mega brain. But we've also got now multiple strategies in play for how that, so the goal is the mega brain. There are multiple strategies out there for how that mega brain will be produced. Some of them are aligned with the energy transition. Some of them are alignable with the renewals. And some of them are currently at the moment not, but even where they're not, there are knock on the benefits for the renewable ⁓ transition. So I would say the three key ⁓ strategies are the American strategy brute force. They've started to build ⁓ gas-fired power stations as well as started looking to nuclear and stuff. So the American strategy is a green back strategy for it's, they just, have all the money in the world, you know, they are going to spend it. So they'll spend money to win. And that is not in any way aligned with the energy transition. But I think there are two other interesting strategies going on, two global kind of geopolitically huge strategies going on. The next is the Chinese strategy. And China have been very clear publicly clear about what their nationwide strategy is. And it's called something as well, partly as the open source, which is pretty amazing. So like, get everybody's eyes together, everybody's eyes on this, that's part of their strategy. But the other part of their strategy is something called East data, West computing. Have you heard of that at all?

Gaël Duez (07:53)

Never. Never.

Anne (07:54)

Oh, Everyone should follow me on LinkedIn, because I do actually try and keep on top of what's going on here. The blog about and talked about it a reasonable amount. The East data West computing strategy for China is like, well, we want AI, we want giant data centers. But we want them in a way that is actually realistic and not ridiculously expensive. We don't want to have to spend huge amounts of money on it. So what they say is, well, we've got a big country and most people live on the East Coast. All the big cities are on the East. The producers of the data are on the East Coast. And we don't want to build the data centers on the East Coast competing for land and water and resources and everything else and electricity with those cities. So our plan is that the cities will grow in the East. The data centers will all get… built in the West, where we've got huge areas of land where there's not much going on. We can build giant wind farms, we can build solar, we can build nuclear power stations, we can build hydro. We'll do all of the processing of data over in these giant data centers on the West. All the people will be on the East. And what we will exchange between the two will be data. Not electricity, just data. All the huge amounts of data produced by the people go to the West and then all the results of analyzing that data will come back to the cities. ⁓ And it's a much easier and cheaper to build networking infrastructure than it to build electricity infrastructure or any other kind of infrastructure. So that I think that's an excellent strategy and not one that we talk about anywhere near as much as we should do. I keep trying to say build your data centers in Scotland, ⁓ that is the UK equivalent of. ⁓ Obviously, China is on a little larger scale. And if they're attempting to do it across the whole of China, we should really be attempting to do it at least within Europe. So there, that's a strategy which is aligned with renewables. Because the whole point is that you can build all of these things in the West where there's little space. The other strategy, which I also think is an excellent strategy, ⁓ is the one coming out of India. So in India, they have they are building a strategy which is very aware of their context. And the context in India is there's a lot of sun in India, there's tons and tons of solar. So in India, they've already built at least one AI data center, which is solar and battery powered. why pay for what, you know, live with what we've got. So solar is their strategy.

But the other half of their strategy, which I really like, is the use of time of use tariffs on electricity. So India has really gone all in on time of use tariffs for electricity. They've said, look, if you're using electricity while the sun is shining, it is and should be to you 10 times cheaper than if you attempt to use it when the sun isn't shining. So try and steer everybody, all their industry, all their consumers, all their users, to do the energy intensive tasks while the sun is shining and stop doing them or do lot less of them, gray out, really dial them down because you'll be paying 10 times more for them when the sun isn't shining. So again, that is a strategy that is very aligned with the renewable transition. It's saying the energy of the future is solar. We need everybody to be using it as it is generated and using fewer batteries because you don't want to have to, it's impossible to, it'll be incredibly expensive and incredibly resource intensive to buffer everything in batteries so that you can just use electricity at any time, whether the sun's shining or it's at night. It's so much more efficient and so much better and so much more resource efficient to just get used to using your electricity when the shining which then gets back to your point before.

Gaël Duez (12:04)

I think we've got lost a bit with the strategy of the green transition in AI, but it makes a lot of sense. And I've never heard about the East data West computer approach or the approach from India. And you know, this is something I'm always looking for, like to have a global perspective on all green IT related topics and not to be too much Western centric. So thank you so much for this. Now, going back to these strategies and this AI and energy efficiency approach. So now that we've seen this country level strategy, what should, according to you, enterprise level strategy? By that I mean, if you're a leader, don't really matter if tech, product, financial leaders in your company, what should be the strategy you should have to make sure that you use the good AI, well that's a very wide topic, but also the most energy efficient AI.

Anne (13:05)

So it's an interesting one. What do you want to do with it? Have a think you're attempting to do. In the end, need AI to be aligned with the energy transition, which means that you need to be doing your training where the sun's shining or the wind's blowing and less when it isn't. But the likelihood is you're doing most of your work through a hyperscaler. You're doing it through AWS. You're doing it through Google. You're doing it through… ⁓ through Microsoft or Alibaba, indeed, or Alibaba. ⁓ And the answer there is the answer that we always, know, we, two of us, all of us in the industry have been saying ⁓ for nearly 10 years now, which is that you've got to demand it. You've got to go to your supplier, your AWS and say, look, I want AI that runs on renewables.

Gaël Duez (13:34)

Or Alibaba,

Anne (13:59)

What is your story here? And how do I make sure that my AI is trained and at the inference runs on renewables? ⁓ Because you can't really make that change yourself. You can only get them to make it. But if you do say I want it and this is part of my decision making process, they will make changes. mean, everything was slightly blown away by the AI scaling laws coming on board, but they still know that everybody does care about running on renewables and they want, they care running removals because they're a lot cheaper. But you have to keep pressing your suppliers to do this work for you because I don't think there really is or choose a supplier based on their story here. Go and say, what's your story? What's your plan? I'm choosing you based on this. Making a silent better choice is not really actually of that much use here. You need to make a noisy choice. You need to be going to your suppliers and saying, “This is what I care about. What are you doing about it?”

Gaël Duez (15:03)

Okay. I got it from an operational perspective. However, what about choice of models, I think in many corporations at the moment, you just… chase the winner like ChatGPT is everything at least in the Western world so we must have our ChatGPT use case and how can we help make better educated decisions? Because we've obviously discussed a lot about efficiency and reducing the energy intensity of both the building phase inference phase. But there is also the case of a good watt is a negative watt. mean, a good watt is a watt that we don't consume, how this discussion is truly happening and is it only happening on a cost based like it costs literally 10 times less dollars to train the model And I'm realizing my question the place now, but it goes back to how mature are most of global decision makers in corporations to make the right decisions when it comes to choosing AI models and not necessarily following the hype I would say.

Anne (16:16)

Well, so it's always a very, it's always an interesting one, this. I think that there is an incredible alignment on, as we talked about earlier, And ⁓ cost is a good proxy for energy use for electricity use. So every, there's almost, there are no, almost no enterprises who are not thinking, well, just a minute, what's the cost here? If I want to use a model in some tool that I'm running myself, what's the cost going to be? Because and 10X does make a difference. 10X is something that will change behavior. So I suspect all enterprises just need to start thinking about what's the cheapest way. This is what, forget green. What's the cheapest way for you to get what you need? And not just, and expect it. And remember that the open source stuff where there's a very active community of people who are trying, keeping trying to reduce the costs is going to be the one that ends up being cheapest. the interesting thing, ChatGPT did come out with an open source model ⁓ this month, think, wasn't it? Which was nice to see, because I think because a lot of the work, ⁓ you mentioned Hugging Face have been shouting about the fact that there is now an open source community who are really keen to work on these things and need models that are available under permissive licenses, not massively restrictive licenses. So although ChatGPT at the moment is very inefficient. Those folk will be looking over at what ⁓ DeepSeek has done and the various other models since then that have taken what DeepSeek did six months ago and made it even better. And they'll be saying, well, how can I apply this to my favorite model, which is ChatGPT? So I think for enterprises, ⁓ go for the cheapest, that's your North Star, is go for the cheapest way of doing it. ⁓ But you're to have to think about what's cheaper now, but also what's going to be cheaper in a year's time, in two years time, in three years time. I've had many conversations with people who've said things like, well, I chose this green technology. ⁓ I think it was Julia versus Python. ⁓ that Julia was always a really super green technology. ⁓ But it was quite niche. There weren't so many people working on it. Python has just got more and more efficient over time, just because it was a much bigger community with much more people working on it, much more people willing to invest in it. So although chat GPT, their open source model is not so efficient at the moment, my suspicion is that they'll have a much more they'll have a very active community of people improving it. So it's hard to say. I say it's early days, but I would be tempted to say, well, it's interesting that, well, what we might want to do is learn from Python. So with Python got much, much better. So people who had chosen Julia, which was better at the time, didn't get those benefits. But people who stayed on earlier versions of Python also didn't get those benefits. Python has turned out to be very difficult to upgrade through the to the new releases, which are much more efficient than the earlier versions were. So you need a model that is going in the right direction for you, where there's a very active community who care about what you care about, and you want them to care about it costing less money to run it. And you need to be able to, you need them to be focused on making it easy for folk to upgrade through the new models as they arrive, because there's no point in having some new model that's amazing, but you can't get there because it's impossible for you to get from where you are on model version one to model version 10, which is a hundred times better.

Gaël Duez (20:23)

Well, that's super interesting because let me wrap it up here. If I'm a decision maker, CTO, CPOC or whatever, et cetera, and I'm faced with choices regarding AI powered product, I would say. There are actually several questions that I should ask if I'm following your thought here. The first one obviously is what is the cost? Cost of today cost of tomorrow because the problem or the opportunity with AI powered product is that most of the time they're scale. So how much does it cost me today? How much will it cost me tomorrow? But that's question number one.

Anne (21:01)

See you again. But not just because you scale it, also because is that model going to get better over time or worse or stay the same?

Gaël Duez (21:10)

And that's actually the second where does the engine comes from? Is it come from an open source community? And how big is this open source community, which is a good proxy of actually what you mentioned, which is how much better will this model comes over time? But then you need to also to ask a of a technical questions, how easy this model is to actually get scaled and how I can easily upgrade from one model to another. So it's already three big questions I would say that anyone should ask whenever presenting an AI powered product. Am I right?

Anne (21:47)

Yes, yeah, absolutely. It's not easy and it's quite early days. But I would say call your mind back to rights law, which we talked about a little bit earlier. Things get better the more they're used. So things that get a lot of use and are open source, the sweet spot is there's loads of users, there's loads of demand, there's loads of ability to scale it up and get more more users using it. They care about it being cheaper and it's open source. So lots of people can work on improving it that will get better according to rights law that you know as things get used more they get better that will get better that is the python lesson but you

Gaël Duez (22:28)

But that's a super interesting point because that means also the fourth question should be, folks, what are the feedback loop mechanisms that you're putting in place to get every early stage signal that I need? Because we're not that sure where we're going. So I want to be sure that I'm riding the Python code horse rather than the other one and making sure that I'm using an open source. AI model, which will actually keep on growing the community. maybe at some, it should be something as trivial than how many commit did we have on this, you know, open source model for the last month or the last quarter. And if we see the number drop, then it should, you know, trigger some sort of red flag saying, my God, we've invested quite a lot on this product powered by this model. And this model, the community is shrinking. It is a red alert and we should really pay attention to eventually. Migrating before it's too late. that's actually a fourth point, which is super interesting that you raised.

Anne (23:27)

Yeah, and of course, you've got to you have to have the ability to migrate. So this comes back a little bit to to best operational practice. If you can't change, there is no good there is no single great decision you're going to make today, but is going to to work forever from now on. ⁓ With AI, everything will change. mean, just like the the timeline that I've just given you. It's an accelerating timeline. A load of stuff happened. You know, we started in 2017, but then massive stuff's happened in 2025. It's an accelerating timeline. there's no model that you can choose today, which is going to be guaranteed to be a good choice for the rest of the for the next 10 years, it is going to change on a moment by moment basis. And, and you maybe, you know, you don't have to that doesn't necessarily mean you have to move on a moment by moment basis, but but at some point, you are going to have to move. And Python, we're saying, Python was a good choice, but it was a good choice for some people because they kept the ability to change and they migrated to the new versions of Python. But it's a ⁓ major issue. The hyperscale, as I mentioned this to me in the past, how much waste there is on ⁓ the hyperscale systems because of customers who are running old versions of Python they can't migrate away from. That is just five or 10 times less efficient than a modern version of Python. And all those CPU cycles are just waste. All those carbon emission is just waste. And that's only because they don't have CI, CD, don't have automated testing, they can't upgrade, they can't change.

Gaël Duez (25:11)

Comes back to the quality of your entire tech stack and how agile it is. Not the fancy wording of agile, but like truly agile, like the ability to ship code efficiently and almost automatically for sure. Anne

Anne (25:26)

Absolutely.

Gaël Duez (25:28)

There is one last question that we need to address, which is how we measure things, because we mentioned several times, 10 times more efficient, cetera, et cetera. But according to you, in this very blurry landscape of measuring AI even only related to energy efficiency, is in carbon efficiency and water efficiency, it’s even more complicated. What are the trends? What do you see? How comfortable are you when you say for instance, DeepSeek is 10x more efficient, whatever, etc. What did you notice when you researched this topic?

Anne (26:10)

There are numbers all over the place, I would say. And the thing is that in different use cases, the situation is different. So it might be 10x better, maybe it's 10x better in some cases, but it's not in others. It's complicated. I don't think that coming up with a... I would say 10x is useful because it kind of indicates that it is a significant amount or in some, at least some… useful use cases a significant amount. ⁓ But as I saying, 10x doesn't last forever. And it doesn't mean anything. So 10x. now DeepSeeker is saying 70 times for some particular use cases, 70 times more efficient. Is that a common use case? ⁓ It's kind of like, that is that what everybody's going to be doing? Is it not? It's ⁓ but it is it does suggest a direction of travel which at the moment I think the only thing we can do is go is say what's the direction of travel and is that the right direction of travel for us? And I'm going to say over and over again, something that I always say, which is if in doubt, just measure cost and just care about cost. Because, know, time of use tariffs are going to come in. ⁓ India is really leading the way on that. that and Spain as well have introduced it. are a couple of European countries with time of use tariffs.

Once those are globally accepted, which they eventually will be, then carbon and cost will be very, it will be nicely aligned. So if you kind of get your head around the idea that there are going to be time to use tariffs and you define everything that way and you get used to measuring in terms of cost of running your systems, you will eventually align with the energy transition, is my thinking on that.

Gaël Duez (28:07)

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you're very optimistic. I meet from time to time people which are a bit less optimistic than you are. But at least from the energy transition perspective, it makes sense to have also this approach and in this alignment on cost and carbon efficiency. I would add maybe to this that when it comes to being comfortable with the numbers that are thrown all over the place because this is really what it is, that it's basically know your context and your use also something that concerns me regarding the ability to get accurate figures is that the way even the inference phase is run today is getting more and more complex. You mentioned in our previous discussion the chain of thought approach, which is that now even you throw the tokens to the model and the model will not immediately answer you back, but they will pause and take the time to redo the calculation even sometimes access to other specialized tools. We see now that some models, they're also browsing the web to get confirmation of what they emitted as a first answer, cetera, et cetera. even the use phase is getting more and more complex. And I think in that case, it's really, really important to know which use case we're talking about, which context we're talking about. And that sort leads for me to a call for regulation or at least common norms, because it's almost impossible otherwise for developers or users to really understand what is the cost, the energy cost of this specific use case, this specific request. I I got it with the trend of follow the money. It's a good one, but to be able to compare, I think we need a bit more transparency as well, because things are getting so complicated that even someone truly willing to provide the information from one of these big companies will struggle to access the data.

Anne (30:06)

Yeah, it is. is really, really hard. I totally agree with you. It's not an easy question to ask, answer really. Yeah. I think you can only really do kind of compare for yourself. Is it best, is my use case better or worse this week than last week after this change and before this change?

Gaël Duez (30:23)

Yeah, which could be a good approach. anyway, thanks a lot. I mean, that was an amazing discussion. We went through all the history of generative AI, which is a funny word to use, knowing that it's, I mean, less than five years.

Anne (30:39)

We didn't even do all of it. could have, could have, there's more interesting stuff in there to talk about, but yeah.

Gaël Duez (30:47)

Let's keep it for Green IO or London in that case. No, let's keep it for another episode. Maybe you will be the first one to join the podcast three times. I would say two final questions. mean, you've got quite a lot of resources being shared on AI and energy and AI and efficiency. Is there one specific resources that you would advise the listeners to follow on top of following your LinkedIn page.

Anne (31:19)

Well, this is what I say all the time. And I kind of think, well, nobody must, nobody could have not read Building Green Software because it's so much designed for all the listeners to podcasts that I speak on. But I will tell you that the numbers that sold do not reflect the fact that everybody who's listening to the podcasts that I host has read the book and they would enjoy the book if you are attending, if you're spending any time. Listening to this, read Building Green Software or listen to it on audiobook form because it is available as an audio book. it's all about the principles, you need to understand the principles and then work up from them because everything changes so much all the time. It's why in the book we tried to focus on the principles.

Gaël Duez (32:03)

Makes total sense. And maybe my final question, even if you already shared, I would say at least a positive mindset or optimistic mindset, do we piece of news to share with the audience related to sustainability and IT?

Anne (32:20)

Well, I I will just reiterate stat that I gave earlier that China is building a power stations, one gigawatt per day worth of new renewable power. And we all need to be looking at China and learning from what they're doing. They are on the rights. They're following Wrigh's law. They're learning by doing. And that is a huge resource that we all have to go and look and say, what is China doing? Let's do some of that.

Gaël Duez (32:51)

Okay, and as usual, I'll put the link of all these reports Anne, thanks a lot. It was great discussion. Really looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks in London. And that was an amazing job that you did investigating all of this trends and all of this history. So thanks a lot.

Anne (33:13)

Well, I was cursing you for a while because it was taking me so much time, but I'm really pleased that I know more about what's going on. It's something incredibly important these days and so I'm very pleased with it. So thank you very much for asking me.

Gaël Duez (33:17)

Yeah. Actually, you're more than welcome and actually I feel more blessed than cursed. Thanks a lot and see you very soon. Bye bye.

Anne (33:33)

See you soon, Green IO.

Gaël Duez (33:44)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the share notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a thumbs up on YouTube or rate the podcast five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with relatives working with AI is a great move to provide them with insights on this hot topic. You've got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.

In our next episode, we will keep on exploring the British IT sustainability landscape. After all, Green IO of London is in two weeks. And we will welcome Ross Cockburn from Reusing IT and Elaine Braun, the CEO of the Edinburgh Remarkery. And they will both explain to us why they hate recycling. Stay tuned. Either way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter and check the conferences we organize across the globe. As we already discussed in this episode, Green IO London is almost there. September 23rd and 24th are the dates. As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets are all gone.

I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

Preparing her forthcoming keynote at Green IO London, she went all the way down into the rabbit hole of AI and energy efficiency. She investigated from OpenAi to DeepSeek and open source models, what a software developer using these models can and cannot do to reduce energy consumption, and so on. 

In the first part of this episode, Anne Currie et Gaël Duez discussed:

And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Anne (00:01)

They realized was that the more compute they poured into training and running an LLM, the better he got, and it just kept getting better. So people were expecting we'll we'll pour in energy. And at some point we'll, get diminishing returns. You know, we'll go, well, that's the point where we, where we stop building the data centers, but they didn't discover that. They discovered that it just keep going up and up and up

Gaël Duez (00:19)

It will plateau.

Gaël Duez (00:28)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

Do I really need to introduce Anne Currie to you? She's the co-author of the acclaimed O'Reilly book Building Green Software, a pillar of the Green Software Foundation, a veteran in the cloud industry, and also a science fiction novelist with a series of Panopticon books, which I didn't read yet, but I intend to catch up before Christmas. And we will have the honor of having her as a keynote speaker at Green IO in London on September 24th, where she will talk about AI and its energy consumption. And there's something to know about Anne. She's a thorough speaker. When you give her a bone, she will go all the way down into the rabbit hole. This is exactly what happened on this topic of AI and efficiency. She investigated from OpenAI to DeepSeek and open source models investigated what a software developer using these models can and cannot do to reduce energy consumption and so on and so on. And I realized it wouldn't be fair for the thousands of listeners of the show to be deprived of these insights. Hence this episode on a much complicated topic, AI and efficiency. Hi Anne and welcome back on the show because you're now part of the small club of guests who have been due time on the Green IO podcast. Congrats!

Anne (02:16)

Well, thank you very much. It's great to be back. And I'm really looking forward to green IO should be an excellent conference. It looks like an amazing lineup.

Gaël Duez (02:27)

I mean, you're part of it, so it must be. Listen, Anne, before we deep dive into this AI and efficiency discussion, I was listening to the Environment Viable episode, which you hosted with Sean Varley from the chip manufacturer, Ampere. It was super interesting to hear the discussion about which developers are actually able to leverage the true potential of a chip or all the hardware used to run the software on. Sean made a point that the hyper-specialized engineers building the serverless tools are more able to achieve significant results than a regular developer who has to deal with many business and technical requirements, the time constraint and so on and so on. And I guessed that it was… sort of music to your ears because you advocated during your discussion with him, but also in this podcast previously and in your book that building efficient software is actually super hard. So before we deep dive into AI and efficiency, could you elaborate a bit on this constant stance of yours?

Anne (03:39)

Yes, so there are lots and lots of ways to cut your energy use in your systems, but I always say that for most enterprises, don't think about code efficiency. It's incredibly hard. It's a very, very specialized skill. There's tons of low-hanging fruit in operational efficiency. adopting modern ops practices will help you be more secure, will help you be more resilient not you're having just getting rid of the waste in your systems, turning things off when they're not in use or when you don't use need them anymore, getting rid of your zombie services. That generally will cut your energy use in half whilst making your systems more secure and more ⁓ and a lot cheaper to run half usually half as much to run. So that's for enterprises. I always say that look first there because the changes to use the less electricity are completely aligned with other business needs that you have. So it's worth it is worth a little bit of investment to cut your hosting costs in half and also to get a more resilient system. ⁓ rewriting your systems to be more efficient, that is a really specialist skill and it is not worth paying the kind of people who have the ability to do that in most enterprises. So what you really need to do there, this is where I was very aligned with Seth's statements which you're much better off, if you want efficient software, buy it. Buy it off the shelf, buy it managed, ideally already managed. If you're using a hyperscaler, buy a managed service off that. will also often, which is where obviously Seth wants to be selling his chips to those same people. So enterprises never need to get involved. They sell to the hyperscalers, the enterprises buy that chip from the hyperscaler wrapped in a managed service that might be serverless, might be something else. ⁓ And that's kind of that means everybody's aligned. Otherwise you end up with it's really hard. Many years ago, when I started my career, I was involved in writing high performance software in C, not because I was some super person doing that stuff, just because we had to because all the servers were really bad back then 30 years ago. And therefore you had to write really efficient software to get everything to run at all. And it took ages. These days, most enterprises, if you attempted to do that kind of work, you would go out of business. There are some ways that it can happen. And that is a little bit about what we're talking about today. ⁓ Some ways that enterprises can be involved or even individuals can be involved, but not… through your enterprise writing your own custom system. It's half the story of DeepSeek, which you asked me to look into a couple of months ago. So we come full circle on that. yes, my key thing is don't try to do something that isn't realistically going to happen because there are lots of things that every enterprise absolutely should be doing in terms of adopting modern ops best practice that will save loads of, realistically it's going to save you more electricity use than anything else you do.

Gaël Duez (07:01)

Thanks a lot for clarifying that yet there are many, many, many things to be done before writing efficient code. Maybe we'll come back to this point later because doesn't mean that especially if you write code for the very first time, there are not some best practices or things to consider. But now that you've mentioned DeepSeek and that was actually something that I asked you to investigate in preparation of this episode several months ago. Maybe you could explain what DeepSeek did and didn't do to achieve its so-called energy efficiency, which is to take with a pinch of salt because once again, it really depends a lot on under which angles you analyze this. So could you enlighten us a bit on this?

Anne (07:43)

Well, I'm actually going to roll you back because when you asked me to look into this, really needed to say, what's the context that DeepSeek, so DeepSeek, it's a new model that came from China in January. And it really caused an enormous, enormous amount of interest because they said that they'd got 10x reductions in running costs.

Gaël Duez (07:52)

Yeah, sure.

Anne (08:06)

Which actually is pretty, is very believable. That's not very much in terms of how much do we expect, especially from a code efficiency change, but it caused enormous amounts of interest. And I think that the interesting thing there for me, when I spoke to a lot of people in the industry is, especially, you know, I'd go out and talk to deep mind engineers and say, what do you think of this? Has it achieved this? Why is it so interesting? They go shrug their shoulders. And say, don't understand why people are so interested. ⁓ 10X is not that much. Maybe they've achieved it. have no interest. It hasn't done anything exciting. There's nothing new that comes out of DeepSec, but it has caused enormous interest. It is enormously interesting. And I think for folks to understand where that interest comes from, we need to roll back a little bit. And the first place I want to start is something I said on stage. Last year I was at Green IO, I was in the panel. ⁓ And ⁓ I said at the time that there were two things that we absolutely knew were coming. ⁓ One was climate change and the other one was AI. And there's no point in railing against either of those things. They are coming. They are… But the good news is they are the two revolutions that are happening at the moment, which will actually change our lives very positively as well. So, and I don't think that we can look at this or think about this or think about the solutions to our green problems without acknowledging the fact that we are in the middle of a green energy, a renewable energy transition, which is amazing. It's a revolution. Last year in 2022, 92 % of new investment in energy production went into renewables. mean, do not underestimate that. That is amazing. That is not the situation we ever anticipated 10 years ago. Things have really, really improved. And we've been part of that because we've been making noise and pushing for it. But we have achieved there. The energy transition is coming. I if you look at China, last year, again in 2024, they built the equivalent of one nuclear power station every day, just for renewables, mostly solar, but also wind. Again, we would not have expected that a year ago, 10 years ago. And even a year ago, we wouldn't necessarily have expected. So we are in the context that we are in the middle of a green revolution.

Gaël Duez (10:37)

Yeah.

Anne (10:42)

We don't talk about it all the time, but we don't hear it on the news, but it is going on and it should be something that humanists talks about all the time. The other thing we're going through is an AI revolution. And what I'm gonna talk to you a little bit, because we know a little bit about that kind of like solar is going, wind is going. We understand that, but AI, to understand AI, I think I needed to roll back quite a few years to understand where it came from and why a whole series of really important changes have happened over the past eight years, where they came from, what effect they have on the other revolution. Because the win here is not to kill AI because I don't think we want to. It's great. There's lots of amazing use cases for it. But even if we did, we wouldn't be able to. It's rolling. ⁓ There's no point in fighting against that. What we need to do is align the AI revolution and the renewable energy transition. We need to make sure that the AI, which will be an enormous energy user, and that's what I'll be talking to you a little bit about today, the history of it why it's going to be an enormous energy user. We need to make sure that the energy users is renewable energy, not fossil fuel energy. And that is where we need to absolutely be focusing all our attention, I would say. So I don't want to, I could keep going and talk for the next half an hour, but I want to get your thoughts on this.

Gaël Duez (12:16)

I think the two revolutions are going on for sure. I usually tend to zoom out a bit and consider the energy transition as just part of a more global ecological transition because we know that if we don't incorporate other very precious resources such as metals or even the biosphere, we might sometimes take the wrong decision when it comes to driving the energy transition while not considering any of the other impacts it might have say beyond the scope of this discussion. However, I'm with you on this one that yes, AI seems to be a massive energy consumer. I still didn't make up my mind if it's because of a wasteful behavior coming from the US where actually energy is cheap and we shouldn't focus that much about it. or if it is really that it will always require an enormous amount of energy to get trained and even more important to get consumed by the inference phase. So I didn't really make up my mind and that's actually something that I wanted to ask you when you investigated DeepSeek because we had tons of discussion like yeah it's the training costs less which is we're talking about several dozens of millions of dollars to train a model like GPT-4 or GPT-5. So it's also significant money that can be saved. And that's also some sort of a social justice issue because if you have only top corporations around the world or top universities having access to this technology that… should also question how the rest of humankind can use or not use this technology. But that being said, a lot of the discussion also happened that, yeah, DeepSeek might be most energy efficient, which was, according to you, not a big deal for most of the AI engineers. But on the other end, there've been also a lot of discussion like, yeah, but the inference phase, when you request something from DeepSeek, it was actually super energy intensive. And that's why I asked you and your detective skills to investigate because I really wanted to get more mature numbers and a better understanding. So I guess the floor is yours now.

Anne (14:28)

Yeah, so, oddly enough, those questions are the ones that I've been trying to answer for you when you asked me to answer them some months ago. Just completely destroyed my life with this question, which is an excellent question. So, what I'm going to do is take you a little bit back to give you a bit of context. What was the situation that DeepSeat came into? And I think it's really important that we do talk about this.

And also I find it very interesting and it does give you a little bit of an insight into the minds of the hyperscalers, the AI designers, where they're coming from on this. in 2017, a paper came out called Attention is All You Need, which you may have heard of. And it was a paper that came out of Google Brain, the teams at Google at the time. And they said, you know, we've just discovered this really cool a new algorithm called, a way of doing AI called Transformers. And it's really good because it was, oddly enough, was an efficiency play. It cut the energy requirements by about 10x. And it was just better. It allowed you to take in more context when you were doing, it was about translation and chatbots were mostly about kind of English to French, that kind of thing.

And ⁓ it was almost 10, it's 10 times cheaper. ⁓ But it all it'd be but you know, there are all we're finding all kinds of interesting things about it is much the algorithm is innately more parallelizable. So it used to be the AI used to have to run quite sequentially. So to get ages and ages to do the training and everybody got really bored. And AI engineers don't have an awful lot of it, you know, they are God this takes ages. But this one because it was parallelizable, you could you could

take it into bits and you could run it simultaneously on GPUs. So they said, well, you know, there are these fancy GPUs from Nvidia done for gaming. We could use those and we could run this much faster using GPUs. And we could really scale it up because, you know, we can just scale this. We can now scale this horizontally rather, you know, with these GPUs. And everyone went, oh, that's great. And when they wrote the paper, they said, we're seeing that it seems to be working better as well. It seems to be producing better results, better translations, better chat bot chat, that kind of thing. But in the beginning, it was mostly about, this is quite cool because we can do it faster and we can do it more efficiently. And this caused a kind of big split in the AI industry in the 2017, 2018 that open AI just went.

This is so much better than everything else out there. We're going to go all in on transformers. And LLMs are based on this transformer technology. So all the chat GPT and all that kind of stuff, based on the idea of transformers. Google said, well, no, we're having lots of success with other forms of algorithms. So we aren't going to go all in on LLMs. We're just going have a little bit, know, hardly any look at that whatsoever. So AI just went gangbusters on this. And they decided the best way to try this out was to build chat GPT, a chatbot based on LLMs. And they built chat GPT one, which nobody really saw, and chat GPT two, which they trained with a whole load of interesting data of dubious. Apparently they trained it's an awful lot of fanfiction, which is interesting because fanfiction.

is not Creative Commons, it's Creative Commons, there's no IP usually when it's released. I think it really gave gave Chat GPT that kind of early, kind of friendly tone it had. Anyway, so it did a whole load of stuff that they trained Chat GPT on all this fan fiction. But between Chat GPT 2 and Chat GPT 3, and Chat GPT 3 was the one that was released and we all saw. And this is the key moment they suddenly realized something really quite that nobody was expecting. Something that they coined as the AI scaling laws. Now, if there are any physicists watching, I was a physicist, it's not a law, it's not a law of nature, it's more like a Moore's law. It's the kind of thing you call the so you can get ⁓ investors to give you money, like Moore's law.

Gaël Duez (19:02)

Yeah, humans made low.

Anne (19:10)

It's very

Gaël Duez (19:10)

Is that the best definition of Moore's law that I've ever heard? This is a law made by humans to get money from investors. Okay, that's sort of low. Okay, I got it. ⁓

Anne (19:18)

Absolutely. It's exactly that sort of law. But it is also industrially and experimentally interesting and useful. What they realized is once they had LLMs and chat GPT that could run on GPUs, and you could scale out those GPUs horizontally, they started to build bigger and bigger data centers and pour more more and more energy into them. What they realized was that the more compute, they poured into training and running and LLM, the better he got, and it just kept getting better. So people were expecting we'll we'll pour in energy. And at some point we'll, get diminishing returns. You know, that's the point where we stop building the data centers, but they didn't discover that. They discovered that it just keep going up and up and up in the bed. And the, so the definition of better here is because my husband's a physicist and he said what does better mean? Is that the definition of better here is basically better on all the metrics they had. So they've got kind of artificial metrics about how accurate the results are, ⁓ something called perplexity which is how when they get to the end of calculating something how sure are they that they got to the right result. The perplexity got lower that they were more confident of the right result but also the kind of subjective measures like going in and asking somebody is this better than it was, know, is it more readable? it does it seem like a better translation or a better chat you're having? All of those measures people go, yeah, it's better. It's better. It's better. It's better. It's better. And this was and this is this should all strike us all with horror. Because this is the issue. This is what's caused all the problems coming. Well, not the problems, but you know, the advantages, but also the risks here that the amount of compute and that was ⁓ number of parameters per model. So if you made the model bigger, it got better. The amount of data that was required to train the model, good data required to train the model and the number of passes that it made through the data. And you combine all of those together and they all have to go up in together to keep on this line of it just keeps getting better, this AI scaling law ⁓ is that you write all of those together and it just keeps getting better. the thing is the AI scaling law is about AI is really very, very impressed, incredibly impressive and we don't know how impressive it's going to become if you scale it.

And then of course you have the, you know, that is music to the ears of hyperscalers. Because I think one of the things we have to remember here is hyperscalers gonna hyperscale. It is an advantage that they have that they can keep hyperscaling and therefore they will. So at this point, and this was 2020 that this rule was first experimentally proven that so far we had not seen any tailing off of the effects of just pouring more and more and more energy into these AI identity data centers. So 2020 and then things kept going on from there. And at that point, the only strategy in existence force, and mostly driven by America. They have all the energy, they have money,

Gaël Duez (22:58)

Yeah, more energy.

Anne (23:03)

So at this point, they'd realized this, this AI scaling law, but it wasn't really widely appreciated. Investors weren't quite so interested in it, hyperscalers weren't quite so interested in it. But then in late 2023, ChatGPT-3, came out and that was the one where everybody went chat GPT mad and started talking to it and there was it was just wall to wall news current coverage. Everything in the world was going on about ChatGPT-3 and suddenly all the hyperscalers really woke up to the fact that this this was something they had in their hands that was in a that had some degree of product market fit. People wanted to talk to chat. You see they wanted to use it. They wanted to use it for translations. They would use it for writing reports, wanted to use it for writing their novels, they wanted to use it for all kinds of things. Suddenly it had established, late 2023, it was established as a thing, a giant thing. ⁓ And I will show you the actual charts of what happened then when I'm doing my onstage talk. But hyper scaler spending on data centers doubled pretty much overnight between 2023 and 2024, hyperscalers doubled the investments they were doing in building data centers. And that was pretty much all data centers for AI, because they didn't really need the additional data centers for all the other stuff they're doing. They needed it for AI because they were attempting to follow the AI scaling law. They knew that if they didn't build it, well, they were in a race then. Everybody was thinking, well, if I don't build the cleverest AI, then one of my competitors is going to use their hyperscaling ability to ⁓ build that super AI. And through 2024, this was just the entire story. was just bigger and better, bigger and better, bigger and better. And at that point, you kind of think, well, this is going to blast away the energy revolution, the green energy revolution. We can't align this stuff because there's no limit to the end of what they're going to need.

And then, and then in early 20th, in January, and then coming into that situation, which was a dire looking situation, much worse than I'd realized, to be honest, because when I was looking at it, was thinking, oh, hang on a minute, everybody's, you know, there is only one strategy here, which is scale, scale, scale. In 2024, at the beginning of 2025, DeepSeek came in, it was launched.

Gaël Duez (25:21)

Eventually...

Anne (25:47)

And it said, yeah, we've just done some little minor tweaks and we've cut energy use tenfold. And that's, and everybody went bananas about that. And the interesting thing is why? Why did everybody go bananas over DeepSeek? Because ⁓ DeepSeek didn't do anything amazing. As far as all the AI engineers were saying, well, you know, it doesn't really enable us to do anything new. It's not a new piece of technology. It's not a new idea. It's not coming out. There's nothing, you know there was a reason why they were all shrugging going well, even tenfold, know, we're looking like it's growing like that tenfold is a blip. We're hardly going to even notice that as we drive over it. ⁓ But I think DeepSeek was incredibly, incredibly important. And the reason why it was important was because it was because of the interest, the interest was the interest in some ways.

Gaël Duez (26:52)

So what you're saying is that the focus on DeepSeek was more important than DeepSeek itself because DeepSeek put on the table the most overlooked question which was about this brute force strategy which was undermining the energy transition. Am I correct?

Anne (27:12)

Well, yes, and no. It caused the industry to diverge into one brute force and one less brute force. But so I think what DeepSeek did was it demonstrated that there was interest in AI as good as it was at the end of 2024.

Gaël Duez (27:21)

Okay.

Anne (27:32)

only cheaper because the hyperscalers had just said, well, no, it's not good enough yet because we can just keep going forever here. We are. That's what we're going to do. We're going to keep going. When DeepSeat came on the scene, partly motivated by the fact that China didn't have access to these really flashy Nvidia chips anymore, it said, actually, don't have it. I think it's good enough now. I think it's good enough now for lots of use cases but we can't use it in those use cases because it's too expensive. So what DeepSeek did was it kind of said, look, this is a cheaper one. Can you do anything with it? And it didn't do anything new. What it did was it used three techniques. At the first version, I think it used about three techniques that weren't quite well known, which is again why all the deep mind engineers were going, well, there's something exciting there. Eight bits ⁓ precision.

instead of 64 bits in places where only eight bit was required. So just being a bit more ⁓ efficient in not over provisioning on bits. That was a little bit of the chain to me. That was actually probably the biggest ⁓ reduction in costs. Something called mixture of experts, which was basically saying, well, we're all gonna have these monolithic ⁓ models that do everything. Why don't we kind of break them off a bit like microservices versus model? And we say, well, that model is expert in this, that model is expert in this. And we'll just route your question to the model that's the smaller model that's more specific to that. So that was another part of it. And the final thing was they started to say, well, actually, APIs for talking to the hardware, for talking to the Nvidia chips, CUDA, not very efficient and not very well done, we could do those better. So they started, and none of those were new ideas, but they just said, look, we're just doing all of this. But the interesting thing was that it caused so much attention because you had a lot of enterprises and vendors who said, you know, actually this is something I need because AI was good enough for me, but it was too heavyweight for me to put in my headset or my phone or my.

What should it was just to have what I needed was AI that was as good as it was only 10 X cheaper. And so suddenly there was a whole, it demonstrated a whole load of people going, I'll, I'll take that. Thanks very much. I'll take this new DeepSeek model. But there was something about, so, so DeepSeek did one thing, which was demonstrates desire from customers for the functionality that was already in existence investors suddenly switched their focus from AI scaling laws to demonstrated customer demand for AI as good as it was. ⁓

Gaël Duez (30:30)

And for the sake of clarification here, you mentioned several times that DeepSeek was 10x more efficient, but are we talking about efficiency during the training phase? when you mentioned users, they enterprise users building their own models and needing much cheaper? Computing costs, energy costs, etc. Or are we talking about the end user, you and I, because you mentioned running on the watch, etc. And is it more the inference phase just for the sake of clarification, are we talking about the building phase, the running phase or both phases which were 10x more energy efficient.

Anne (31:11)

Well, at the time, actually, I have no idea at the time, because everything's moved on since then. 10x was the number. I think it was training at the time, but it can't just be so the interest was kind of people going, I want something cheaper, make something cheaper, make something cheaper so I can put it in my, and that means you need to be cheaper to train and you need to be cheaper to run because people, I one of their first customers was a headset customer who said,

Gaël Duez (31:20)

I think so.

Anne (31:37)

Look, I need to be able to run this in my headset, which means it has to be cheaper for inference. And here comes the other thing that DeepSeek did that was really very revolutionary, which is that they said, we're going to open this up. The work we're doing, we're going to make it open. We're going to make it open under an MIT license. So oddly enough, even though it's a Chinese company, classic American license, the MIT license And the MIT license, mean, so the Deep Six stuff was built on top of ⁓ the open source llama from ⁓ Meta and also Quen, which was open source from Alibaba. But they also open sourced all of their stuff that sat on top of it.

So, DeepSeek, released everything under this permissive license and said, fully boot, go and make it better. And that is what I think that enterprises, really, really loved. Because we all know that there's something called rights and another law. And this is like Moore's law. And in fact, Moore's law is a type of ⁓ rights law. Wright's law says that if you make more of something, this is all about building things and ⁓ shipping them to customers and running them and learning from them. You learn, the more you build, the more you learn and the more efficient you get at it. Oddly enough, Jeff's paradox is also a bit of an expression of rights law. But the more you build something, the more you do it, the better and better you get at it. And the one thing that investors like is rights law because that is about saying, there's something where there's an enormous demand. And if I meet that demand, I can just keep getting better and better and better and better and better assets. ⁓ And so ⁓ the by combining the fact that there was clear interest in chapter BT four level of functionality, but cheaper and also saying, and I'm going to use open source, which is an amazing tool for making things better and getting a whole load of people all over the world involved in improving this. So in some ways it doesn't really matter what happened when DeepSeek, because DeepSeek was just about saying, look, you can start here. You can start getting better at this and there will be a market for it. So in the time since January, and it was only January this year, there's been a lot of movement here.

So in August, DeepSeek came out with another model in which they said that they had got the costs for running and this is inference, the costs for writing a line of code using the DeepSeek model versus a proprietary model like ChatGPT, let's just constantly say ChatGPT, was 70 times less. It was $1 versus for approximately $70. And that was all because it's open source and people keep improving it. If there's something that folks care about and there's an open source element to it, they can keep tweaking it and improving it. So the win for DeepSeek and the reason why it was interesting was because it demonstrated that to a certain extent, product market fit had been the met people were happy enough with what was available in January 2025. They just wanted it to be cheaper. And we all know that, and especially if you combine that with open source, it gets cheaper.

Gaël Duez (35:23)

Following you on this one, there are two signals, not only one, the first very interesting signal that you mentioned is, well, we had reached a moment where people were happy enough with the capacities of generating AI and they now would look for cheaper solution. The second signal, which is super interesting as well, is that the maturity of the AI and let's be a bit more precise, GenAI ecosystem was good enough for people to embrace open source. You have enough people ready to participate enough enterprise confident enough to jump on an open source solution. So I think the DeepSeek moment, which is always, as you mentioned, something that happened only beginning of this year, signal the ecosystem because it goes even beyond the market two times. Energy matters, price matters, so enough, at least partially enough with this AI scaling law and the brute force philosophy that comes with it. And the second one was, hey, we are now ready for open source. that's a pivotal moment as well. If I'm not

Anne (36:36)

I think you got 100 % that it was two things. because in and of itself, those changes were not that impressive. They weren't a lot of people were saying, well, is it even tenfold? I think it might only be fivefold or fourfold. And they say the DeepMind engineers last place to going, yeah, there's nothing exciting there. It was product market fit, or a degree of product market fit. and the fact that they open sourced it at the same time. And everybody's going, yeah, I just want it cheap. I want that but cheaper. Thank you very much.

Gaël Duez (37:02)

Because I connect this to the astonishing numbers that were shared by Sasha Luccioni at Green IO New York. And that was actually not something related to Sustainability, she shared that on her face today on the platform. You've got more than one million models. One million. I was shocked. And almost all of all of them are open source so we've seen a blossoming of models and maybe this is something also that that we should talk about to relate to efficiency

Anne (37:33)

Actually, it's all efficiency is all about this. You get a whole load of eyes on it and a whole load of people say most enterprises don't have those skills to do all that tweaking and tuning and stuff. But once you've got once you expand it out to the whole world, you find people who do have those skills. And if they if they do it on an open source model, and then and then all that work gets shared, you know, you do it one incredibly clever person does something and then thousands and tens of thousands and millions of people get to use it. That's, that is how code efficiency works. That's how, that's how it's, that's how it starts playing off. So on the one hand, we've got this amazing, ⁓ we now in a, a renaissance of efficiency. ⁓ If you look at the things I mentioned, the three things that DeepSeek started doing, ⁓ that were not new things, there'd been papers around them for years and years, the bit efficiency. Now, I think they went from 64-bit to 8-bit in some of their stuff. We've now got open source stuff that's taking it down to 4-bit, to even 1.5-bit. How on do you do that? Because people are going, oh, do you know, I could do something with this. You've got whole world of people tinkering and making it better.

It's been an extraordinary year thus far. But there are two major, major problems that this doesn't address or ⁓ issues associated with this. DeepSeek has not solved the problem. There are two things that we need to be thinking about. The first is that efficiency will mean that we just use a lot more of it, which doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. ⁓ But it doesn't necessarily mean that in and of itself on its own is going to solve the problem. And that's the usual thing that always comes up, Jevons paradox. Now, I'm a big believer that Jevons paradox could be fixed and Jevons paradox is the definition of economic growth in many ways. But ⁓ I think there's a different problem here that will be solved in a different way, which is to go back to what I said before, hyperscalers gonna hyperscale.

Gaël Duez (39:55)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Anne will be back next week, and she will talk about the hyperscaler strategy regarding artificial general intelligence, the East coast, West coast, China's strategy, and the right questions to ask for any developers or leaders. Having to choose an AI model. Stay tuned and, accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the share notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Or rate the podcast five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with relatives working with AI is a great move to provide them with insights on this hot topic. You've got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.

By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter and check the conferences we organize across the globe. As we already discussed in this episode, Green IO London is almost there. September 23rd and 24th are the dates. As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets are all gone.

I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

To better understand this secret but serious love affair between big tech and water, what better location to investigate than its birth place? Yes. THE silicon valley. And no one there is better qualified to explore the topic than Masheika Allgood who lives in Santa Clara and recently created a Data Center Water Consumption Calculator based on public data. Over their conversation, Gael Duez and her covered: 

And much much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on Septebmer 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Masheika Allgood (00:02)

Okay, so let me say that a 100 megawatt data center, system is gonna require 223, I hate to say it, because it sounds insane, but 223 million liters of water in the system just to get the cooling requirements. That's the spin up the system. And then it runs through three million liters of consumed water every day.

Gaël Duez (00:32)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. A month ago, Google released its 2024 Sustainability Report. Its overall water consumption increased by 28 % year on year. The good news is that location-wise water withdrawal and consumption data were made available. Water being even more difficult to transport than electricity, how aquifers are used by its different consumers impacts a lot the local communities. And data centers are not the last to consume water.

Ask our British friends, who recently discovered, thanks to a combined work from Foxglove and The Times, that 231 English data centres consume the equivalent per year of almost 4,000 Olympic swimming pools. But they also discovered that this figure is completely underestimated, because over half of British water companies have no clue how many data centres they supply, nor how much water they are hoovering up. I'm quoting here Donald Comble of Foxglove. To better understand this secret but serious love affair between Big Tech and Water, what better location to investigate than its birth place? Yes, the Silicon Valley. And no one there is better qualified to explore the topic than Masheika Allgood. Masheika has already lived several lives. As a lawyer, as a techie. For instance, her team at NVIDIA wrote the software that enables AI training, (she built the enterprise licensing system required for running AI on your GPUs), and now as an activist. She recently made a big splash, pun intended, by creating a data center water consumption calculator based on public data and open hypothesis. So, welcome to the show, Masheika It's really an honor to have you with us today. 

Masheika Allgood (02:50)

I really appreciate you having me on. This is a really cool opportunity, so thank you.

Gael Duez (02:57)

Well, I think we have, as I said in the introduction, I mean, you've lived several lives. I think I've got like half a hundred questions before once. And that might shock my usual listeners. I'd like to start right from the start with a provocative question playing a bit the devil advocate here. And no, I'm not going to turn into some clashes, stupid YouTuber, you know, to get more clicks and likes and what nots. But I would like to put this question on the table first, maybe to evacuate it fast. So you're someone who's deeply engaged. Again, the water consumption of data centers in the Bay Area, and we're going to develop this. But my question would be, do you consider yourself as a NIMBY, not in my backyard person, or actually that will be a very wrong way to describe what you're actually doing?

Masheika Allgood (04:00)

So I don't think this should be in anyone's backyard. So I don't think it's gonna be so separate. Yeah, so I live in California. I live in the Bay Area, but I'm from Florida. And Florida is one of the wettest states in the US. So I grew up with rain as a regular feature in my life. And I moved to California at the tail end of 2014, which was in the midst of like a 10 year drought cycle.

Gael Duez (04:04)

I was expecting this answer!

Masheika Allgood (04:30)

So my first couple years here, it never rained, like at all. It was freaky. Like I had friends who were like recording the rain and like sending me clips and it was like, my God. Like I just, I missed rain. had never been anywhere that just didn't rain. And it just, it was a surreal experience. And when it started raining, I was like, ⁓ this is what that is. Wow, how cool, right? And so I didn't understand the concept of water scarcity because I came from a place where there's ocean there, there's lakes and the intercoastals, like a river on the inside. There's water everywhere. When you drive, you always see water. And I come to California and like there was no drops of water anywhere. You're always hearing drought. Everything was brown. My wife laughs because I thought they called it the Golden State because it was brown. Because when we drove everywhere, like all the grass was like golden. I thought that was it. I knew the real reason, but for some reason my brain supplanted it and she laughs to this day. But water scarcity is a real thing in the US and in California and specifically. We've had massive fires over the last couple of years, all up and down the West Coast. These horrific like looks like the world is ending kinds of landscapes from fires. So water is a real issue here. It's the states. And so people don't necessarily consider those things. But when I realized and when I learned that data centers take drinking water, it just, all of my alarm bells went off and it became a cause for me. You mentioned in your intro, you called me an activist.

Masheika Allgood (06:24)

It's a term that I'm not fully comfortable with because I'm more of an educator of activists, right? Like I'm not all that great with people like those who like me, like me. I lead amongst, you know, in certain situations, but there are people who they can mobilize communities and they're true activists and I try to assist them in what they do. But with this, this is the first time I was pushing, like, hey, activists, this is something you might want to do ⁓ because it's of critical importance, not just in my neighborhood, but water scarcity is an issue all across the globe.

Gael Duez (07:06)

Thanks a lot for the clarification about not being an activist yet being very active, would say. so if we try now and, and thanks for the clarification about the not in my backyard, meaning actually not in anyone's backyard. I was expecting this answer, but I'd rather have you clarifying it.

Masheika Allgood (07:11)

Yeah.

Gael Duez (07:28)

Now, how come that it is such a pressing issue in California? mean, do you have a lot of data centers? Obviously, this is a paradise for tech companies, so we could expect, but it's very abstract for lot of people. What are the order of magnitude? Maybe some people know about Virginia and, you know, data center alley near Ashburn but how bad is it? Regarding the concentration of computing powers and how bad is it regarding the water consumption? Could you provide us some meaningful numbers just to grasp something that is pretty blurry in everyone's mind starting with mine?

Masheika Allgood (08:09)

So I live in Sunnyvale. I can walk. ⁓ I don't know how you do it in metrics, but I can walk about 10 minutes from my front door and I'm in Santa Clara, right? Santa Clara is the seat of Silicon Valley. The county I'm in is the home of Silicon Valley. There are 55 data centers in Santa Clara.

Gael Duez (08:18)

hahahaha

Masheika Allgood (08:37)

Along this one little narrow strip, like this is the home of tech, which means data centers started here first, right? Because you needed them to build the tech companies, right? It's symbiotic relationship. The 55 data centers we have in Santa Clara makes us the largest concentration of data centers in the US outside of Loudon, Virginia, which is number one. So it's, we talk a lot about second in the US where we're tops in the world, like we're in the top 15 in the world in terms of concentration because the US has way more data centers than anyone else. So us being the second largest in the US makes us a player on the global stage when it comes to data center concentration. The difference with our Santa Clara data centers is we've been doing this here for decades, right? And so the vast majority of those data centers are not AI data centers. We're more recently building AI specific data centers, which are the ones that are most consumptive. Also, California and we do some things right here. So we have a cap in California. You can't build a data center larger than 99 megawatts. Companies are trying to get around that by building like two or three 99 megawatt data centers on a campus came. But we'll never build anything as big as say the massive one they built in Memphis ⁓ or some of the ones they built in Atlanta. The big super huge mega data centers cannot be built in California. Our structure doesn't allow it.

Gael Duez (10:14)

How come that this cap exists because it sounds a bit counter-intuitive in the country of big tech? I mean, this is not the first time I hear it. You have it in Singapore until recently. It was lifted recently, but you had it for several years. I know that in Ireland, the electricity regulators basically put a ban on any new data centers if they're not self-powered which brings a lot of questions regarding building gas powered how come that this legislation was in place for less than 100 megawatts?

Masheika Allgood (10:51)

So California is an anomaly and I think the world should be a little grateful that the tech started We're anomalous in the US when you look across our spectrum of how we handle industry and politics. So California has to a greatest extent tried to walk the fine line between innovation and responsibility. We aren't the best at it. We learned some things during fire season that we've not done all that great with our water. But industry-wise, we have tried to be reasonable and walk the line because California is one of the bread baskets of the U.S. We grow more food here than almost any other state. We have some of the most fertile land in the U.S. And so you have to make provisions for farmers to have water as well as, you know, industry.

Gael Duez (11:42)

So the cap was related already to water consumption more than energy consumption, the 99 megawatt.

Masheika Allgood (11:52)

I might have say that because we have a variety of industries. So it wasn't just a water thing. That's just my focus of it. That was the benefit. ⁓ But no, we've we've had the cap for a while. I wasn't part of that legislation. I can't speak to the impetus, but I know that we in a variety of areas have been trying to walk this line between innovation and responsibility to the public and to other industries. So because we're

Gael Duez (11:54)

Okay. Okay, got it.

Masheika Allgood (12:20)

We're a massive state. We've got a lot of competing interests. We've been pretty good about not allowing any one interest to take all the things. So our farmers are always protesting they don't have enough water, right? Our techies are always protesting they don't have enough power. Everyone's always protesting, but everyone's always getting business done. So like, if everyone's unhappy, you're probably doing it right kind of thing. So that's kind of where we landed. I don't know why they chose 99 megawatts, but I am so grateful that they did. Anything larger, we'd in a much different situation.

Gael Duez (12:53)

Let's go back to the water consumption ⁓ 99 max megawatt data centers, do they consume a lot of water? this is a question that was actually asked by some listeners on the Green IO Slack workspace what is the cooling techniques and how do you explain such a big water consumption from data centers? Specifically here in California or in Santa Clara.

Masheika Allgood (13:19)

Okay, so let me say that a 100 megawatt data center, oh, let me put it in liters for your audience. system is gonna require 223, what's that? Oh, no, that's pretty crazy. I hate to say it, because it sounds insane, but 223 million liters of water in the system just to get the cooling requirements. That's the spin up the system. And then it runs through three million liters of consumed water every day. So like the system cycles through that 200 million and then as it cycles through it consumes either through drift, so the little particles flowing away, evaporation or blow down, which is like the water that has gotten too heavy with sediments or too polluted and they have to like push it out of bottom of the system. So that's like 1.5 % of the water that is in the system every day is consumed, right? And so every day it's consuming around three million gallons of water, or liters of water, I'm sorry, gallons is different. So I got those numbers from my data center water consumption calculator that I built. I basically, no one had any numbers and I was like, someone has to have numbers because you can't keep relying on the tech companies because they're not being forthcoming. So is there a calculation that isn't specific to that industry or isn't specific to that particular data center? Then you'd have to like talk to the operator. But is it like some wild fantasy numbers? Is there something grounded that is respected in the industry? And the Uptown Institute is an organization that basically certifies data center sustainability. And it's not sustainability as in you're good for the planet. It's in sustainability of operations. Can you operate in case of loss of connection either to the grid or the public water supply? How long can you operate? So they have this makeup water calculation, which basically determines if you can keep running within 24 hours, right? or for 24 hours or for 12 hours, how long your systems can run without connection to water. So it's at the design phase and it's based on the power output of the system. So there's some assumptions made, right? And we can argue those assumptions, which is perfect. Like that's the point. You want to be able to argue those assumptions and tell me that your stuff is more efficient. But the assumptions are reasonable assumptions that are accepted within the industry. And based on those reasonable assumptions, that's what the water calculator calculates. So those are your baseline numbers. Your question was, what about more efficient methods? And that's where things get interesting. ⁓ So there's really kind of three different methods that people are touting as efficient. And your first is going to be direct liquid cooling. So instead of… running a closed loop of liquid through the back of the server, I actually put a little connection on the back of the GPU and I squirt water specifically on the hot spots to try to cool the hole because some spots get way hotter than other spots. So I just shoot water directly on it. So it's less water intensive. So that's the first option. The thing about that option, so I'll tell what the option is and why we have difficulty determining how efficient it is. It's supposed to be significantly more efficient, right? But we don't have numbers at scale, right? Like we're not looking at 100,000 GPU installation, which is what some of these data centers have. So we don't have numbers at that level of scale. ⁓ And I'm not exactly sure like if that water is reusable. So they're shooting the water in, it's going into some sort of repository and then being cooled and then coming back to the system. But if it goes through that kind of process, then it's going to have the same problem as any other liquid cooling, which is there's a heat exchange loop. So the loop where you're pushing up against the server or against the chip is closed. That is a closed loop, nothing gets lost in that process. But you got to cool it. At some point, that water, that liquid goes through and gets cooled. It's that cooling loop that's the problem because typically that's evaporative cooling. We all know evaporative cooling is massively consumptive and that's essentially what the calculator is built on, is evaporative cooling. If you have a water tower and use a chiller, then this is what your water consumption will be.

Gael Duez (17:53)

Okay.

Masheika Allgood (18:07)

If your new efficient system still uses a water tower, it's only so efficient. And so we're not getting the numbers of how, what's the efficiency of the cooling loop, right? We're just getting, but it's using less water on the chip. So that's one new method that we just don't have numbers on.

Gael Duez (18:28)

I'd like to pause here and to rewind a bit just to make things clear for everyone. So in the Bay Area, obviously, you don't use air cooling. You need water cooling, I guess. And you mentioned it several times, but most of the time, this is closed loop cooling, which means that the water is getting reused several times. And then at some point when it's getting either too hot or too polluted, it gets throw back into the system. Is it correct? Just to clarify.

Masheika Allgood (18:59)

Okay, so first off, we can't use air cooling in most of the world because you need the temperatures outside to be cooler than the temperatures in the data center. And I don't know if anyone's noticed, it's really hot in the world right now. So that's tough. So that's like free air cooling, And then when it comes to actually like, I'm running fans, it's very difficult giving the heat these GPUs put off.

Gael Duez (19:04)

Yeah. Really?

Masheika Allgood (19:23)

for fans to be very efficient. So it becomes very electricity intensive. So there's this trade off between electricity and water. I use less water, which means I use more electricity and we know carbon and that has its own issues. this is why I say, ⁓ always, always. So there's no math reason for them to make that choice, but then it doesn't benefit society if they do.

Gael Duez (19:25)

Plus cost, guess energy costs are higher than water costs for many operators. Yeah.

Masheika Allgood (19:50)

So this is why I'm not in anyone's backyard. There's no good answer for this, right? So, okay, so it'll go through the loop and that loop is closed. The issue is you have to cool the loop and you can either cool that loop through air, which is more electricity, or you can cool it through water, which is water consumption. So in California and the Bay Area and pretty much in every data center, you have this issue of how do you cool the loop? And you really have two options, kind of three if you live in a colder environment, let the air cool it. But very few data centers are in that area. And so that whole, when the water goes bad, it goes down, that's through the cooling loop, right? Because the other loop is closed. So we're not throwing any of that away until it's like ridiculous, right? But when I'm evaporative cooling, then that system has a loop, right? And we're pushing water through and it goes to the top and it evaporates and we're just forwarding water on the other liquid to make it cool. It's a whole process. But yeah, that loop, some of that water gets recycled and you have to Blow down that water. there aren't very good answers, right? So if I use direct to liquid cooling, that's less water in that closed loop. But, the questions are, so how does that recycled? Like, is that water cooled? Like, we just don't know enough about the entire life cycle of that process. There's also the, can I put it in the ocean or a deep body of water? That was tried by several different companies, but the chips run so hot they were impacting the ecosystem in the body of water. So that can't be, you can't be heating up, you know, your cool lakes and killing all the fish and birds. So that didn't work out. So then it became, can we cool it in a body of liquid? And that is kind of like the new thing. I submerge it in a body of liquid? And so there's, yeah. So there's, there's issues of PFAS chemicals, so like the types of chemicals they submerge it in. So your environmental folks are worried because if that gets out into the environment, it's disastrous. But there's also the issue of you can submerge it, but it gets hot and it has to be cooled. So you still go through the process if you have to have a cooling system. when we talk about more efficient, I don't doubt that they are more efficient than just straight evaporative cooling but we don't have numbers on what more efficient means. And this is the danger, because people say more efficient as if it's efficient enough. But since they're not telling us how much water they're pulling from specific aquifers, we don't know what efficient enough is, right? So like if you're 5 % more efficient, but you're overdrawn the aquifer by 20 % of its capacity, is that sufficient? No. But can we do that math externally? No. And so this is my concern with efficiency methods, is they're not based on anything.

Gael Duez (23:01)

And there is a clearly a full line of questions that I'm going to ask you about having access to this number of transparency and so on. But I'd like to stay with this efficiency discussion for a bit longer, because that was also a question that was pushed by one of my European listener in Europe.

Masheika Allgood (23:15)

Thank you.

Gael Duez (23:21)

and especially in the coldest place of Europe, we tend to see heat not necessarily as something to be wasted because heat is precious and there are quite a lot of urban areas that could benefit from this heat. And it's not rare now, it's not the majority, but for many new and not necessarily big hyperscaler but like medium sized data centers that they are coupled with a urban heating or, you know, in Paris, they've got a solution heating a swimming pool. I that in Geneva, there is a full district being heated by one data center. There are several examples in the Nordics as well. and this is actually something that you can see in the European energy efficiency directive that how much heat is reused is now compulsory to be reported by data centers because this is something precious. This is energy that we don't necessarily have to waste in the atmosphere. Now, that being said, I live on a tropical island. You live in a hot place as well. This is not necessarily something that we need, but is there any way to be more efficient by not wasted this heat and maybe use it for other human activities like, I don't know, the industry, agriculture, whatever, or is it something that is absolutely not considered?

Masheika Allgood (24:16)

No, we're considering it, but there are problems. So San Jose is the city below me. So we consider it like a tri-city area. Our county is three cities. So it's San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. There are some other cities, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are the three big ones. So San Jose is looking to build housing slash data center complex in the middle of downtown. The issue that we have with it, I am advocating very strongly against it because they were like, but we can reuse the heat within the housing for a variety of purposes. We can put up a greenhouse. It all sounds great until you recognize that all of these data centers run generators, gas or diesel generators on site. And those generators are in California only used for backup power. In Memphis, they're powering the data center itself, right? And the difficulty with generators is they expel small particle pollution, fine particle pollution. So the Bay Area, our Tri-County, plus San Francisco and Oakland, when it comes to air districts, because we have a very unique kind of way that air flows in the South Bay or in the Bay Area, ⁓ our American Lung Association, it's a national organization within the US, they keep a list of like areas that have really bad fine particle pollution. The Bay Area is number seven on that list in the nation, in the entire US for small or for fine particle pollution. So you put up a data center, it has generators, right? The generators are allowed to run, for maintenance purposes.

Gael Duez (26:13)

Okay.

Masheika Allgood (26:29)

They have to run a certain amount of hours every month, right? So think of 299 of generators.

Gael Duez (26:31)

They have to.

Masheika Allgood (26:41)

Running monthly in a city or an area that's in a valley, we get these, I forget what they call it, it's like air inversions where basically the air kind of sits over our valley and nothing gets in or out. So the pollution just sits, right? I was talking to someone who had covered the fires and they were like, yeah, so it sits. And then we always knew when the fire would explode, because the air inversion lifted, right? So when you're talking about reusing heat, if you're in a country that doesn't allow as much generators as backups, that might be a viable option. But in the US, generators are not only backing up data centers, they become first source power. So you've got a lot of data centers, which is what they're doing in Memphis. They're building… in areas where the grid isn't sufficient. They can't give them enough power for their operations. So they just use generators as their main source of power until four years later when the grid operator has enough megawatts for them. California, at least in the Bay Area, our data center operators have been building responsibly. Basically, they build as power becomes available. But that's not the case across the entire

Gael Duez (27:39)

That's insane.

Masheika Allgood (27:58)

There is a run on generators right now. Like electric companies can't get generators for backup because the tech companies have bought so many of them. So they are powering data centers all across the globe with basically dirty energy, right? And the environmental technology you put on top of a generator to make it less polluted, there's a run on that as well. So they're getting the generators without the environmental technology. So there's a lot of irresponsibility going on around how generators are being used. But even if you do it responsibly, we have 55 data centers in Santa Clara, right? and we've got another 15 or 20 in San Jose, and now you want to build 299 megawatt data centers. All of those have to cycle their generators once a month. So that's thousands of generator power cycling.

Gael Duez (28:38)

Yeah.

Masheika Allgood (28:55)

Every single month. I don't know how much heat makes that worthwhile. Like the air quality is staggering. It's insane to think of us putting that kind of load in a city that already is very high fine particle pollution. So yes, it makes sense when it comes to, we don't want to waste heat, but you have to consider, like none of this isn't a bubble, right? So you have to consider, well. What is powering it? Is air quality a concern? Because if you're having people live in a data center or right next to a data center, because it can't be too far, otherwise you'll lose heat in the pipes, right? So there's only so far away it could be for you to be able to capture that heat. Are there other concerns about having the data center located that close to people? It's not just about heat or electricity. There's a lot of concerns around data center.

Gael Duez (29:50)

That's almost a textbook example of pollution transfer and the necessity to have a systemic approach on the ecosystem surrounding a data center. So I guess, but let's not go into this direction, but we could argue that maybe there are better ways to capture the fumes and avoid this air pollution. But let's be honest, today, this is not the case. And while we are talking about

Masheika Allgood (29:55)

Yeah.

Gael Duez (30:17)

This pollution transfer, You told me when we were preparing the episode, another vibrant example of another pollution that is completely understated and you had a clear example, an anecdote that you told me about. Yeah, there is the issue with the energy consumption, the water consumption. mentioned the air pollution, but actually there is another player in the long list of pollutions and negative side effect of having a data center next to you. Can you bring us the anecdote?

Masheika Allgood (30:49)

Noise pollution is brutal for data centers and no one talks about it because it didn't used to be a thing. But data centers, the generators and the cooling, it all puts out noise and it's at a frequency that is at like human talking. So it's not ignorable. So a couple months ago, I was sleeping and I was awakened by this sound. It sounded like

Gael Duez (30:54)

Noise pollution. ⁓.

Masheika Allgood (31:18)

Electric vehicle, you know, they got the weird engine sound. So it sounded like an electric vehicle, but it wasn't moving. And it went on for like an hour and a it's three in the morning. And I had to leave and like try to sleep in the living room. It was brutal. like, you I went to a county meeting around data centers and the number one thing that the commissioners were talking about is can you handle the noise? We're getting complaints about noise. Can you handle the noise? Headphones don't work, earplugs don't work. It is pervasive and it's brutal. And there are things you can kind of do to help it, but a lot of that stuff sits on top of the data center. So like you can't wall it off. Like it's a, it's a really difficult issue that's becoming more and more known, the larger the data centers get and the closer they get to humanity.

Gael Duez (32:10)

And that's a good point that you raise that the logical solution might be, and actually for safety reason as well, let's ground, like, put these data sensors underground, but actually most of the noise comes not from the computing the processor, but more from the heat management. And obviously you need to be able to expel the heat, whether it's with air cooling or water cooling or whatever. And so the noise comes from all the fans, if I understand you well.

Masheika Allgood (32:37)

Yeah, the fans and the make just really frustrating noise.

Gael Duez (32:40)

The fans and the generator. ⁓

And Masheka, in a previous life, ⁓ you were a lawyer. Am I getting it right? yeah, you were a lawyer. ⁓ When we see all of these downsides and the fact that it seems to affect that many people, the logical question is how, especially in a free country like the US, where you've got a vibrant community scene How come that the data centers seem to have a free pass and they can basically pollute the air, emit a lot of noise, noise pollution, as you mentioned the water, seems that it's very cryptic. It's almost a secret. It requires you spy skill to know how much water is consumed. So what is going on with transparency and accountability from these big tech actors in the US or maybe just in California if you don't want to generalize?

Masheika Allgood (33:33)

Yeah. So lawyers are important, but right now the ones who got the head start are the tech lawyers. like ⁓ they understood what was going on way before anyone else did. They had lobbyists in place. And so that's why you see a lot of tech favorable bills that are getting passed in different states. They've been very active with NDAs.

Gael Duez (33:55)

Hahaha!

Masheika Allgood (34:12)

And telling leaders that they can't speak about things like water usage and consumption and electricity or when they're building and how big they're building. And when you're on the other side, your lawyers don't make as much. You don't have as many of them. Like you're asking for a city or county solicitor to take on a trillion dollar company. It's not that we don't do that. Obviously we do the underdog thing in the U.S. It's well known, but it's underdog for a reason, right? Like those are really hard fights to win. So you've got nonprofits and advocacy organizations kind of tackling that. And we're tallying up wins, but you know, there are little wins here and there, whereas there's a deluge of money coming from the other side that has been doing this for some time. And you can see it by how, know, Texas kind of ran over a couple countries in Europe and Africa. Well, not so much Africa yet, but that's next. ⁓ But they've come in and really sold themselves as being something other than what they are and really started trying to move the laws in their favor. So I mentioned Africa because they recently passed a law. ⁓ I think, I can't remember which country. I think it was Kenya. They have a law. Yeah.

Gael Duez (35:33)

I was about to mention Kenya because Kenya tries to a ⁓ lot of big investment in data they've got very low carbon electricity mix. So they try to attract a lot of investment here.

Masheika Allgood (35:43)

Yeah, and they've got a very highly educated workforce. Yeah, they're well suited, but they just recently passed a law that basically criminalizes letting out information about water usage of corporate actors. So we're seeing the playbook from the US play out in other countries. And the other issue is there are 300 million people in the U.S. We've got a lot of land. So a lot of stuff happens to groups of people that don't make it to the national stage. So there's this like simmering ground swell against data centers and you're starting to hear it pop up. But like it takes a lot for stuff to hit the national stage in the U.S. unless it's absolutely catastrophic. Right. And we haven't had an aquifer in a major city fail. As of yet. ⁓ And because AI has become an identity marker, like you have to overcome people's love and devotion to the tech in order to have real conversations about, you know, what it's doing to us while we're loving it, right? It's an abusive relationship, essentially. And it takes a lot to overcome, you know, people who are in love and abusive relationships. So that's kind of where we are. So you know, until something either catastrophic happens or something bad enough happens to enough people, it's very hard to get the communal groundswell. And let's just be honest, we got a lot of shit going on in the States right now that you can be up in arms against. It's hard to pick and choose your fight because everything is on fire, right? So real question in

Gael Duez (37:21)

I got Figure or that being said, you mentioned on the national level but as far as I understood, the US is a federal state and how come that seems not moving? At least in California where you mentioned it's slightly different, the vision of common good might be slightly different. The population experienced fires to an extent that was almost existential. The drought is something that you mentioned it right at beginning of the episode, something that is lived by everyone all the time. So how come that this topics doesn't come that hot, pun intended, in at least California? is it only explainable by the love big tech and how proud people are to be, you the fifth economic power in the thanks to all these big tech industries being

Masheika Allgood (38:20)

So first I'm gonna say, I think our main issues are, we haven't been able to tell the story, right? The fires were largely caused by our electric company, right? PG&E, they paid millions of dollars of damages to people because it was, you we have a direct actor, like they're power lines sparked and that's what caused the fire. So people have a place to put the blame for that. And so it doesn't come back to data centers as a story, right? We know that the US, when it comes to climate change and carbon, it's been very hard to tie that to individual actions every day. I think it's a marketing problem, right? Like we haven't been able to explain to people in a real way that this is a data center issue. Part of that is because we work for tech companies The Bay area, California works for tech companies. if you're not working for one, your cousin is, your friend is, you know, someone who is like most of the tech, jobs have been out here for a very long time. So there's this assumption based on the marketing of tech that we're the good guys, right? Like we've cultivated this marketing over time. And so no one wants to believe, it doesn't even occur to people to believe that what we're doing could be ruining all of us. Like it's such an opposite of what we have been taught and what we've come to know and believe about these companies. Mind you, the luster of that has started to fall off a bit.

Thank you, Elon, for showing the world who we really are in a real way out here. But there was this belief for a long time that tech giants are altruistic and these guys should be running these companies because they're just good human beings. And it's become clear that they can have problematic views. They can be bad people. They can do bad things. And we shouldn't just assume that because they run a tech company that they are good, but those were such coupled identities for so long, right? it's starting to become a thing where we're seeing them as but for a long time, they just rode the wave of tech is good, so they must be good, right? because we don't have real numbers on water consumption, we don't have a real understanding of how carbon for data centers impacts the heat and fires since we can't make a through line of that story, people just haven't seen. But you were asking for positives. I was just in a meeting yesterday with activists and different people who are trying to figure out how we tell that narrative because people are starting to understand it. It just took us some time because, you know, we're out here building cool things, we're we're the good guys. But then Facebook broke the world and we started thinking, huh? maybe we're not so good. it's been a transition of us moving into a reality. But tech has been a dream in this country for a long time. And it's just hard to wake up from it.

Gael Duez (41:13)

Yeah, that's a very good point because, know, the US situation is really specific with so much money poured by the oil industry to create this fog of misunderstanding around climate change, it's really a country that is specific regarding climate change. And from time to time, like, okay, you we've got environmental crises, not just an issue with climate change. So maybe in the US, you should refocus the fight, not against climate change. And my point is, if you focus on water consumption or air pollution, et cetera, eventually you will bump into the same issues, which is if we let main corporate actors treat common goods and the first one being nature and air and water as something that has no price, no value because it has no price and we cannot really seriously address these so-called negative externalities and reincorporate them in the system. I you can pick pretty much crisis that you want, you will get the same solution, like make them accountable, pay the right price for that we pay and that our children will pay, et cetera, et cetera. And this is why maybe in the US, the water, because water is something tangible, carbon is not. Plus carbon is related to energy and the US is a country cultivating the cult of energy. We are energetic people. We are people doing things, etc. mean, there is something almost philosophical here. Water is not. mean, water, you need water. Everyone can understand why you need water to grow a crop and to drink And the same with air pollution and noise pollution. So I was wondering if maybe you could get more traction with these fights that will actually help in any case, the fight against climate change and carbon emissions. seems regarding your answer that it really relates to the narrative framed by big tech companies. Like we are forced for good and we should get a free pass for everything. If I understood well

Masheika Allgood (43:26)

essentially articulated why I started Taps Run Dry. Because I had been having this existential crisis about why can't we move forward? And I realized you have to break it down to something tangible. No one's going to think, we're fine without water. Right? So like, that's why I chose water activism. That is specifically the thought process I went through what you just articulated, you have to make it something that is visceral to people. Carbon's not visceral. It just ask Al Gore, he's been beating this drum for like 30 years and it's not moving. It's just, it hasn't landed. So what will land? Water lands. And that's why I specifically sought out water as my area of activism. And then air pollution, same kind of thing. I live in a place where there is higher asthma on average than there is in other places. And we are a very financially viable area of the country to live in. Like people make money out here, but our air quality is horrible, right? that's something we should probably address. And it means something to all of the techies out here who are making massive amounts of money, but their children all have asthma. All right. That's a general statement, but a broad statement, that's why water and air quality have been where I'm hanging my hat.

Gael Duez (44:44)

Right. It's really an interesting approach. I've got the feeling that this is a very efficient way to get this little click in people's mind like, ⁓ actually, this is serious. I need to pay attention. And the moment they start to pay attention seriously about it, all the little pieces, they nicely add up. There is almost no U-turn. There is no turning back on the road to sustainability. Once you

you can pose because your mental health is at risk. Or, because your financial situation might force you to do so. But it's almost impossible to go back and say, no, actually, no climate change doesn't exist. And we don't have a water issue, as I thought 20 years ago. know.

Masheika Allgood (45:29)

It's going to be a battle, I think you're right. Once people get activated in this particular room, you can't let it go.

Gael Duez (45:37)

Well, Mashaika, thanks a lot for joining, for sharing this very specific and grounded fight regarding water consumption plus noise pollution and pollution as well. I've got the feeling that this is not the last time that we talk to each other.

Masheika Allgood (45:54)

I'd hope not.

Gael Duez (45:58)

Because there are these crazy stories you told me about NVIDIA and before, the ethics that was one of your fight before. I might also ask you to consider talking about this in very concrete ways with these concrete numbers that will be even more precise in a few months, because I think it will be a great talk at Green IO New York 2026 planets are aligned. I would love to see you on stage sharing your findings and your calculators and the way you actually hacked. love it. The Uptight Institute approach, like, hey, let's ask the engineers, but not like how much water do you consume? What are the safety requirements for you to get a good label? And then I'm going to be able to calculate things. Well, that's brilliant. I really love it. So anyway, thanks a lot for joining. I'm really happy that we kickstart the back to school season with this episode and hope to talk to you soon.

Masheika Allgood (46:55)

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great. And yeah, I look forward to future conversation.

Gaël Duez (47:00)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but I trust you to succeed and give us some boost in their rankings. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with relatives working in the data center industry or simply being thirsty for information on the topic, I know I should stop doing these jokes. So sharing the episode is always a good idea to provide them with insights on this hot topic. You've got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode, we will start exploring a bit the British digital sustainability landscape. After all, Green IO London is in five weeks. We will welcome back Anne Curie

who has investigated DeepSeek from a sustainability angle. Stay tuned. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. As I already mentioned, Green IO London is almost there. September 23rd and 24th are the dates. As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets are all gone.

I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as Head of Sustainability at IT company neuland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundesverband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for software and a Champion of the Green Software Foundation. 

Together, they covered many topics including: 

And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A huge gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Anita Schüttler 00:07

In IT,  you unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone.  And this is so great.  I think we actually do  have  a  common ground to be ambitious.

Gael Duez 00:26

Hello everyone,  welcome to Green.io.  I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world,  one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software. To avoid just checking boxes such as inviting a speaker, organizing a digital collage workshop or training some volunteers in eco design. What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To answer these questions, I'm delighted to welcome Anita Schuttler on the show. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as of Sustainability at IT company Newland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundeswehrband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for Software and a champion of the Green Software Foundation. Wow! But what convinced me is Fiona Leinbundgut, our MC at GreenHire Munich this year, introducing Anita to me as a die-hard Green Software engineer. And after exchanging with Anita, I had to add die-hard Green Software Engineer  scaling Green IT from the trenches because she shared several real life examples which were truly inspiring and which she will share with you now.  Hi Anita, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. 

Anita Schüttler 02:18 

Hey Gail, it's so great to be here, thank you. 

Gael Duez 02:19

You're welcome, you're welcome. You know,  when  Fiona introduced  us. She mentioned that you were hands-on green IT practitioners.  I think she said something like  hardcore  green software  practitioner or something like that.  So I was like, oh, great. We're going to talk with a lot of use cases from someone being actually in the trenches. And you know how I love this  sort of episodes with feedbacks from people doing things, facing challenges and sharing what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. But then we had a discussion preparing the visit and you mentioned the Bundesverband Green Software. Yes, I managed to pronounce it properly. And I was like, oh my God, I wasn't aware how active this association was and actually launching a pretty big project. So I've got a few questions for you. And if you don't mind, I would love to start with this topic. And maybe my first question would be,  how did you join this association? 

Anita Schüttler 03:23

Yeah. So it's called Bundesverband and  it sounds really German. I know you can just call it Green Software Association.  Basically, what did the Green Software Foundation does worldwide? We aim to do on a German level.  So  the Bundesverband is pretty young still actually, it was founded last year.  the story goes like this,  there were some companies who were already working together on this green software topic  and  they wanted to accelerate what they were doing, they wanted to bring it  out to the people and this whole thing didn't get much traction and at some point they said, maybe we have to think this like two steps bigger. Why not create a Bundesverband? this thing, it's, it's, yeah, it's an association. So it sounds like something from the German government or so, but it's not, it's companies coming together and doing this. And we have this for several fields, like AI is one of them as well, or can have any other.  And I was already  talking to those who were  thinking about founding such an association. We were somewhat  being friends with each other or becoming friends. And  when they said, let's found this  association,  I said, we want to be part of this. We want to be one of those companies that join as the first ones. So with my company, neuland and… I asked everyone internally and people were actually pretty excited about this. To sum it up, we're actually a founding member of the Bundesverband Green Software. 

Gael Duez 05:35 

Congratulations.  Can individuals join this association or is it only company membership?  

Anita Schüttler 05:38 

It's meant as a company membership, but we do have members who are single person companies. So NGO also is fine as well.  Or if they're in academics, they can join. 

Gael Duez 6:00 

Okay. You were already doing a lot of green IT stuff. What was the motivation for you more personally to join them?

Anita Schüttler 6:02 

Yeah, I was actually really excited about this because it felt like, okay, now we got a movement and now we have something that we can show to everyone and where we can,  uh, put up some big signs and tell people about what green software is. And it looks more official, so to say. Yeah. And it looks like a bigger thing. And we really noticed this when, as soon as we had this association, there was a different kind of speed behind this and more of a push behind this. yeah, that really accelerated a lot of things and moved it to another level than it was before.

Gael Duez  06:42

And that might be my thank you, Captain Obvious moment. But  why did you have this need to create a German association? Why not, for instance, creating a chapter of the Green Software Foundation? What drives you to  go more in-depth at the local level? 

Anita Schüttler 07:09

Yeah, so Germany is actually pretty active also  in terms of the Green Software Foundation.  For example, we have the most Green Software  champions of any country  within the Green Software Foundation champions.  We also have several meetups. I always join the one at Karlsruhe every month  because it's online and everyone can join bit of an advertisement to  join this Green Software Meetup. And still it felt like the Green Software Foundation was too far away. I think it's very  focused on the English speaking  countries or English speaking community.  it's a pity because there's so much going on in Germany and there's so many people who are interested in this and  really doing things. So we wanted to gather those and get in more companies and people to join us and do something without maybe even without having this barrier of the language. Because when you tell people to say this in English or to communicate in English, many are put off then if they are not this familiar with English as well.  

Gael Duez 08:30

I was sort of expecting the answer, but I didn't want to lead the witness and of course the language barrier and the connection to the local ecosystem is super important. And that is also true that we need to think in ecosystem and it's perfectly fine to have large global association, well connected with more local ones, with more specialized ones. You have  some  being launched about AI, for instance, or  e-waste and that's perfectly fine. Thinking in ecosystem is very important, but I just wanted to make sure.  And  so far, so the, Bundeswehrband Green Software is one year old and you've got a pretty big project as far as I know. Can you tell us a bit more about it? You've already advertised it at Green Eye of Munich, but then you've got a second chance. 

Anita Schüttler 09:30

So I have to start earlier actually, because this project that we're currently trying to launch has a history already. So as you might know, I'm part of, well, I'm a co-chair at the Bundesverband Green Software. And  my other co-chair  is Aydin Mir Mohammadi. And Aydin is really a pioneer of the first hour and he's  all in  very internally motivated. And he launched  a project in Karlsruhe. So Karlsruhe, if you have no idea, and I had no idea before either is a city that has about 50 % IT companies. So there's a really strong digital ecosystem there. And what Irene did together with others in Karlsruhe is that he went to the local cyber forum it's called there. And together with them, he started a project called CO2 Challenge. So the idea of the CO2 Challenge is that companies commit to reducing 40 % of their digital emissions within one year. And to make this happen, they get a free mentor or mentorship by a person  who will guide them on their first steps.  What do we have here? What can we take a look at? And basically,  what are the low-hanging fruits where we can just, yeah. Turn stuff off or so. This is what we want together with this. And this project has been running in cars for about a year already and it was  really successful. it's,  you know,  there was no,  we measure everything beforehand or whatever. It was really  low entry points. We just count servers or so. So like this, you can't see this right now, but yeah. Rule of thumb. And now the idea is to take this project and scale it to a European level. And  what we want to do is we want to have  coordinators  for at least three European countries. So obviously Germany will be in there, all of Germany this time, not just Karlsruhe.  We already have the Dutch who are very excited about this and want to join. And currently we're still  actually struggling to find a third country. I'm very much hoping for France because they have such a strong ecosystem already. And who knows, maybe we'll find a fourth one even. And then we want to have regional levels, so regional clusters. And those will actually be working with the companies to really make it happen on the local level. And there will need some proper measuring and counting and not just rule of thumb this time. Yeah. Okay. So there are quite a lot of things to unpack here. 

Gael Duez 12:49

And just for clarification, the goal is to reduce the IT related emissions by 40 % or four zero within a year compared to the  SBTI target for the ICT sector, which is 45 % until end of 2030. So that's pretty ambitious. How did you manage to convince people to go for such an ambitious  target? And why this number? 

Anita Schüttler 13:17

I didn't tell me this a few days ago. We were talking about, shouldn't it be 50 % just to make it even bigger? And when I first heard this, it was like, oh my God, so much 40%. That sounds like really a lot. And, um, I didn't said, yeah, I wanted to make it sound like a lot, but not that much. So it's less than half. And I thought this sounds good. So this is where the 40 % comes from. And  the idea is that in IT we have so much waste and everything is so wasteful. And if we just manage to turn off this waste, if it's 40 % in the end, no one knows.  Maybe  we actually do manage to reduce 40%. And if you see  how much, like for example, environments are running, even though they are not used, 40 % actually isn't that much of a big number anymore.  but yeah, we want some ambition because that's what I always think is a good thing about IT, reducing  emissions in IT, unless  unlike in physical environments where it really takes a lot of effort to even get a few percent in IT, you  unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone. And this is, this is so great. So I think we actually do have a common ground to be ambitious on.  

Gael Duez 15:05

It makes sense to have aspirational goal. But in that case, I feel a bit of a contradiction  between we need to measure that we want to assess that people are shooting for big goals and the rule of thumb, because we all know that there are a lot of low hanging fruits, especially in companies where there is no green IT ambassador or sometimes even sustainable the ambassador.  But how do you manage to say it was pretty successful? What were your success criteria? Was it more like the number of companies or people joining or was it the actual results that you managed to get so far? 

Anita Schüttler 15:31

Yeah, so maybe I mean, Aydin will be mad at me for telling this, but  we don't have hard numbers, but we have soft numbers from Karlsruhe  where they. Yeah,  back of the envelope calculations. If we turn this off and it takes this much and it runs for this long and we have the grid makes, example, how much will this be? yeah,  we're sometimes a little,  yeah, well, uncertain. Is this gonna work out really well? Because if you only take a look at this first step, having a few companies to start with and lowering some of what they do, it might actually not be that much overall at the end compared to like when you compete with say a factory that does cement or whatever,  we have no chance at all to make this happen. I think what our advantage is that  with such a program there will be a lot of training and we plant a seed here  for the next years to come and more and more people will really learn how to be a practitioner because that's what it takes to become a mentor at all. And then you have those people in the companies, they will  accelerate what's going on there and they will spread this whole thing to the next company and so on.

Gael Duez 17:09

I understand now it's a learning by doing process  and that whenever the calculations are less and less back of the envelope and more more rooted in best practices, then of course  you will be backed by harder numbers.  But to be honest, the back of the envelope calculation that you already shared, mean, if you divide by two your number of servers and you know the energy consumption of the electricity consumption story of your server  and  somehow where they are located and the  carbon  emission factor of the electricity grid  in the region, it's a bit less than back of the envelope. Starts to be quite serious. So thanks for the clarification. And actually when we were chit chatting before hitting the record button, you mentioned that this project, the CO2 challenge that you want to bring at the European level was,  and I'm quoting you here, an emotional roller coaster. I think it's actually pretty cool if you can share what you meant by this, because when we consume non-profit projects or initiatives,  we don't necessarily see the amount of energy, sometimes money,  but also cognitive loads that are needed to kickstart them and even  more important to ramp them and to nurture them. So could you explain a bit more what you mean by this and  what do you expect to achieve also obviously with bringing it at the European level? 

Anita Schüttler 18:49

Yeah, first of all, we are a pretty young association. We have pretty low member fees to make it possible for everyone to access this association unlike when you join a bigger association  and  money is very scarce. So  we're going for  an EU funding and we need a very high level of funding. So  there's programs on the EU level where you get like 60 % of your funding  and there's a lot of money, but when you have to provide those other 40 % yourself, you certainly might have a big problem if you don't have money flowing in from all sides, which we don't have. And currently there's still a program called Life, and this is the one that we're going for. The problem is this program was  built with the intention of accelerating the energy transition or rebuilding ecosystems. So lots of physical things and now we come with our IT stuff and we actually don't really fit into this program. But we still  want to get funding from this. So when you look for which program could be the right one for us, we always feel like we are sitting between two chairs because we don't really fit into this one, but we also don't really fit into that one. And  we have to make sure that we serve the criteria for this program to get funding at all, but still be true to what we want to achieve with this. So this is the first problem.  We get some  help from someone  who does this on a regular basis, EU fundings. And she's always very excited about what we want to try to achieve because it's something new and it will bring attention to this whole topic to the Brussels level, to the EU level because they don't really think of this decarbonizing IT thing at all right now. You can see this because there's no program for this, to fund this. Instead of like for AI. Just pick your program right now.  So she's very excited and we are near the hand are always very, Oh God, this is never going to happen because it doesn't fit and they won't fund us. And then we'll sit there and have no money at all. Maybe by the time this  podcast comes out, we'll have made it successfully. I hope so.  My present self will then be happy  for my future self. So we'll see.

Gael Duez 21:47

I find it really interesting what you've just shared for two reasons.  There is this question of scaling and even for a nonprofit, like what you describe is basically investing for fundraising. And that's not really something that you think  that often when you launch an association. But when you want to have a larger impact, here comes a question of scaling and resources and just the time that people will put on the table is not necessarily enough. that's a twist of a mindset to say, okay, we're going to pay people to get more money, et cetera. And some people might feel uncomfortable with this. Like, isn't it getting too commercial or whatever? But on the other end, as you mentioned, if you really want to go beyond a few initiatives in Germany and go at the European level, then it makes sense to get resources. So yeah, thanks a lot for sharing. This feedback and this bit under the hood approach. Yeah. And the second point that struck me, but it's a bit like, you know, I'm rambling on this is my, what I call the green IT curse all the time, which is like IT is flagged as green by nature. And as you mentioned, AI is everywhere, et cetera.  we don't have any. 

Anita Schüttler 23:00 

Electricity is a hundred percent renewable and we're done.  

Gael Duez 23:20 

And we're done. Bravo. And the issue is, of course, that if I were the European Commission and I was checking which sector to decarbonize first, I mean, I could consider road transport as much as  the IT sector, because basically we emit as many greenhouses,  and this other sector.  But people will spontaneously think, oh, all these trucks, big polluting trucks, etc. We need to electrify them.  And no one will think about data centers or devices and so on. So it's really interesting that even to get funding to do  decarbonization of IT,  you don't fit anywhere. Yeah. 

Anita Schüttler 23:55

We're accelerating so much and this IT sector will be a biggie in the future  and no one's thinking of this right now. \

Gael Duez 24:00

I agree. I agree. The trend is really worrying.  speaking of it and maybe it's time to move to which is second part of our interview,  as I mentioned in the introduction. And what really interested me in the discussion we're having and we had to prepare the episode  is  this question of scaling. I mean, you're someone who tries to bring things at scale. And obviously you described it super well with  how from a small car's way based association you're trying to bring it to the European level. But it's also something that you did a lot in your work and you've got some good use cases to share about taking a good idea and making it at such a level that it starts to have a meaningful impact. I would love to get your feedbacks, get your insights from the trenches. 

Anita Schüttler 25:00

So my company is  we build software for e-commerce. Yeah. And this in itself is I  actually want to call it a problem here because we've lost some  activist people over the years because they wanted to work on something that will provide the world with a better out view instead of  consumerism and more of this. But I love to stay because it means that I  get to work on where it's maybe needed most at least on  what I can choose, where I can choose to work. So  I've actually started out as a programmer in my company 15 years ago now.  And  like five years ago or so,  something happened. There were the  demos from Fridays for Future in Germany. They were really big back then.  We as a company were joining with a big group of people on a demo that was like 80,000 people or so, maybe 50,000, I don't know, a lot in any case. And there was so much momentum at that time, 2019, before the pandemic, that we said we want to do something in our work environment as well. we founded a guild internally at Newfoundland and we looked at our operations, what can we do better there? And back then, we already found that actually our biggest factor might be the software that we build and we have no means to find out how much that causes.  Some three years ago, I finally had my company where it needed to be for me to switch from being a programmer to being a full-time  sustainability practitioner. I had a lot to learn back then, but this is where it started. And later that year,  I found out about green coding and  found that this is actually where it all can come together for me. So what I bring as a programmer  and what I'm interested in as, yeah, a person,  a mom, yeah,  a citizen of this planet. And from there it all got going.  in the beginning, it was like,  I wanted my company to  help me push this topic. And they always said, Anita, you have to make it successful, then we'll back you up. And if no one's interested in this, then there will be no backup in the first place. So this is a bit, huh, what? But this is just how it happened.  actually, I got there. It just took me three years. So what we did in the beginning is that I worked with our teams.  We have  one or multiple teams for each customer  and we sneaked it all in. Yeah. We  looked at what are you doing there? And then like a one and a half years ago, I suddenly had the first of our customers and it's a big corporation. One that is on the stock market and they have over 300 IT people working for them all over  Europe, actually. And they  actually started out their green IT journey just with a small workshop. And they asked me, I was so happy, I can't tell you how happy I was. They asked me to get there and  have a workshop with them, talk about what is green software at all and what are the principles that you look into and so on. And then nothing happened again for a year.  early this year, they came back and they said, we have a big sustainability strategy for  our  whole corporation and  green IT is part of this. And we want to do role specific trainings  for all of our over 300 IT practitioners. And I was like, yes, yes, this is such an important step. Those last few weeks and months, I haven't had much free time to be honest, because  I was doing so many things in parallel. And  we had two  trainings of two hours each, just basic knowledge about sustainability, about negative impact of IT and so on. And then we had  training for  product management, product owners, project managers, UX and UI, like a real deep dive until no one was able to do anything anymore after four hours or so. And just recently we had another deep dive for web developers, backend developers, architects, operations, and so on. 

Gael Duez 30:15

And this deep dive, when you mentioned web developer, backend developer, architects, they were all in the same room, this is  one single course or you split the deep dive into all their specialties? 

Anita Schüttler 30:31

Yeah, so  what's important to know is that the teams that are working on their piece of software, they're always cross-functional teams. So you have everyone that is needed to make this piece of software happen in the same team. And at first I thought, I would be cooler to have them all split up and each of them gets their own training. But then I realized that it's actually pretty good if like, for example, the front end developers know about operations and architecture as well.  like the  product owners know about UX and so on. So they really can work together then. So this wasn't just me telling them stuff. I had a lot of practical exercises in this as well. So where they get to discuss and  work with a tool to really find out about this, yeah, sustainability in IT thing.  We took a look at a lot of  measurement tools and I had some exercises where they had to  use them themselves and find out how they work and how they can, for example, use EcoGrader and the web sustainability guidelines together to find out what to do and so on. 

Gael Duez 31:55

So it means that you had doing this exercise, both a product manager, a UX, a web developer, etc.

Anita Schüttler 32:00

Yeah, get them to work together. 

Gael Duez 32:09

What struck me also is the time span. You're almost talking in years, not in weeks or months. It's, you know, I planted the seed and eventually one year later they came back to me and say, oh, we want to launch a full program, et cetera. So it's, it's really a, a work of patience, I would say. 

Anita Schüttler 32:30

Absolutely. You need really, you need a long breath to get this done. Both me and my company, I'm really now seeing a lot of traction and a lot of support, but it took years to build and I think it's the same with customers. have a first  meeting of some sort, they get to know you, then nothing happens for months. At some point they will come back. Then you plant the next seed and then you wait for months or maybe even a year again until the next step happens. And in some ways this is good because the, for example, the measuring ecosystem has evolved a lot in that last year. Now I actually were able to show them, look, this is the green metrics tool. We've used it. This is what it looks like. This is how you do it.  So  I wouldn't have been able to do this a year ago. And the reason I was able to show them all of this is because we did it ourselves in our company. And that's a big thing for us as well.  

Gael Duez 33:37

That's a big point. And that's definitely a topic that I would love to investigate with you. Just  one quick question. You mentioned green metrics tool.  Are there a specific set of tools that you use in your company?  Where does it come from?  

Anita Schüttler 34:00

The green metrics tool is  a tool that was built by green coding solutions in Berlin.  Diddy,  shout out.  Yeah, they did a lot of really great tools. And by the way, the Bundesverband green software now has a landscape. Just like the CNCF, for example, they have a landscape as well. And we have a working group that worked at this landscape of measuring tools. can find it on landscape.bundesverbandgreensoftware.de.  Yeah. And it's a tool that you can use to measure  how much your software  uses in which  phase of the software life cycle. So looking  in from the outside.

Gael Duez 34:42

Well, thanks a lot for the clarification.  now getting back to what you mentioned is that you practice it in your own company.  Can you provide us an example on how you deploy  green IT  measuring tools and how you make sure that  a piece of software or full software is actually getting assessed and how you reduce its environmental footprint? 

Anita Schüttler 35:06

Yeah. So  this is, have to talk about two different things here. The first thing is that we always work for a customer and we work together with the customer. we usually also have people from the customer working with us together in the same team and all of the software that we build belongs to the customer. So this means that either the customers in the journey, they're on board or we… have very limited ability to do something. There's been  some sneaky stuff going on where we  had a team that did this together with the product owner from the customer and they  labeled their project cost reduction. So in Jira it said cost reduction  and  then we had our  green IT  tasks and every sprint we had one task that the team did  over time. It reduced some money as well, of course, but it was actually meant from a different perspective. If the customer is not actively asking for this, we have to be sneaky about it. 

Gael Duez 36:20

Was the fact that  you planted the seeds and went almost undercover using the word cost reduction where actually you were looking for carbon reduction,  was it  useful? to get  broader adoption? Yeah, okay. 

Anita Schüttler 36:40

Yes.  And actually,  the stuff that we did in this project, it was so cool. And I talked about it at conferences as well. Because for example, this team,  when we talked beforehand, they were very certain that this service,  uses 80 % of our,  causes 80 % of our cost. This will be the service where we have to start. And then we started measuring and found out that no, not at all. This service has like 7 % or so of your emissions, but this other service that costs you, I don't know, five or 6%, it causes over 50 % of this team's emissions. This was really an eye-opener for me to find out. And then we tweaked their servers. We played around with the setup of service that they had and how many instances where and so on and were able to get  the emissions of this setup down to like four or 5%. So basically reducing almost half of the emissions that this team caused in their operations. Yesterday we had our internal conference again and  in last year's conference I talked about this and everyone's really interested in,  how does this work? What do we have to do to get it done? Yeah, so you always learn from whatever you do. And then you talk about it and others will start  being interested and asking the right questions. That's really cool. 

Gael Duez 38:15

That's cool. And it creates inspiration.  And you were mentioning that you needed to mention two things. The first one is that you work always with a customer, otherwise you don't have that much impact. And I get the second thing about the feedback you wanted to provide about using the tools internally was...

Anita Schüttler 38:33

So  this year, we actually now have a software that belongs to Neuland. So we have full impact of this.  It's a search software called Homes. It builds on open source software like Solar, OpenSearch, and so on.  But now we were able to do whatever we wanted with this. And  we used this ability to do whatever we wanted to say, we want to have a Blue Angel certification for the software and be one of the first companies at all to get a Blue Angel for their software.  So the Blue Angel is an environmental certification that you can get for all kinds of stuff. And it's published by the German Environmental Agency together with the Ministry for Yeah, environmental ministry or so. And you can get this for like, it's known for paper, for example, toilet paper, whatever. I've seen it on  a ship as well, which was  very weird. You can get it for data centers. And  a few years ago,  there was also a version for software that only had one company getting certified. And that was the Ocula by KDE. And that was it because the  requirements were so high that it was not practical at all. And then it was reworked a few years ago, like two years ago or so. Now we have two  software that have this Blue Angel after what was reworked. The first is the Green Metrics tool,  which it already talked about.  And  the second is Nextcloud,  which is really nice as well. But  all these software that were certified so far, they were open source. And now we came with our almost but not completely open source tool and  we started late April.  when we did,  asked Arne, who's our measuring partner,  we measure everything on his cluster, and Philippe, who's  in the Bundesverband together with me active and he's like I am an auditor, he's audited all the other softwares that got the Blue Angels so far.  And I asked them,  we want to be done by the end of May. This should be no problem at all.  it? And they were kind of,  let's see. And  I was pretty naive in the beginning.  And then it took us like until the end of May and even still, we're still not done. I can say that the green metrics tool evolved a bit as well in this process and we all learned a lot and it's just important for someone. Someone has to do this. 

Gael Duez 41:47

How come that it took so much time? 

Anita Schüttler 41:39

Yeah. So,  first of all, the software wasn't done yet.  It still isn't.  I'm someone who always goes,  I always go to my colleagues.  We have to be fast. Come on, let's do this. And the software was still changing while we were already measuring. And the team was working on the software and I did this certification process together with a colleague  of mine,  Tilo,  and we had no idea about how the software is working. So we had to  learn how is it working under the hood.  And the thing about the Blue Angel is that  you can see  it was written with a different kind of software in mind. It was written with,  we have this installer, you click on it, it installs everything, and then we have to make sure that it's good and it doesn't do anything crazy. And now we come,  so Nyland is not a product company. Yeah, we're  a company building software all the time, but we don't usually build products. And  Holmes is not a product as well an accelerator. we had to,  we have like five Docker containers that we had to orchestrate one after the other. They need to wait for each other.  We need product data that has to be imported and only when it's, when this product data is there, we can go on and so on. So this process was pretty difficult already. And  then we did the measurements and found out that, so the Blue Angel asks you to have a standard deviation of not more than 5 % over like 10 or 30 measuring runs. And we had like seven, eight, 9 % standard deviation. So what is happening there? And yeah, until we tackled this, so we found out we need more memory for solar and so on. So until you're done here. And then we thought we were done, but we had to redo all of our measuring  because we had to split up our scenarios. So you need usage scenarios. We have one  for a back office where someone is configuring something. And then we have a usage scenario that  imitates the real  online shop that will search something. And this  scenario of Yeah, it's basically J-Meter doing this. No one had this before. We had to split up those because they were together and so on. So lots of problems where all of us learned, not just us at Neuland, but also  Anne  and Philipp, they were learning and yeah, the tool evolved over time. And I think we've  taken quite a few hurdles in the process and I hope that by next week we will actually really be done with this. 

Gael Duez 45:00

Okay, excellent. And if someone were to ask you, how do I scale green software  practices in my own company? What will be the top advices, top tips that  you would tell him or her? 

Anita Schüttler 45:10

Top tip number one. Be as close to what the people in your company are actually doing as you can. Don't  come with green  software principles on a high level because  they  will not have an impact in the daily work. look at what people are doing, translate for them, and then ask them to do this or that, which you know will really have an impact. Second is  depending on what company you're in, it might actually be a good thing not to talk about sustainability. know this sounds really crazy, but I've had so many conversations where people said, oh, this is cool. We already thought about doing this. Oh, we are actually already doing this, but not for sustainability reasons, but for reasons X, Y, Z. So Green Software provides so much value on so many levels that people often don't even realize that you're doing something for the environment here because it also  adds so much value for other things that a company is after. 

Gael Duez 46:25

I can feel that. I was about  to add,  yeah, be prepared to be patient. That's a  long game. Thanks a lot, Anita. That was a lot that was shared for a single podcast episode. So I wish you the very best with your… CO2 challenge and the ramping up, I would say, of the Bundesvenband Green Software. Yeah, thank you. And also that all the efforts that you've put into your company and your clients will actually keep on  spreading. So thanks a lot for joining the show. Thanks a lot for having me. was great to be here.  

Gael Duez 47:00

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Each vote is worth a thousand likes on YouTube. Talking about social media, sharing this episode on your favorite one, or directly with relatives working as a software practitioner seems also a good idea to provide them with inspiration to go beyond raising awareness and scale green software engineering. You got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. 

We are now going to do a summer break or winter break, actually, for me. And Green IO will be back on Tuesday, August 19th. Who will be the guest? I don't know yet. I have a couple of interviews to edit and I'm not sure which one will come first. Make sure to subscribe to email alerts or notifications on your favorite podcast platform  not to miss it. 

By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog  and check the conferences we organize across the globe. As you guessed from this episode, Green IO Munich had a great first edition last week  and of course,  all eyes are now on Green IO Llondon on September  23rd and 24th. As  a Green IO listener,  you know the drill,  you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.  Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference  are all gone.  I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists  build  a greener digital world.

Roxanne 49:08 one byte at a time

This is how Rainer Karcher describes himself. 

It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. In this episode Gaël Duez welcomes a strong advocate of moving the corporate world into the right direction from within? Having spent 2 decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz, Rainer Karsher knows the corporate world well, which he now advises on sustainability. 

In this Green IO episode, they analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris agreement, but also caring about biodiversity or human rights across their supply chain. Many topics were covered such as: 

And yes they talked about whales also and many more things!

BTW, Rainer will also be one of our 2 keynote speakers at Green IO Munich next week where he will wrap-up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their CSO. 

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Gaël Duez (00:00)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

Gaël Duez (00:27)

Climate Activist in a Suit When I first read this statement from Rainer Karcher, it immediately resonated with me. How can we move our corporate world into the right direction from within? It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. And today I'm welcoming a strong advocate of the second option. Rainer knows this world well, having spent two decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz. He founded Heartprint a year ago to keep on advising them on sustainability. Today, we will try to analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris Agreement but also caring about the biodiversity crisis or the human rights across the supply chain. By the way, Rainer will also be one of our two keynote speakers at Green IO Munich on July 2nd and 3rd, where he will wrap up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their chief sustainability officer.

Gael Duez (01:40)

Welcome, Rainer. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (01:44)

Thank you very much for having me and thank you very much for the very good introduction. I'm really looking forward, first of all, to meeting all of you, hopefully, who are listening now, and to meet you, Gail, in Munich on July 3rd, which is Munich, which is my hometown. So I'm really happy to be part of that and just looking forward to seeing you all.

Gael Duez (02:01)

Yeah, thanks a lot for this and you have a lot of pressure on your shoulders. I know that because you're playing home. So we expect a lot from you.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:08)

And you can, you can. I'm not sure whether I'm able to fulfill, but I'm very much looking forward to at least giving a bit of thoughts and sharing my mind.

Gael Duez (02:13)

I'm sure you will. Thanks a lot for this. And you know, when we were discussing how ESG is delayed from most agendas due to according business priorities in the current times, you were actually very vocal about the lack of business acumen of decision makers doing so. Because according to you in particular in such times, ESG remain a major business goal and executive committees or board should not, and I'm quoting you here, deprioritize future readiness. So there's so much to unpack with this stance of yours, but maybe you could start with explaining what you meant by… and deprioritizing future readiness.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:58)

Absolutely with pleasure and thanks for that question. Well, let me just maybe circle back a little bit. And as I've started my combination of IT where my foundation lies, so I'm an informatic person since 1997. So my career started in IT and kept it that way for quite a long time, exactly as I said, more than two decades. And about five years ago, I've started to get into sustainability from a business perspective and combine my private passion for environmental protection and for certain other things with job and with IT. But at that time, there was a very strong focus mostly brought up from Fridays for Future and all the for future type of combinations. And the society, I think, got very much more interested in talking about the topic, which was a good one. And then from my perspective, things happened. It just turned into something which nowadays is called the green left wing woke type of a thing. And once you start using ESG or sustainability as a term, people are, or least the majority of people are like, ⁓ gosh, come on, again that thing and again that talk. In particular, if you go to businesses and if you go to the C suites of companies. And the thing is, ESG was never meant to be a left green, woke type of a thing. It is just something for ensuring the foundation of our future. And if we're talking about future readiness, from a personal perspective, from a company's perspective, from business and from survival, than it is about just being aware of what's going to happen, create transparency of what to expect and have a bit of an ability to predict what you can do and how you can influence things. What I mean on that, bringing that down to ground level is if you own a company, if I just got handed over a company maybe from the fifth or sixth generation back something which was founded 100 years ago. The only thing I'm very much interested in is keeping my business going. And whatever it takes, I need to be ensured that the future and whatever is happening there is something I'm able to either influence or to predict to be able to adopt it. And that means that if, for example, there is someone crazy coming up in the US and raising taxes to 50%, I should be aware of how much influence this will have to my income. If I do have a lot of business which has been made with the US, I should be aware. And I should have a plan B, some kind of a backup plan if things are going to happen, what they're happening. And the same is relevant for anything which could come up from the environment. If there is a hailstorm showing up in three days, if I am a car dealer and I do have 1,000 of cars parked outside, I should be aware of that. And I should have an ability to maybe bring them to a parking garage or elsewhere. If I do have maybe agricultural business ⁓ I'm going to take, I should be aware. If there is a very dry summer to be expected and maybe set up something which is helping to water my plants. Otherwise, I most likely have an issue from a business perspective. So nothing of that has to do with saving the planet or just doing some kind of good stuff and saving animals or insects or anything. No, it has not. It's a very purely business perspective in ensuring that my business is able to keep going.

Gael Duez (06:10)

And how do you differentiate in that case ESG from, I would say, risk management that every good company should have put in place?

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (06:22)

That's the fun thing. There is not that much of a differentiation and there doesn't have to be. So resilience and risk management is something which, at least in exactly the way like you said it, I did work for Allianz, which is an insurance company. So they are very much interested in all that aspect. So resilience plays a crucial role for them. So take their business perspectives, which is indeed just in trying to regulate as little as possible as damages and just selling policies and polices or insurances as much as possible as well. So the business model is at risk if things turn around the other way. So if they have to regulate a lot of damages caused by strong weather results, for example, take the latest example of Switzerland where there was hundreds of households just pushed away from a glacier which just broke. If you are the insurance company and you have to regulate that. This makes you multi-million or even billion worth. Take the example of wildfires which took place in the US, in Los Angeles, same thing there. So if you're an insurer, you have to be aware of the risks which could occur and just then make your business based on that. And that awareness, that risk awareness is exactly what we're talking here as well. So future readiness comes very much with exactly this. But that was the example of an insurance company. If I'm a local small medium-sized company, producing anything for maybe the big enterprises. Those companies normally do not have a view into this. There might be some little, yeah, different sessions depending on what kind of business you do, but most of the small medium-sized companies don't even have a division looking into risks or analyzing them. And that's exactly where Future Readiness comes in from my perspective with very small, very concrete examples, not with 120 PowerPoint slide type of strategy paper, which you need to read through and then still nothing changes. No, tangible results, tangible and grabbable examples of how to make yourself aware of what to expect. And maybe another example, even if I'm a small company and I am the ones maybe producing some electronic components for big suppliers, I do have maybe dependencies from Asia, from electronic goods which are being produced there. So supply chain risks a core. And that is something which to me is a perfect example of the classical ESG. So I have environmental risks, have social aspects like human rights, I'm doing the production cycle, modern slavery and all that things. And I have governance structured things which are, for example, regulations like carbon board adjustment mechanisms. So the term ESG itself, sustainability as a term, might be in a wrong angle in the meantime and being wiped off the agendas. But you change the narrative and if you just change the perspective towards something which is be aware of what to expect and try to find a backdoor plan, try to find something which can help you with diversifying maybe your supply chains. Then we are talking about future readiness from a pure business perspective, nothing to do with saving the planet or doing something for anyone from the green party.

Gael Duez (09:19)

I fully got it and it brings a question in my head because quite often it seems to be for medium sized business, even for big corporation, very strong tension between what should be done to be future ready, but in a matter of years and what must be done to be financial ready for the next quarter report for instance or even just to meet the end of the year from a financial perspective. And this tension I've met it quite a lot with people saying yeah I know that at some point my factory might get into trouble because we might not access water in such a cheap and easy way that it used to be the case before. Yet we know about this supply chain issue and like 90 % of our suppliers are based in Asia. But under the current economical circumstances, we cannot do anything else. How do you answer this sort of not necessarily even a pushback, but just question arising from your clients?

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (10:23)

Yeah, yeah. Well, there is two angles which I always try to come up with. So the first one is depending on the size of your company, you depend on loans from banking and financial industries. So if you invest into new machines, if you have a big project coming up, you need to have a cheap and a very good and affordable loan from banking industries. And I just yesterday read an article that the biggest investment bank from the Nordics plus the European Central Bank already reacted to omnibus. So the current deregulation ideas from the European Commission, so to say, and just simply decline. And they just simply said, well, you can either go ahead with CSRD and with the reporting like it was supposed to be and like it was originally, or you can just count on it that depending on your interest as a company, loans are getting more and more expensive, or you won't even get one. So this is the first reaction I would have. Just simply think about that. If you have even a short-term type of a planning, if you only have a six-month or a one-year perspective ⁓ to look into the future, you still are in trouble if you completely ignore that topic, if you try to avoid thinking of it just based on, well, the European Commission decided to just push it up for another two years. Well, the banking industry does not. They are very much interested in already understanding how future-ready your company is of today.

Gael Duez (11:41)

But it's funny that you're mentioning the banking industry because you know there is a famous hearsay that there is no climate deniers among insurers because the insurance world is perfectly aware of the devastating effects of climate change. But the financial sector and especially the banking sectors comes under much more pressure usually because they still finance fossil fuel expansion plan and the like, and they're not really super clear on how to finance the ecological transition. So it's kind of a surprising example that you provide. And if you could elaborate a bit on it, like, do you really believe that the banking sector is actually now pushing more and more for sustainable practices? I'm really curious about it.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (12:31)

So I'm mixing emotions to be honest. I do know a lot of people out of that bubble and in particular within due to my time in Allianz in the financial sector. So I do know a couple of people even in the largest banks of the world. And yes, for sure, there is a lot of praying water and drinking wine. There is a lot of, yeah, let's just do this and that. And you need to invest into sustainable futures and still. those banks are the ones which are investing the most still in oil and gas, which is our enemy. So therefore, let's be clear on that. But on the other side, from a pure business perspective to those banks, I know from those people that the risk analyzes ⁓ for all of them. And independently, whether they invest a lot or just very little or nothing into oil and gas, all of their risk assessments came up quite clearly. If they put millions into any kind of companies and invest into any kind of companies without a clear strategy, the risk is way too high that they never see that money again. And from that perspective, they will have to change and they will change. Is that something which can happen like a finger flip? It can't. So this is something which takes time. And that's another thing which I've very much learned during the last six, seven years now in the big corporates. If you believe that a 300,000, 500,000 people company is able to be changed within half a year or a year, it can't be. Even if it has to. And even if, yes, for sure, the pressure is incredibly high. This is where, and probably already can now listen to the climate activist and the suit. So this is that mixed and emotion type of a thing, which I'm struggling with each day and trying to find that balance and transport that into a narrative, which has been understood then from the C-level back to your first question, because yes, I know, and I'm the activist here, the windows and the opportunities are closing rapidly fast. And I just listened to Johann Rockström last week in Berlin, who just showed up the graphs of what to expect and that the two degrees won't be something we can expect in 2040 or 2050, no, already by 2030. So it's incredibly increasing at the moment and the rise of the temperature and the loss of species in biodiversity aspects, all of that is dramatically increasing and we should and we have to act the fastest as we can. But on the other side, we lost that opportunity already 15 or 20 years ago. So this is something I could get depressive now and looking back in anger and say, well, we should have, but no, this is not me. So the optimistic person in me as well. Let's do whatever we are able to and let's push it as hard as we can, but still keeping it realistic. circling back to your original question, the second point on that is, well, if I do have a company which completely ignored the aspect of sustainability so far, I always come up with the argumentation, well, then let's start with things where you're even able to save money. So the return on invest is immediately there if you, for example, look into energy efficiency. 90 % of small medium-sized companies never ever looked into an energy efficiency aspect with automation. This is where then the digital comes up and my twin transformation heart beats a bit louder. There is so much opportunities today where you are not even able react manually anymore and you don't have to, but just implement very easy, easy to consume, very affordable solutions to increase energy efficiency. Save energy and so therefore save money as well and get the return on investment quite rapidly. So and this is where you can have a starting point with and based on that define a strategy and a vision for your company and what most people in particular the C level is underestimating is of how many people within the company are already interested in supporting that ideas. So majority of small medium-sized companies I've spoken to in the last 12 months was at the beginning like yeah well you know. This is not a topic for us and nobody speaks about sustainability as a whole. And there is no clear vision and strategy. And I doubt that we just get the approvals from the employees and from operational roles. And they have been all wrong. 80 % of human beings, and that's the average value, are quite well aware of what's going to happen. And 80 % would like to change and take some kind of an influence, but they don't because they don't have the ability to in their day-to-day jobs. If you just grant them a vision and an idea and a strategy and some kind of support, you would wonder as a small medium-sized company of how much is possible to be changed in a very short period of time with all the knowledge, the experience of your employees, of the people surrounding you.

Gael Duez (16:55)

So actually, it's not two points, it's three aspects. The first one being get good financing conditions by being sustainability compliant. The second one is go for savings and cost savings equals energy savings and actually reducing waste most of the time comes with some sort of a cost savings. And the third one is actually please your employees and your stakeholders and your shareholders, maybe, but at least your stakeholders because most of them are more climate aware than you might think so. So that will be your answer to this usual pushback end of the world, end of the months. And Rainer, you mentioned the omnibus law, so maybe for the listeners, and there are many of them not based in Europe, if you could just clarify what it is. But also it helped me ask actually you another question, which is actually a double question. So it's three questions in one, I think I think you're having a hard time with me. I'm sorry with this.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (17:46)

I'm enjoying it lot. I hope that keeps it interesting for the listeners. That's the only thing we would like to get.

Gael Duez (17:56)

Excellent. If you can just briefly explain what is the omnibus situation and how you connect it with the current backlash against sustainability that we see in Europe and in the US, and maybe also because you're a very global person, well connected around the world, how much of the current narrative that we have in the ESG circles or sustainability circles at large is actually a western bias because as far as I'm checking on the news around the world there are a lot of other countries still implementing ESG regulations. seems it's always a bit difficult to assess what is going on in China especially when like me you don't speak Chinese and you don't know the culture that well but it seems that for instance China is pushing a very ambitious agenda on ESG regulation. They're actually quite aware of the biodiversity crisis. It doesn't mean that they're doing everything to solve it, yeah, how much we are just convincing ourselves that the world is now facing a backlash where it's actually Trump and its European followers that are actually doing this backlash. So it's a lot of questions and you can feel free to unpack them the way you want

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:08)

I like the global perspective. And exactly as I said, I'm working globally since a long, long, long time. So that I did spend most of my career in global faced companies. mostly had colleagues from all over the world and influenced them from different cultures and from different type of thought and mindset, which I always really

Gael Duez (19:13)

Yeah, yeah.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:26)

let's just maybe start unrolling the questions and getting a bit of explanation. So the omnibus is something which came up now, in particular due to the economical crisis which we are facing all over Europe based on the new US administration and all the tariffs and taxes and all the things which he came up with. ⁓ And I'm not further commenting on because otherwise I could get immediately very angry. But let's just stick it with that. Since he's in place, the European Union tried to find ways to support European economies and lower bureaucracy and lower the effort which has to be taken, for example, for non-financial reporting. So it is a quite already established type of a thing to… put yourself into non-financial reporting. It's nothing of just now a year or two. This has been in place since quite a long time for big corporates. So a lot of companies with more than 1,000 employees and 50 million on the revenue do have to report that since already 15 years or even longer. So it just got replaced then by the so-called CSRD, which is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Within that, was, or there are, ESRS, so that's the reporting standards for environmental, social and governmental structures. And that exactly was meant for the next three years to bring it further down to reporting even to companies above 250 employees. So not the smallest ones, not the hidden champions, but companies with 250 employees and more would have been required to report. Omnibus now with the idea to reduce bureaucracy, to make it a bit easier for the small companies was brought in place to just limit to 250 employees company, but to raise that to a 1000 people company. So there was a couple of millions which would not or which are not affected due to that any longer. And it was then pushed by another two years. So not with implementing it by 2025, but 2027, 2028. And this is exactly where the criticism comes from, from my point of view, that with omnibus, things are being delayed at a time where they should not be delayed. Future readiness, as we spoke about already, is being even de-prioritizing companies are not looking into it. Because this is a bit of the typical carrot and stick situation. If you're not enforced in doing, you don't. At least that's the majority of companies who are looking into that. If there is no law in place, which pushes me to do something, then I just simply don't do it. And that's exactly where I think we need to change the perspective and need to come into another angle. And that is which most likely didn't even make it into the news. There is, with coming with Omnibus, so that was a bit of the good part of it, a voluntary type of a reporting. So that's the voluntary standards, which is then meant to support the small companies with creating a very simple and very much slower and smaller type of a reporting to standardize that. So if you're working with a big enterprise, if you are a supplier for a big enterprise, you mostly get sustainability questions anyhow day by day on your table. If you're in tenders, if you try to work together with others, you need to report on sustainability. And the voluntary standards was meant or is meant standardize that, that you don't have to reply to each of your customers in a different way would like to have it in an Excel sheet. The other one as a PDF, the third one as an email. The fourth one would like to have maybe access to your database with an API. So to standardize that, ⁓ Omnibus came up with the voluntary standards. And this is something which I think makes total sense. And in exactly that way, I think if you look at it and keep the standards, keep the reporting for the big corporates where there is a lot of things already in place and a lot of reporting already has been happening for the last two years or at least one year and keep that and bring it more to a standardized way for the small companies. So this would be a bit of the explanation what the omnibus is all about. To your second question, I 100 % agree. We are looking very much on the depriorization and on everything is getting worse and worse over time now from the industrialized Western world. If you go to other parts of the world, if you go to developing countries, if you go to sub-Saharan Africa, they have a complete different view and a complete different perspective on sustainability as a whole. And why? Because they're under pressure much more than whatever we are already. If you go to India, for example, in my former surrounding in Allianz, I had a huge amount of colleagues working in India. So 6,500 of Allianz technology employees are working in Trivandrum in the most south of India and in Pune, which is more in the north. What I found and still find is a lot of passion, a lot of engagement of the people there to really make things happening because they were affected much more than whatever we are. ⁓ And not only from a climate perspective, not only from rising temperatures and the loss of water and strong weather results, but plastic pollution, as an example, if you take plastic pollution, well, we do have a very good recycling system. So what you couldn't see now is that I just ⁓ questioned whether it is a good recycling system.

I'm I just did see a reporting which was science based just two days ago, which was just showing up the recycling quotes in Europe, which are less than 12%. So we are reducing the recycling to a very little minimum and only PET has been recycled. All the rest as it's mostly combinations is not. So if you think we're good in that, we are not. It's just been mostly sold or burned or just dumped somewhere, we just don't see it. And that's a bit of the difference of what it is in India. But back to the question, you said it as well. China, for example, took over a third of the European CSRD. Well, a bit of an adopted wording and somehow a little bit of a different angle. But a third of the regulatories which we came up with for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is now being pushed away through omnibus, has been taken over from the Chinese government and brought into local laws. And well, I'm not putting, and don't get me wrong now, I'm not putting an autocraty and a society which is ⁓ putting pressure on human rights from every angle and ignoring human rights from a democratic perspective like what we are looking into. I'm not putting that into a positive view, but exactly as you said it. So the depriorization of sustainability and ESG is not at all happening all across the world, It might come up from a different interest. And if you take China, for example, which is the country with the biggest increase of solar and PVs over the last two years, that comes for sure not from a ecological reason, but a pure economical one, because solar is in the meantime, the cheapest way of producing power to the grid as you can get it. And this is exactly the reason why they do it. So there is definitely different type of interests. But on the other side, Like you said, those who are affected, those who are feeling pressure, either on waste or on temperature or a lack of water or lack of biodiversity, if you have to start pollinating plants manually by hand, if you have to have people climbing up trees, pollinating apples and oranges to get the fruit at the end, because there is literally no bees left, no insects left to pollinate in other ways. Then you start thinking and this is exactly what we are still missing and already not given an answer why I think it is what it is. I think we are still way too protected in the Western industrialized world. Still everything is in supermarkets, still everything is somehow affordable, still everything is existing. If I open the tap, there is still fresh and clear water I'm able to drink right out of tap, at least in the majority of Europe. And that is something which I think is a bit of just pushing away the realities of what the world as a whole looks like and the global issues are.

Gael Duez (27:28)

That's funny, it is exactly the word that popped in my head when you were discussing and explaining the global situation that we are still so protected. protected or putting very nicely things under the carpet, as you mentioned for the plastic recycling or downcycling. By downcycling, mean that you use the product to build something with a less quality, so for instance, plastic bottles, they will never be used to make other plastic bottles as the little recycling sign could wrongly advertise us, but more to create carpet or garments or whatever. And I think this would be much more understandable for the the general public, if we were talking about downcycling rather than recycling. But this is a green IT or digital sustainability podcast. And I'd like maybe to zoom in a bit and ask you, how shall tech companies navigate these troubled times and embrace the paradigm that you've just described, starting with future proof. No Sorry. Starting with future readiness.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (28:36)

And future proof is a good one as well, so we can talk about it in both ways. So that's totally fine. So try to visualize a butterfly. A butterfly is only able to fly if both wings are moving. And if there is only one wing, it will immediately drop off. And that's exactly what I try to explain what twin transformation stands for. It's the transformation of, and that's the one wing digital, and make digital sustainable. So looking into your own footprint into the things which are just coming up due to technology. So that's a major energy consumption. Take AI, which just now skyrocketed the energy consumption of data centers all across the world and still keeps going. So I think we are already at 3 % of the world's energy, which is consumed by data centers purely, just data centers. So not everything else for infrastructure, networks, Wi-Fi, whatever type of things, no purely data centers. And this is going to be predicted to go up to maybe even 22 to 30 percent in the next years due to AI because of a massive energy hunger which comes up on that. Same is relevant for water consumption. So all those data centers need to have cooling independent whether they use direct cooling, which is mostly a closed circle or and this is the majority of data centers use cooling on the roofs with chillers, whether it's just water chilled and used for such kind of cooling just have a massive consumption of fresh water. And this is something which we still don't have an answer for. And well, this is the own footprint. If you take materials, if you take the amount of equipment which is being dumped each day instead of circular usage and instead of refurbing the company devices and just handing it to a second life or just ensuring that materials like raw materials ⁓ is being just reused again. of that is the outcome and the own footprint of digital. And that needs to be turned into a sustainable aspect. So you need to be transparent. You need to know how to treat things and sustainability needs to take an influence into that one wing. The other wing is the sustainability transformation or the future readiness transformation. And all of that to get support from digital. What I've experienced in most of the corporates in the past and still, if I look into companies nowadays, there is a lot of manual effort if it comes, for example, to the reporting aspect. what we've spoken about a bit earlier, CSRD and all the non-financial reporting, most of the companies, and I hope that you agree in listening now, still have Excel and SharePoint and PowerPoint and emails and PDFs and whatever type of things as a source and data tool to work with for such kind of reporting. Does it have to be that way? No. There is definitely digital answers. Is AI supported answers, there's a lot of things in automation you can just achieve in supporting your surrounding and your work. And thing is, those people who I met who are in sustainability manager roles, in sustainability head roles, chief sustainability officers, majority of them is non-IT people. So they do not have even an idea how to make things different than with Excel or with PowerPoint or anything else. So what it needs is digital and IT people need to support those people because none of them is in such kind of a sustainability position to just do non-financial reporting. None of them is interested in day by day shuffling Excel sheets and counting numbers. All of them would like to take influence and make things happen within the company surrounding and I am able to support them with digital. We are able, for example, in product cycles. So taking another example, Green Digital Twins, this is a very perfect version. If you create a digital copy, a twin, of your product, of whatever type of material type of thing you're working with in a company and just color it a bit green in remark of looking ⁓ into maybe the weight. If you reduce weight, do a digital twin without even producing something, you can maybe lower weight for a transport of a good. If you repairability already upfront, you can support the longevity of a product. If you just have an awareness, of which components are being used in a final product, you're even able to already predict the recyclability of that product. All of that are definitely a lot of things where digital can support sustainability and the other way around, where sustainability needs to have a closer look into the digital world and ensuring that digital is not increasing the issues and the problems, but helping them and supporting.

Gael Duez (33:09)

You know, a few weeks ago, had a Letitia Bornes, a researcher on digital sustainability and one of the good experts of rebound effect. And when I was listening to you after having listened to her, I'm sort of having mixed feelings about it because, I mean, on paper, what you describe is flawless. I mean, and I love the butterfly example, by the way. But what has been happening over time is that every time digital enhance or improved processes, reduced waste, reduced energy consumption and so on, some sort of rebound effects happen, which most of the time cancel out the gains. And this is always where I'm a bit cautious. Like I would love to deploy what you're describing, like a word where IT and AI and so on would purely focus on reducing creating a more livable planet But this is not what has happened most of the time. It's a nuanced world and I don't want to be oversimplifying here. How do you deal with it? How do you create the conditions where what you describe will actually happen rather than having this crazy rebound effect like, it's more efficient by 50%. So let's spend 70 % more on it to gain new customers markets. 

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (34:34)

And that's a very concrete danger I do see as well. That's without any doubt. And the more efficient we will get, let's now follow maybe the predictions of the big corporates, the tech giants from the US who are currently now predicting that AI will solve most of the issues. AI will increase the technology which is being required for carbon capture and storage. AI will help us for fusion reactor development and all that things. So they make us feel that

Gael Duez (34:44)

Thank you.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:00)

AI and digital will solve all the world's issues and we can just lean back and keep going than what we've done already the last 100 years. And this is the complete opposite of what it should be. And I agree with you. So there is definitely a huge risk that there is rebound effects in certain other areas. And that's even more showing the importance of people like us who are aware. And it's all with awareness. It all comes with transparency and with understanding what the outcome is and that we always pay a price.

Gael Duez (35:05)

Yeah.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:29)

I think, and now let's just maybe circle into a bit of another angle. So far, we've kept it mostly in the environmental and technological aspects. maybe a bit increase the focus on the social component and meaning on us, human beings. If you take the amount of people with mental health issues and depression at the moment, which is massively increasing, mostly due to the pressure which we face, mostly due to all that always on things with social media. And if you just take all of that, think people are getting more and more aware, well, there might be an outcome with what I do each day and there might be a price I have to pay for. And that's exactly what we need to be aware of. If we use digital, if we use AI, if we use technology, it is not what the ones producing it and making the most money and billions out of that is trying to sell us. It comes with a price. That price is something which we have to bring up even more on the agendas and why it needs to have collaboration, why it needs to have NGOs. Even if in the US, for example, NGOs are not that famous anymore and Trump is wiping off kind of financial support for them, we need them. We need to have people who are independent, who are not money driven, but who are driven from values, from common good, which are interested in changing the world. Are they the ones to answer all of the world's questions? No, they are not. It's a balance between. And that brings me back to my own personal brand, to that climate activist in a suit idea. It needs to have a balance between both worlds. And that comes again, repeating that with the awareness of what is the price and what is the outcome we can get and finding a right balance in reducing the risk of any kind of bouncing back into then doing even more and even doubling than maybe the outcome.

Gael Duez (37:12)

And that's absolutely right. And you mentioned two things that actually would like to get a bit of a highlight from you, which is the price we pay for AI. And I think the example you took was excellent. And you mentioned the NGO and I briefly mentioned in the introduction that you're the chief sustainability officer of sustainableit.org. So for those who are not familiar with sustainableit.org, I would say that this is an NGO who focuses mostly on IT executives such as CIO and CTO How do you help them with your CSO hat future readiness and also to push back this AI frenzy with this sort of fear of missing out the syndrome that we are facing to take a balanced decision.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (38:01)

Yeah, thank you very much for that question. So maybe for those not knowing me, I'm working full time in my own company for Heartprint which is my paid job, my day to day job, which is paying the soup on the table for my three kids and for my wife and the family at home here. And then they do have ⁓ a side job, is pro bono for sustainableit.org. Sustainableit.org, exactly as I explained it, was found about three years ago in the US. It's a classical NGO, no commercial interest, no financial interest. The only thing we get financially is the fees from the members, which are in the meantime 135, mostly exactly as I said, big stock listed companies from all across the world. And what the initial idea in nutshell was all about is in defining standards and in just joining a group of people who are interested in doing the same and speaking up with one voice towards those who are trying to fool us. So that was a bit of the initial idea, because if you started ⁓ five years ago, in requesting maybe carbon footprint from hyperscalers, you got either no answer or completely hidden type of an answer without any value. And that was something which started the idea in defining sustainable standards in IT and by IT increasing the pressure with speaking out of one voice. And in the meantime, it just got developed. We've got changed a bit of the focus to AI and now we are defining currently together with roughly 50 people from such kind of companies and member companies, but as well supported by science, by the UN Global Digital Compact, by World Bank and certain others, what is responsibility in AI and what does it mean as a standard. And this creates currently guidelines and this creates white papers and a bit of a framework which is being released in roughly three weeks, so end of June. And the idea here is to… Again, define a standard which currently only has certain angles and certain local aspects. So there is, for example, the European AI Act, which got defined about two years ago. But this is, first of all, not comprehensive. There's very little in it, which is on environmental aspects, for example, water consumption and stuff. On the other side, it's European and it doesn't have a global reach. And so therefore, what we try to do here is in defining that things. And my job there is in supporting the board as a member of the board in adjusting then maybe strategic angles to take as an NGO as a whole. as you can clearly guess already, so the US headquartered NGOs are quite heavy under pressure at the moment. So if you're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, which plays a major role, if you go in ethics, for example, for AI, as well in standards for sustainability, this is quite difficult at the moment for all the US people. In the board and even for us being an US headquartered NGO. So what we're trying at the moment is to change a bit of the pressure more to European sides. We are creating a newly adjusted European advisory board and we are then trying to push things more from that angle because we can. We are still in the democratic freedom to talk openly about things and we are still able to just push things further in… regard of diversity aspects.

Gael Duez (41:14)

And in Europe, science is not a gross word. So we can keep on talking about it on fact-based rather than belief-based. now circling back, so thanks a lot for all these explanations about the symbol.it.org and how also it helps us understand better what is at stake at the moment with the US. With your members, and maybe it's too early for you to answer, but how do you advise them to embrace AI wisely. Mean, do you have some concrete example or is it too early to say?

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (41:48)

No, I can at least give some maybe one, two ideas into that aspect here as well. So what it all comes up with, and by the way, this will be promoted then as well and will be opened up to public as well with very concrete guidelines and practical how to start things and very practical examples from the big companies which are members of Sustainable IT. But one of the things is, again, transparency. So if I, and this is an example. Where German Railway, Deutsche Bahn, example, started already about a year ago or something. The usage of mostly then the on-prem AI solutions, so none of the big corporates is using public ChatGPT or Mistral or anything else. They do have their own on-prem solutions for data privacy reasons, which do have then with an API for sure the large language models of big solutions on the market or copilot and everything else but they still have their own on-prem solutions. That means they do have an opportunity to influence how it's been displayed. And one of the things Deutsche Bahn did was displaying after a prompt what was the energy consumption caused by that prompt. if anyone from Deutsche Bahn is using in their internal AI system ⁓ their large language model to create maybe the next PowerPoint slides or just an email to the next manager maybe asking for a celery raise, then there is an immediate response which just shows the prompt you just used did cause 25 kilowatt hours of energy use. So that is one of the very concrete examples which I would propose if you're in a big corporate surrounding to just come up with a bit more of understanding and awareness. And what it requires then, and this is maybe a next example, if you're working in a smaller surrounding just using AI from public offerings ⁓ in maybe paid options like OpenAI, Mistral, with Luchette or anything else, then it is again on training. So don't hand it to your colleagues. Don't hand it to your employees just completely without guidance, without awareness, without a training. They need to understand what the outcome is all about. they need to understand sometimes a small language model would do and sometimes even a Google search would do. Well, maybe a bad example because Google just wiped off the standard Google search and replaced it with AI.

Gael Duez (44:04)

Yeah.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (44:07)

What I was going to say is you need to be, again, aware. And that awareness could either come with transparently showing it. If you do have the ability, if you don't, start things with a training. now maybe to those who are just listening, say, well, we still don't use AI within the company. I bet you do. You just don't know about it. And you just don't maybe want to know about it. Because if you, as a company leader, are not providing solutions for your employees, they'll find their own ones. And I mean, it's very easy to register for the full free versions or just pay, I don't know, $10 or $15 per month for Le Chet or anything else just on your private account and still use it in the company surrounding. And I am sure in most of the companies, a lot of people are using already AI, even if there is no official answer, no official provided service form from the company perspective. So training, training, training.

Gael Duez (45:00)

I've never thought about shadow AI the same way as shadow IT, but actually it makes total sense. But thanks a lot for this. And thanks a lot for providing this concrete examples and the feedback from your position at sustainableit.org. I think we are out a bit of time now.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:05)

Yeah. So do we.

Gael Duez (45:21)

Let's finish with a positive piece of news. What is according to you? ⁓ The news that you got recently that uplifted you the most. can be in sustainability in general, or it can be in IT sustainability more specifically. Feel free to pick the one you

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:40)

Very good question. So I would like to maybe turn the angle again a bit into something probably unexpected, and this is whales. ⁓ So a very good friend of mine, is Frauke Fischer. She is a biodiversity expert from the university in Germany. And she wrote a book which is in German, Walmacht Wetter, or translated version, ⁓ whale is causing weather. And if you're interested in reading that book, I can highly recommend. It's something which explains how whales are influencing weather during their lifetimes and once they die. one of the positive news I recently read is due to whale protection, which is in most of the countries in the meantime a common thing, there is only very little exceptions, but due to whale protection, the number of big whales and blue whales and the whale population in general just got… way, way, way better than what it used to be and what it looked like and way better than what got expected. And this is, to me, just an example if we really want to make things happen, if we are really willing in changing something and the transformation is then understood from the majority of people. If there even is a couple of people declining or still not believing in things, if the majority is following that path, we are able to make things happen and influencing in a positive way. And this is exactly what I would like to maybe use as a closing remark for myself.

Gael Duez (47:04)

I love it, especially because I go whale watching every year. That's the sort of ritual before going back to school because in Réunion Island, that's the perfect timing. But, I love it.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:17)

I didn't even know about that. You're well watching. at that. So without speaking about it upfront, I touched something which is close to you as well. I love that.

Gael Duez (47:24)

Excellent. Well, Thanks a lot, Rainer, for joining the show today. And I'm really looking forward to hearing you on stage at Green IO Munich. And thanks a lot for joining there as very happy.

Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:36)

Thank you very much, for having me. It was a great pleasure talking to you and looking forward seeing you soon.

Gaël Duez (47:41)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on our website, greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other responsible technologists is also a good idea to provide them with inspiration. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. 

In our next episode, we will welcome Anita Schuttler, a well-known IT sustainability expert involved in many NGOs to talk about the latest developments in green software engineering. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Munich was a huge success last week and the next one is in London on September 23rd and 24th. 

As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

Green IO New York, ICT4S, GreenForum Berlin, Green IO Munich, … Eventually responsible technologists have more an more places to meet, learn, share, and grow our community. A world of opportunities and … frustrations because many of us cannot attend all these great conferences. This is why, starting this month, we created a new section in our newsletter “Couldn’t attend?… we’ve got it covered for you” where members of the Green IO community share their main takeway of a conference. Let us know what do you think about the initiative, and feel free to reach out to us if you attend a conference and want to contribute.

Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences? 

To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed: 

And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Erica Pisani (00:01)

Think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other.

Gaël Duez (00:12)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

How is sustainably covered in main tech conferences? Sure, cybersecurity, DevOps and its DORA metrics or anything related to SRE is covered at length. Did I forget to mention AI? Not anymore. But what room is left for the environmental impact of our what are the main trends, which are filtered out from specialized conferences like Green IO or Ecocompute to non-specialized conferences, the big tech conferences. And to talk about it, I'm delighted today to have Erica Pisani with us. So Erica lives in Canada, Toronto, software engineer in a FinOps company. And when she doesn't work, she enjoys playing violin and working in the woods with her dog, which might give us hints on why she eventually managed to be the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. So I'm really glad to have you on the show Erica and that's going to be a great debrief that we're going to have.

Erica Pisani (01:42)

Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited to join Green IO.

Gael Duez (01:47)

You're more than welcome. So, Erica, how did you end up being the MC of the Performance and Sustainability Track at QCon London this year? And please share with us the long version where you explain how you started to get interested in IT sustainably in the first place and is there any, I don't know, maple syrup involved? Yeah, I know it's terrible cliche. Go for it.

Erica Pisani (02:07)

No, no, I do love maple syrup. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily part of the story. But I guess the longer story is I originally, so the punchline, guess here is I came to sustainability in software development through edge computing. And really I started looking at edge computing because I just didn't know what the heck it was. A couple of years ago, every like cloud provider from, and I was working at Netlify at the time, every cloud provider from Netlify to Versal and Cloudflare and like AWS that were going on and on about compute power being available at the edge, data being available at the edge. My coworkers were so excited about edge functions launching and I straight up had no idea what they were talking about. And for me, the best way for me to learn stuff is to try and learn it as if I was gonna teach it, which is that age old advice. So to motivate myself to learn about Edge, I ended up deciding on a whim to pitch a lightning talk of I'm gonna talk about the Edge and I'm gonna talk about why it's important and exciting for software developers. No sustainability component in it whatsoever. It was just I wanted to learn more about it. And fortunately it got picked up because it was this huge thing. And I got extremely lucky that through the great vine of conferences, my talk got the attention of a member of the programming committee at QCon in 2023. so I go to QCon London and I can't remember what the track was at the time, but there was a sustainability track there at the time and Sarah Bergman was speaking. And I remember going to see her talk and I'm sitting there and I can't remember the name of the talk exactly, but she's, talking about the different scopes and the stuff that you see in the building green software book. And as I'm sitting watching her talk about this, I realized that the edge that I'd been focusing on for so long could actually play a part in the sustainability, sustainable tech movement. And so I ended up completely overhauling my talk because I was just like, just want to focus on learning more about sustainability in tech and how this can tie in and we can leverage it in this really amazing way. And I got so excited that like for me, felt like one of those turning points in how I view my career where I wanted to start looking through how I build software through that lens a lot more seriously. And because I was so excited about this, another programming committee member maybe about a year later because she kept hearing me talk about, and we kept in touch just because we met at the conference, got along. and she's like, so we have another like sustainable track that's going to be a QCon. And at that time I had been doing a few different conferences and was kind of tapped out. I was, I needed a break. So she's like, you don't have to do it this year, but consider it maybe for next year. And so, you know, 2025 Qcon London is about to roll around and she asked again like would you be interested and I was like I'm recovered I am ready to go let's do this and so that's how I ended up hosting the track this year.

Gael Duez (05:26)

Excellent. That's really, really cool to kickstart with something you don't know and having this approach like I want to teach about it to make sure that I understand about it, which is I must admit a bit of my approach as well. Like I love ending up teaching pretty fast when I'm investigating a new field because that's the only way to actually put your brain is not always purely backed by science or research papers. So yeah, I got you on this one.

Erica Pisani (06:00)

Yeah, and I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes when I'm in a rush to solve a problem, I sometimes hand wave over things I don't understand and just keep going. And when you have when you force yourself to like, okay, someone's going to ask this question, you have to understand why it's behaving in this particular way. It's so much better in the long run, but it's definitely always tempting to skip when you're when you just want to get the shiny thing working.

Gael Duez (06:14)

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's especially true when you've got some momentum in the field, like in green IT or IT sustainability at the moment, where there are more and more. And that's the good news. There are more and more people getting involved, talking about it, posting about it. mean, my LinkedIn be read the entire, the eight hours nonstop with this sort of constant media production, we tend to forget about the longer form of thinking, which is reading a book or preparing a course. And that helps actually to structure much more the topics you're investigating rather than just, I've heard about him. I've heard about her. she read. She did something amazing. She said something amazing. But at the end, how do you connect all the dots is really missing. That's my feeling when I'm reading too much of my LinkedIn feed, which is, guess, the only social network that I'm still active in.

Erica Pisani (07:12)

Yeah, no, I understand. And even just like all the newsletters available out there too. It's very overwhelming.

Gael Duez (07:16)

Yeah, wow. Oops. And I play guilty for the green eye one, but it's a monthly only. It's a monthly only. I choose the rhythm for the reason.

Erica Pisani (07:24)

It's one of the few that's like gone through my, what's the word now, my frequent like just purges of my newsletter inbox. It's managed to stay the test of time.

Gael Duez (07:32)

Yeah. That's a good test. Erica, let's talk a bit about QCon this year in April it was. Were you also in charge of sourcing, finding the speakers?

Erica Pisani (07:51)

Yeah, I was asked to be a track host. So QCon London happened in end of March, beginning of April, and I had to start doing my like, my research and reaching out in September, October of 2024. so kind of had the themes, I could make of it what I would. And I was responsible for almost creating the story that I wanted to tell in the context of performance and sustainability through the speakers that I was selecting. There were some restrictions because budgetary reasons for conferences, like on geographies. And obviously, they're hosted in London. They want to see some folks that are based in that tech community. But otherwise, the conference was really great for track hosts like myself to find who we wanted and invite them in.

Gael Duez (08:42)

That's a pretty prestigious name. I guess when you reach out to someone, say, hey, would you consider talking to QCon and submitting a talk, usually the door doesn't slam on your face like, wow. Excellent. So that being said, what were the top trends you witnessed in green IT? within your

Erica Pisani (08:53)

I'm not gonna lie, it was very helpful to be able to say I was coming from CubeCon London.

Gael Duez (09:11)

Sustainability and performance track in QCon London, but also feel free to elaborate a bit on the bigger conference. It's just that I'm not 100 % sure that you had the time to actually enjoy the rest of the conference, so I don't want to push you out of your conference zone thinking, oh well, I read the program, but that's pretty much it.

Erica Pisani (09:29)

I know I honestly, I was very glad my track was the first day because after the first day I was zonked. I can't imagine doing two days of a conference and then having to host the track. I'll start with the general theme of, guess, the wider conference from what I was able to pick out. Obviously AI is the thing right now. A lot of people are talking about AI's impact on the tech world, on the wider world. There was...

Gael Duez (09:34)

Can you imagine? That's a different story.

Erica Pisani (09:55)

Someone who, if I remember correctly, was giving a keynote even just like on design and how design is kind of being impacted in positive and negative ways with AI. There was a significant number of talks that talked about AI and if it wasn't the main feature, it was at least touched on and referenced on how it was impacting the topic that was being discussed. But would say there was still a good variety of topics being spoken about at the conference. It wasn't so dominating that it was just like QCon have become an AI conference. was just it because it's playing such a large part in software right now and has been for a couple of years. is understandably taking a lot of space in people's minds and there's a lot of questions. And so there's a lot of speakers that are stepping to the plate to talk about how AI is affecting things in different ways.

Gael Duez (10:28)

Yeah, AI-con.

Erica Pisani (10:47)

In terms of the themes of the performance and sustainability track, one of the themes that I would say, so in terms of the talks that were selected, they covered different things in general. I want to kind of talk about how you advocate maybe for sustainability initiatives at a leadership level, because one of the common questions that would come up from audience members is how do you get buy-in from the wider organization? There's a lot of software developers who listen about, yes, this does matter. We know it's important, but we still have to tell business leaders something to be able to take the time to experiment with gathering metrics, understanding what metrics do we need to gather. ⁓ As Sarah has mentioned before, I think in one of your recent episodes for Green IO, sometimes it's not entirely precise and that can be difficult to get buy-in for if it's not like you have a hundred percent certainty that these metrics are going to give you a clear picture of, let's say the carbon emissions of your software stack. And so one theme was like, okay, how do you get, how at it as an organization leader or organizational leader, how do you get buy-in from the wider organization and start adopting more sustainability practices so that you can move in the direction that you want to move? Obviously I had an AI feature there, so had someone come and talk about how to develop AI in more resource constrained environments. AI most of the time is talking about developing big LLMs with massive amounts of data. And obviously it's well known about AI's energy consumption. So I wanted to have someone be able to speak to how do you make AI performant in a smaller scale, which means that it's more sustainable.

Gael Duez (12:15)

Yeah. Was the speaker, Okay?

Erica Pisani (12:30)

Jade Abbott. So she is the CTO of Lolata AI and she's based out of South Africa and as she talks, I know the talk isn't quite, it's not live to the public yet, but she talks a little bit about how South Africa has unique constraints environment-wise. Like you can't depend on constant running electricity to be running these big, or training these large language models ⁓ for let's say like, you know, two weeks straight. So it was a really interesting talk to hear how to build those things. And then local first software is not just within a sustainability perspective, but in general, it's becoming more interesting across the board because it's a very performant way to build software. ⁓ And so that was something that we were able to highlight in this track. And obviously Sarah was on the talk and talking about, or on the track and was talking about metrics and how to gather that information. That's also a question people often have is how do information to be able to take action on it because you can't act on something that you can't measure and move toward a better outcome.

Gael Duez (13:37)

Did she talk about the observability versus good old metrics debate?

Erica Pisani (13:42)

Yes, yes she did. Yes, a little bit. She got like a lot of great stuff in the 40 minutes that she had. ⁓ And I'm actually excited when the recordings come out to rewatch it again because obviously there's so much information you take in a conference.

Gael Duez (14:00)

So you mentioned the buy-in being one of the main topic. What would be the two, three, four main insights that you've got from these different talks? So Sarah's talk, ⁓ who else was actually talking about the buy-in, the C-level buy-in?

Erica Pisani (14:16)

Ludi. And I wanted Ludi's, yeah, because she had experienced decarbonizing tech stacks ⁓ at one of her companies whose name I forget at the moment.

Gael Duez (14:20)

Ludi, yeah, obviously Ludi, yeah. Loomi My daughter's got one so that's pretty easy. It's a story box.

Erica Pisani (14:33)

Okay. Thank you. Hahahaha! Okay. That's really cool. So yeah, that was like probably the largest theme. And from there, it's like how to have more sustainable AI, how to develop more sustainable software. those were, think that like the big themes that came out of that track and that there were often a lot of questions about.

Gael Duez (14:57)

Okay. So now I'm going back to my previous questions. How can we get some buy-in? What were the main insights shared by Ludy and Sarah and some other speakers? Do you recall some vivid examples of things to do or not to do, actually?

Erica Pisani (15:17)

Well in, in Sarah's talk, she, and I, I realize it's, ⁓ it can, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to do this, but be okay with accepting the use of proxy metrics that are perhaps not perfect. And I think even to ask business leaders to do this is obviously a bit of a, is a bit of a challenge or like organizational leaders is a bit of a challenge, but even as a, speaking as a software engineer to have to take metrics that I know are not completely accurate is a bit challenging even for me to sit with. I think she made a very good point that it's better to have at least something that's somewhat approximate and close to what we want, and at least be able to somewhat measure it and improve it over time than to be completely blind as to what the state of the software stack is in terms of our sustainability initiatives, if we have them, or if we have certain concrete ones in the organization. And for getting buy-in,

Gael Duez (16:01)

And measure the evolution.

Erica Pisani (16:14)

Ludie, think really accurately summed it up or one of her great points anyway, was that it is a business risk ⁓ to just gloss this over. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Data centers are not necessarily going to be safe from these massive, seemingly once in a generation storms that seem to be coming every year. And taking that seriously now, even starting to get in the mindset of we need to think about this. I think it's only a matter of time and I think there's some, can't necessarily quote the specific regulations and stuff like that, but governments are starting to make it a regulatory thing. so regulatory considerations are something every business pays attention to anyway. So if you're getting on the right foot now, it makes it far less painful in the future because this this is going to come.

Gael Duez (17:06)

Interesting this resiliency approach because it goes so much against our culture in the tech space at the moment which is like you know there is no limit sky is a limit which is actually true sky is limited it's called the greenhouse gas emissions in the sky is the the blood limit but that's a different yeah but that's a different that's a different issue

Erica Pisani (17:21)

The literal limit,

Gael Duez (17:31)

I think it's good that we have these talks and people speaking up on these and maybe rebounding on what happens around us. Like what happened in Spain and Portugal should be a wake-up call to pretty much everyone running a 24-7 infrastructure because suddenly you can have no electricity. For the moment, backup generator are available for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, But hey, for how long and what is the cost actually to running all of this?

Erica Pisani (18:00)

Yeah, and at least closer to home for me, we had some terrible wildfires over the past number of years. Wildfire season starts increasingly earlier and earlier every year. ⁓ And I think probably the most memorable thing that happened with that wildfire season was a few years ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada were blanketing New York, and it seemed like an eerie Mars-like situation. ⁓

Gael Duez (18:00)

It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was crazy. And not so fun fact, I use in quite a lot of my public talks now, the white fire in Canada to get some proportion from people and I'll ask them what is the size of the country that is equivalent to the burnt area from these white fires? And people that don't imagine, proper answer is Nepal. then when you put it like, you know, the Nepal map on the average European country or the average even US state, it's pretty big. Suddenly, you're like, oh my god, this is insane. But the problem is it's often pushed back as some ecological concern, And the connection with our tech world is not made that much. This is why all this water stress, for data centers, or energy stress becomes that much important. And you mentioned another trend that you nurtured in your track, was efficiency, software efficiency, running software with less energy. I guess Holly Commons talked about cloud zombies, were there other insights also? And what did she mention also?

Erica Pisani (19:30)

Yeah. So obviously the zombie server thing is a good one. ⁓ Another one being that if I think that I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but like efficiency is there's a limit to efficiency. There is a limit to how, and I think this is even worth noting in the sustainability context because we may take the idea that we may need to run fewer servers at a much higher degree of like utilization to help ensure that we reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we have. And there's a fine balance there where if you were to run servers maybe at too high of an efficiency, and the example that Holly had given was that of like a combustion engine, a car. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency that it has, but it's designed to run at far lower than that threshold because you don't want to wear the engine out. And similarly, that's something that we have to consider when we're trying to like resource capacity plan where we want to make sure we have enough servers to handle the amount of traffic, not as low as like, what was the quote that maybe like 12 to 18 percent of the capacity of a server's use that's obviously way too low. But we can't necessarily be at 90 to 100 percent because now we might be running the risk that our carbon emissions are related to the embodied carbon cost of having to replace our hardware frequently. And she also tied it back really well to just even like humans working way too hard all the time and needing to still take time to rest. And I think that's something that is important in a world like ours where we are trying to build more sustainable software in a world that is increasingly getting hotter. And it can sometimes feel like we need to work.

at 100 % all the time to get closer to that. But I Holly's talk in that it also reminds you to rest a little bit, take care of yourself because you can't be running at 100 % all the time.

Gael Duez (21:20)

Do we need all of this? And all of this that far and that fast. That's super interesting what you've mentioned because it connects with two dots. first of all, what Holy Mansion is really literally backed by science and researches such as I know that I'm quoting him a lot, but

Erica Pisani (21:35)

Yes.

Gael Duez (21:52)

Professor PS Lee in Singapore was like this big expert on water cooling and really study the impact on hardware of how you manage a data center in tropical area. He has provided me tons of feedback and that was one of his feedback. The hardware, it has some sort of a sweet spot for running operations. And even if it's not like the max capacity, sold by the hardware providers, actually, above a certain threshold, you're really as you say, you're significantly decreasing its lifespan. So obviously, increasing the emission via the embodied carbon, because you will have to replace sooner the gear. And so that was really connecting in my mind when you mentioned it.

Erica Pisani (22:39)

Yeah.

Gael Duez (22:41)

And it also connected to something else that we should be cautious about all this talk about how much energy we waste or how much server capacity we waste. know, in Green IO Singapore this year, we had this talk from, this AWS software engineer. He was showing this graph of how unused capacities on average you could find on a standard AWS server, And I think we should be very cautious about this theoretical number and it might be proven way lower in true operational condition. And back to the track itself, about?

Erica Pisani (23:27)

One of the, I think, things that was really exciting about the, like, just hosting the track too, is seeing, there seemed to be like this effect where as more people came to the different talks and people started hearing about the different topics that were in the track, there was increasingly higher amounts of people coming to the track as the day went on. And it seemed like a lot of folks...

Gael Duez (23:41)

Okay.

Erica Pisani (23:53)

We're really excited and really engaged. And I think that that's really encouraging to see that when folks are aware of the sustainability stuff that we can work on in tech that we have available to us, it seems like it's more we know what we want, we need to do, and we have some ideas of what we can do, and it's just a matter of executing on it. People are really excited to take that back to their organizations and start adopting it themselves. I know sometimes you see some talks where folks just don't know what to ask, but that's not what I saw at QCon. Everyone was super keen, which I love to see, and that made me really excited for my speakers as well, because I'm glad that they got to see just how excited people were about sustainable tech.

Gael Duez (24:44)

and having a lot of questions is always a very good sign for a speaker, that's for sure. And actually, it connects with a question I wanted to ask you, all this momentum and people showing up more and more over the day, because I was wondering, why did you choose to name your track Sustainably and Performance? And was it the only angle performance to attract devs attention? Was it like if you had mentioned only sustainly or green IT, was it not enough? What is your explanations for this choice?

Erica Pisani (25:21)

well, I have to admit, I didn't get to necessarily call the track that like it came in as performance and sustainability. I can make some tweaks to it, but for the most part, it was like, we have this idea that we would like this track to be this. do you feel comfortable playing together a track for this? And I think though, that it was well named because I think.

Gael Duez (25:25)

Okay. Okay.

Erica Pisani (25:43)

Like performance is something that a lot of software developers usually, that's often the stuff that they're running into in their day-to-day works and something that's very front of mind. They're dealing with like too slow of an application in this respect or ⁓ this database isn't responding well in this capacity. And so they're looking for solutions and ideas on how they can tackle the performance challenges that they maybe have and their organization, or they're anticipating that there will be challenges and want to know ahead of time. That being said, think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. And I thought I'd like, as I was building the track that angle I thought was very important to me because you the best of both worlds in this sense. You can look to build performance software and by looking to build performance software, you can work toward creating a more sustainable future with the tech that you're building. And I didn't want it to seem like you had to pick either or. There is a lot of opportunities for both. was also why I really doubled down on that title for the track.

Gael Duez (26:56)

Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, if this is a wording that would attract people, I think you made a really good choice to use it to make sure that your room is full and then they got exposed to great content. If the room is empty, mean, that's pointless to have like the most technical possible talk on sustainability in scope one and two and three and four and what not. I got your point.

Erica Pisani (27:18)

Yeah, but it is good even just to have a, almost like if you can envision the software that you ultimately have at the end of the day that happens to be sustainable and ultimately I want to see a sustainable future and so it's a little bit like I'm pulling that messaging in a bit. I think it makes it more real for people. It doesn't feel like an abstract theory.

Gael Duez (27:26)

I completely got it. I've got a question. I'm always curious about what is mentioned when people are talking about sustainability and planetary boundaries and the likes. Was it like mostly about carbon and energy or where other environmental impacts such as water, resource exhaustion, et cetera, et cetera, also mentioned?

Erica Pisani (28:02)

⁓ Water resources and stuff like that was mentioned in the talks themselves. Holly both called that out specifically in their talks. For the folks that were on the other side, the attendees, they tended to think more in terms of the energy.

Gael Duez (28:09)

Okay.

Erica Pisani (28:18)

Not to say that they weren't thinking also about the water usage and stuff like that, but I think usually when folks were asking questions, it was more like, want to reduce the energy consumption of my data center to reduce my emissions more than it's consuming X liters of water every day.

Gael Duez (28:34)

Which makes sense because this is their main proxy metrics to act like on day one. If you decide to migrate your cloud or even to do like carbon aware computing, it requires the DevOps and the Ops and sometimes the SysAdmin to be put in the loop and it's a longer game and QoCon being really focused on Dev and DevOps, starting with energy makes a lot of what you shared is very positive news because I remember that three years ago in main tech conference just talking about energy savings was really a Revolution and now if it goes beyond and some talks mention also water That's a very positive sign. Okay

Erica Pisani (29:16)

Yeah, and even those metrics, like we're getting better at tracking them, but Ludie called out in her talk, like it can be difficult to get really concrete measurements sometimes on that alone. And so if we're looking to gather more information on, let's say, water usage, that's going to be something that we'll have to advocate for with our cloud providers to start giving us more information in that respect as well.

Gael Duez (29:23)

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. makes lot of sense. Okay, so Erica, thanks a lot for the wrap-up of this five talks at QCon London. Can I ask you one last, maybe two last questions? What's next for you in the Sustainably Area, of course?

Erica Pisani (29:48)

Of course. There's a few different things I'd like to look at on the side for myself. I've had a few different ideas kicking in my head, partially inspired by some of the talks I'd seen at QCon and just from following other folks in the field. One of them being because I, in my role right now at the financial tech company, we use Django, which is like a framework that's been around for ages. And I can't remember who the person was on Blue Sky that kind of gave me this friendly nudge, but there was this whole discussion happening in a Django forum of people trying to figure out how to best measure like carbon emissions or energy usage of Django apps. And there wasn't necessarily some good consensus on it. And so that's something that I'm hoping to take a look at at some point with what free time I have. ⁓ And then otherwise I'm still just trying to learn from everyone else right now. And what I am learning and at least having some ideas about it and blogging about. So that's kind of what's next for me right now.

Gael Duez (30:41)

Okay, interesting sense. And you mentioned resources and stuff that you've learned. Would you like to share with the audience your main sources of information, except for QCon London, obviously, this year?

Erica Pisani (31:11)

Yeah, I really like following the folks at the Green Software Foundation. Sometimes I'll take a look at, they have working groups that are looking at like developing papers on let's say recently, I think they did a working group on AI and I'm just interested in seeing what they're thinking of in terms of developing more sustainable AI. I also like following, I don't know his last name, but his first name is Wilco and he's very active in. Yes. So he's someone that I follow and just like pay attention to as well as, yeah, and Sasha Luciani, even though I don't work in AI, I still love listening to, or not necessarily listening to, but what she writes, I tend to read as well. And then I listen to Green IO, which is also how I've been getting some of my information.

Gael Duez (31:43)

He's amazing. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks a lot for this. And maybe to close the podcast on our usual positive piece of news, would you like to share something? I know that you're based in North America, so it's not that easy at the moment, but would you like to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability or life in general? I don't know. ⁓

Erica Pisani (32:12)

Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned before, I got like really interested in edge computing. I like I've gone deep down that rival hole of understanding more about how people are investing it and how it's growing over the years. And I think something that's got me really excited, and that makes me like, I consider a wonderful piece of good news is that as more distributed computing, obviously distributed computing is a thing already, but as it gets more adopted in an edge computing sense, there's really cool opportunities for things like smaller edge data centers incorporated into maybe urban environments where the data centers can heat buildings. And by being able to be used in that way, we can actually significantly reduce carbon emissions of heating buildings, which is a major, major source of carbon emissions. And that, I don't know why I'm nerding out so much about that, but I think that's an amazing piece of news, especially being in a colder climate like Canada.

Gael Duez (33:13)

Yeah, I was about to say that in tropical area, that's kind of the opposite. what do you do with this extra heat? And, know, to bounce back on what you said, this edge computing and this CDN stuff and all of the likes is really something that I'm trying to investigate more and more because on one hand, yes, it can be the case at having, you know, less network to travel through, we can reduce somehow not the immediate environmental footprint of data because it has almost zero elasticity, but the would say midterm long term sizing of the overall network. it makes sense like to have computing capacity closer to the end user. But on the other end, if you look at how the world is decarbonizing, there are huge gaps. And I'm always wondering, if I'm going to try to take a North American example, but if I've got users based in Ohio, do I really want to do edge computing in Ohio far as I remember, the grid is pretty dirty there. Rather than hosting most of my server capacity in Quebec, where I think it's one of the lowest carbon electricity grid in North America. this trade-off, I think I've never seen any article, any research paper truly embracing it and trying to tackle it. So correct me if I'm wrong. And if any listener had some research paper, please send them my way. But yeah, that's a real challenge for me. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say because you're the edge expert. like, you know, talking about it, but I've got an expert. So I'm going to ask the question to the experts.

Erica Pisani (35:09)

No, don't worry. So the question is more like how to balance like having edge data centers, let's say in dirtier grids compared to just hosting in. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think I would also be very interested in this research paper should it exist. I think that is one of those things that it's gonna be one of those.

Gael Duez (35:22)

Hahaha

Erica Pisani (35:32)

Design architectural decisions because to your point, if I'm in North America and I, you know, being based in Toronto, I have this wonderful data center that is one of the greenest in the grid, not that like a four hour drive away from me. I would rather use that data center and test whether hosting stuff at the edge in Toronto makes from the reduction in the distance traveled of the request, does that make a meaningful difference to host that stuff here where we may need to be burning in the middle of winter fossil fuels to be able to supply the electricity grid? Or is it better to just rely entirely on the data center? I don't have necessarily a good concrete answer for that, but I think that there would, I would love to see there be tests done on that because depending on, I guess, the fossil fuel that's being used in that particular grid, there can be a very meaningful difference to hosting everything on the data center, not leveraging the edge, versus leveraging the edge heavily and getting the reduction in emissions from not having the request travel as far.

Gael Duez (36:41)

Agree. If you ever want to resume your studies and do a PhD, you've got a research topic. But anyway, well, thanks a lot, Erica. That was cool to do this wrap up episode about QCon. I wonder if the listeners will enjoy it as well. So please feel free to comment.

Erica Pisani (36:49)

Yeah, I have lots of material now. 

Gael Duez (37:06)

Because if so, we will do more. are other great tech conferences also that are focusing more and more on sustainability, but it was also great meeting you. I was not aware of how involved you were in the field, so I'm very glad that we connected now. So thanks a lot for joining the show.

Erica Pisani (37:21)

Thank you again so much for having me. This was a blast.

Gael Duez (37:25)

Low carbon blast. Talk to you soon, Erica.

Erica Pisani (37:27)

Low carbon blast, yes, always. You too, take care.

Gaël Duez (37:39)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech. Now, if you enjoy this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with fellow software practitioners seems also a good idea, if they couldn't attend QCon this year. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.

In our next episode, we will welcome Rainer Karcher, a pillar of the SustainableIT.org association and a climate activist in a suit, as he likes to describe himself. We will talk about the importance of not deprioritizing future readiness, which is what is the current backlash against ESG doing, and what IT and digital has to do with it. Stay tuned.

By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. New York was a blast last month and the next one is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP

Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

This episode is the second part of a long interview with Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As presented in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! 

In this second part, Gaël Duez and Laetitia Bornes moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode however we would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. Among the topics covered in this second part are: 

And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Green IO listeners can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Laetitia Bornes (00:01)

The problem is when you put a model that has been made for a given purpose in the hands of someone who doesn't know who doesn't want to recognize its scope and who therefore uses it outside of its field of validity.

Gaël Duez (00:18)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favourite podcast platform and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.

This is the second part of my long episode with Letitia Born, a doctor in human-computer interaction, systems engineering and systemic design, who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second-hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As we saw in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for designers and nuanced, with potential applications for the entire digital industry regarding how we assess its potential footprint and handprint, that is the positive impact it brings on our planet and our societies. In this second part, we moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and system thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode. However, I would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. So Laetitia, when we were discussing how you model the vintage use case and all the results that came along, I had like a ton of question about what are the limit to modeling? What are these assumptions that you built your research paper on, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's a great opportunity to have a trained researcher, a doctor now on the show to discuss a bit about not the vintage use case itself, but how we actually can do systems thinking in a proper scientific manner. And maybe it's a bit provocative here. My first question about it is, because we know that there is limit to model everywhere, where are you unhappy with the way you model the vintage use case? Whether it's a boundary that you would have changed, some proxy data, which you would have preferred having primary data instead, or it's assumption that you couldn't really double check or shortcuts that you had to take. It's just a sort of transparency exercise that, it's not because you've got a published research paper that everything is flawless and that you didn't have actually to put limitations to the scope of what you wanted to investigate.

Laetitia Bornes (03:43)

Yeah, So I would say that ⁓ I regret that my model focuses mainly on carbon emissions and not on the other impacts, apart from the loss of income from charities. But this is linked to the fact that I drew on the value study, which focused on avoided emissions in carbon equivalent. I've also made a big shortcut by displaying the number of sales per month to assess the economic viability of a scenario. Because if you change the business model in an intervention scenario, instance, by to a subscription then the economic viability would no longer depend on the number of sales with delivery, but on the number of users. It's not really complicated to change in the model in reality. It's just that I've never taken the time to do it. also, I must admit that the system that calculates the sales per month is quite basic and not really realistic. But all of this is not really a problem for the purpose of my modeling, which was only to demonstrate the sensitivity of assumptions and the fact that very different results can be obtained on the basis of the same study if we include other indirect effects. I wanted also to demonstrate the value of transparent and dynamic modeling and of comparing interventions to strategies. So I did it with the help of the that participated to my workshops. ⁓ And yeah, so I wanted to carry out a formative evaluation of magnitude, my modeling tool with professional designers that I ⁓ could do so as well. it depends on the purpose of your modeling. In my case, the way I use modeling is really not, let's say, rigorous, ⁓ even if it's shocking, because the aim is to predict precisely something. So yeah, in my case, it was to demonstrate some things. If I would have done it for Vinted in a real we would have made it more rigorous, for sure. Yes.

Gael Duez (06:09)

That was the exact question that I wanted to ask to bounce back on what you said, because thanks a lot for this transparency exercise, but also to remind people that we model things in a certain way to achieve certain goals. And your goal was not to provide Vinted a better model to assess their claims on avoided emissions. And that being said, as you just mentioned, what would what have done differently if the model had a different objective which is providing to Vinted a more accurate or a more nuanced way to assess their avoided emission? Could you just share maybe two or three examples? Obviously, you're not going to write a new research paper live on the show. I mean, you can do so if you want.

Laetitia Bornes (06:54)

Okay. It's difficult to anticipate the things that we want to include in the model rely on the methodology. So before doing the methodology the actual people from Vinted, it's difficult to anticipate. But I think if I had all the time and resources that I want, I would have more investigated. The way people use the money they earn from sales and the impact of Vinted on the fact that people renew their word more frequently. So can we quantify how many users buy more items because they can sell it on Vinted? That's something that I would definitely investigate and yeah, have a better idea of what people do with the money they are from but it's anyway you can do a new survey you will still have a lot of uncertainties and something that is not in the model but in my software and that is definitely lacking is a way of visualizing the quantitative uncertainties so you have uncertainties that you can't quantify but you have some uncertainty that you can quantify. And for the moment, my software doesn't help with So for the moment, get a range of uncertainty, you'll have to do for each context two scenarios, one optimistic with every parameter at an optimistic value and one pessimistic. And then you say, OK, I'm between those two values or graphs. to conclude, I said that it would depend on the whole methodology that I would conduct but those were the main things that I would like to investigate personally.

Gael Duez (08:49)

Okay, so the level of uncertainty with as well as the direct connection between the sales and the amount of opportunistic buy. Am I right to say or am I missing some other items here?

Laetitia Bornes (09:09)

Yeah, the rate of sale and the way people renew their wardrobe and also the way they spend their money on from sales.

Gael Duez (09:19)

And actually, the third point was actually the way they spend it. And you beautifully explained it previously with a significant share, which is not quantified in this research paper, but that you could assess is that it is spent on fast fashion items. So it's actually not helping the planet that

Laetitia Bornes (09:43)

Yeah.

Gael Duez (09:45)

So, you know, while you were explaining in a very transparent way, all the limits and all the choices you made for your research paper I had this sentence bouncing back in my head. I think it's from a British statistician, George Epibox. All models are wrong some are useful. And I had this sentence a lot in my mind also when we were preparing this episode. And I wanted to ask you how wrong was your Vinton model and was it still useful? But I think you already perfectly answered this question. But I had another question related to it because this sentence, all models are wrong, some are useful, is sometimes used in the wrong way to, for instance, push back against IPCC models defend other models which would question anthropic climate change. So to broaden a bit our perspective, I'd like to ask you this question. Why should we consider with more scientific robustness the modeling exercises done by the IPCC than the one done by a climate denier who holds a PhD in physics, let's say, or even a Nobel Prize, as in the case of the Dr. John Closer, And another way to put my question is, can you give us a scientific methodology, one-on-one courses in two minutes?

Laetitia Bornes (11:20)

So first about the quotation. Actually, I included it in my thesis So that's funny that you mention it. And in its long version, it says in fact, all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So the question you need to ask is not, is the model true?

Gael Duez (11:31)

Excellent.

Laetitia Bornes (11:43)

Because it never is, but is the model good enough for this particular application? And in fact, this quote is absolutely not a criticism of models in general, but rather a way of saying that models should not be taken out of context. So the problem is when you put a model that has been made for a given purpose in the hands of someone who doesn't know who doesn't want to recognize its scope and who therefore uses it outside of its field of validity. So it's also important to understand that there are many, many different kinds of use for models. for instance, in my case, and it can be also the case if we have a look at models that are used by IPCC, ⁓ you have some models that are predictive models. So they seek to represent reality as closely as possible and to predict the future, which is possible if we are in a linear situation or if we know perfectly the mechanisms of evolution. So that's the case for weather forecasts, for instance, you have always a kind of uncertainty. And then you have exploratory and prospective models which seek to facilitate a reflection in the what-if logic. So we wonder what might happen on the basis of different sets of hypotheses which we consider to be likely or to be extreme and so on. So that's the way I use models for instance. So to come back to the question about the IPCC, there are different things. So the IPCC produces or rather evaluates and shares that are based on different sets of assumptions as a basis for reflection and political decision making. So these are what-if scenarios and they are exploratory. is kind of predictive of a situation assuming a set of hypotheses and they are perfectly legitimate within this scope. if we accept the So for instance, regarding the anthropogenic nature of climate change, there is exploratory about it. statement is actually unquestionable because despite the huge number of researchers and increasingly accurate climate models, no model has ever been able to explain the observed climate change without including human activities in the hypothesis. So… a proof of the anthropogenic nature of climate change. And I'm not necessarily able to go into more detail about it, I recently read a book by Pablo Jensen is called Your Life in Numbers, Modeling Society for Data. So this is the version in English, but in French, it's totally different. I think it's literally why we can't put our society into equations, something like And yeah, he is really good about explaining the different kinds of models and how the weather forecast model has become so accurate and why the anthropogenic nature of climate change has been proved.

Gael Duez (15:19)

That's interesting what you mentioned because you say no model has ever been able to prove that the climate change has not a massive part of a human made, causality. However, we can find models of people and sometimes people with some degree in physics. We've got even, as I mentioned, the case of one Nobel Prize, not experts in climate, but that's a different question, but still a Nobel Prize, who would push a model saying that anthropogenic nature of climate change is not assessed. So I guess modeling is just the first part of the story. What makes a model the model or the source of truth at a certain point of time in history? Because science is always evolving. And what makes you so sure now, thanks to the IPCC work, for instance, that you say that it is an absolute truth that climate change is human made? And I know that I'm playing the devil advocates here, all the listeners in you, you know about it, but it's me playing a bit dumb saying, but I see other model and they're written by people who seem to be pretty clever. So which model shall I trust? Because you know, all models are wrong and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. So what would you say to these people and how would you debunk this partial approach to what is modeling and what is science?

Laetitia Bornes (16:53)

Yes, so the problem is that unfortunately there are, as you said, some people who sound very serious but who use their influence to say things that are completely outside their field of competence. So it's a bit like getting a model to say something that is outside its field of validity. It's quite the same thing. So for example, although I'm a doctor, I don't have any legitimacy to talk about quantum physics. And if I did, I shouldn't be given any more credits than a bricklayer or a baker or whatever. what ensures the validity of science is the research system, although it has many flaws that we clearly don't have the time to go into here, I think. It is organized to verify the knowledge produced. So when an article is published in a serious journal or conference, it has been reviewed by several researchers anonymously who have judged it to be solid and well-funded. And even if a questionable article has managed to be published, then the scientific community can intervene to have it withdrawn. A scientist should only speak publicly about his field of research and particularly about his published research work, because the science is by the publishing system. So you can do ⁓ whatever model if you don't publish it. And if you made the assumption and the hypothesis behind this model in your lab alone, with nobody to check it, it's not science. And in the case of IPCC reports, there is a new assessment of the published literature. So this literature has already been assessed and published. And then the people from the research of IPCC, there is a consensus building in the relevance research community. So it's really difficult to get something much more solid than the reports produced by IPCC.

Gael Duez (19:05)

I think that was our one-on-one crash course on scientific methods. Thanks a lot for reminding this to us. Going back now to the question of a model and systems thinking, I promise I will stop grilling you and you can go back to your normal life because otherwise this episode will last for four hours and we don't want to do this. But to prepare our episode, and to be honest, also to use it in my new Green IT course, I reread Thinking in Systems, the Seminole, Donnellas, Meadows book. And it connects a lot what you explained previously, starting with the importance of system boundaries and using the model for answering the right question and not trying to use the model to answer all questions and really fit for purpose, I would say. However, there's something that really puzzles me in her book, which is an emphasis on free information and short feedback loop. And she sees it really as the number one tool to influence the system, mostly for positive outcomes. And today we have access to all the information about climate change, resource exhaustion, etc. And it seems that our willingness to act for the greater good of the entire planet Earth system, or would say our capacity to embrace complexity is actually reducing. And I was wondering, and that's super incredibly pretentious to just state it, but did she miss something? Or much more likely, is it me who's missing several things? Like, is it a case of bounded rationality, especially our biases, a bit like you explained with the researchers out of their scope of knowledge, I would say, or the information flow being crippled by the frequency and quantity of inflows in our digital world, or information being too manipulated. But I really wanted to get your feedback. And I know it's really like pure systems thinking theory about the importance of information to enhance a system and why she puts so much emphasis on it and why it doesn't seem to work despite having such a great access to information today. You've got a lot of time to answer this question.

Laetitia Bornes (21:36)

Perfect. So first, thank you for mentioning Danila Meadow's work and the levels for intervention that she worked on. So I obviously rely on Danila Meadow's work and on her identification of levels for intervention. I just don't use the 12 leverage points which seems to me to be too detailed and too complicated to explain to people. But I rather work with the four main categories ⁓ of leverage points. So the fourth one would be acting on the constants and the parameters of the system. The third one would be acting on the feedback loops and delays. The second one would be modifying information flows, as you mentioned, and changing system rules. And the first one would be changing the goals of the system and maybe altering the underlying So as I understand it, these levels should be ideally combined because they are moving from the fourth category to the first one, levers are from the fourth category, are quicker or easier to mobilize, but more effective just in the short term. And the first category of levers longer and longer to mobilize, but they are increasingly powerful in truly transforming a system over the long term. So you might want to combine them and not to act only on the long term ones. unfortunately, as we mentioned, providing information is not always enough, especially when it remains abstract. 

Gael Duez (23:32)

Environment, you mean by abstract?

Laetitia Bornes (23:34)

Yeah, because you know about the climate change, you know about the impacts of what you buy, not always in fact actually. So have the information in our world society, we have it partially, but anyway we have a lot of information about climate change and environmental impacts and so on. But it remains abstract because it's figures or because it's events that are not always we are actually living. So you have some people that are quite shocked because they knew a landscape and this landscape changed affected by climate change.

Gael Duez (24:13)

Like the glaciers or things. Like this.

Laetitia Bornes (24:16)

Yes, so I think that if the social environmental impacts of a certain type of conception or a certain type of actions were to be felt immediately and in a very tangible concrete way by the people at the very point of the this would mean that we would somehow act on the delay of the propagation of information. And I would say on the intensity of the information or the way it is felt. I think that this would change things radically. And above all, from what I have understood, beyond information, you have this profound paradigm shift. And this paradigm I think that the way that the information remains abstract is kind of a barrier between this information and the paradigm shift that we need. So when I say paradigm shift, it's what's acceptable in our society, we value, when we make decisions and so on. So yeah, I think we have information, but it remains partial to just some people and this information in an abstract form. I'd like to say that it's not a problem to question the work of Donela Medos because actually she didn't hide the fact that she identified those categories of leverages intuitively and that further research was needed on this subject. There were not a lot of research afterwards. And in fact, a researcher called Ryan Murphy, so he's a systemic designer. He has published a year ago or maybe two years ago, an article on this subject, which explains this very well and which invites the scientific community to continue research into the categories of leverage. So yeah, that's supposed to be a work in progress, but people use it as a recipient. I think it's really useful for thinking about possible intervention. And for instance, I used it in my case study, for instance, in Vinted. As I said, there are different levels of intervention. And I gave these four categories to my designers, my participants, so that they can think of different kind of interventions. for instance, about information, they would informing the users about the environmental cost of a clothes, of an item. Or system rules would be banning certain ⁓ brands of fast fashion from the platform. But then if you move to the paradigm shift, there would have other ideas like enabling closing exchange or promoting clothing repair and customization. So you know you can have a strategy that would combine these different kinds of approaches and of levels.

Gael Duez (27:24)

So that is so much interesting. And I could go on and on and on and asking you tons of other questions. thanks for the honest answer that it's still working progress. It really had this feeling and that was just a feeling thought pretty much worthless that she comes from a generation where internet was not invented and she lived long enough to say it's wide adoption, but sharing information was key and they lived on this assumption. Like you just share information and that's it. And now with all the elaborate answers that you provided like here, but there is information and information there is abstract information and comprehensible information. There is information in how people are ready to receive it because of all these values and all the, as you mentioned, the potential paradigm shift that will be required to people to actually accept this information or accept to do something with this information and so on and so on. So I'm parroting what you say. So I'm going to stop here, but really I think this work in progress approach that you mentioned is super important because it's not information for the sake of information and we will share obviously the link to Murphy's article. Now, if you indulge me one last question before the usual closing questions. It will be also related obviously to systems thinking. And I was wondering also rereading this book, is systems thinking compatible with the way our societies work now? And by this, mean, I'm especially concerned with this crazy focus on short term that we have. can, for instance, see it with listed companies having to display quarterly revenues and so on. And even more like physiologically speaking, the chase for this immediate shot of dopamine that is provided a lot by our digital platforms. I was really like my fist in thinking is somehow the quest for some sort of long-term understanding of things and is our species, at minimum is our society and especially our Western world still compatible with this sort of long-term thinking? And once again it's a question I guess you can take several days to answer but I just love to get your immediate reaction on it and I promise after that we're done because otherwise you will stay with us for days.

Laetitia Bornes (30:06)

So I think that systems thinking is not only compatible with the way our societies work, but it's essential more than ever because we are in an increasingly complex inter-twin set of social-technical systems. So yeah, I think it's more necessary than ever because otherwise we can't understand the systems we are evolving in. Regarding the short term and ⁓ shoot-up dopamine things, think certain thinking should be maybe, yeah, it requires some time. ⁓ It's not as immediate as other stuff. So it has to be explained. Maybe we have to prove its efficiency on the long term to make people accept it. But I think there is a lot to do in the education system. And without exactly mentioning it, there is a really nice book about that that is wrote by Sean, and that is called The Reflective Practitioner. And he explains how we have specialized education in silos and why it's not relevant to the complexity of real world. So that's, I think, a good reference to mention here. So I think maybe it should come from education. I don't know exactly how, but I think that it's necessary more than ever and that in all sectors. So I think it's essential to use system thinking to debunk or at least reframe false good ideas of innovation. If you look at AI with a systemic perspective, the claim benefits the adults on the floor long. So yeah.

Gael Duez (32:11)

You see things in a very different way when you embrace systems thinking. That's for sure. And actually, and that's going to be a smooth transition. For people interested in system thinking and being sort of beginners or just like amateur, I would say, besides Donnela Amido's book, would you have one or two resources that you would like to share with them so that they could sort of ramp up their knowledge in this field?

Laetitia Bornes (32:41)

Yes, sure. So ⁓ if we hold the first generation of systems thinking, which is more about modeling, I would recommend definitely Limits to Growth, which is also written by Danila Meadows and her husband and other folks. I also would Business Dynamics written by Sterman. And the more recent book by Smaldino, which is called Modeling Social Behavior, Mathematical and Agent-Based Model of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolutions. So that's for the of systems thinking, but there are many branches of systems thinking. And I would also definitely recommend Checkland, Senge, and Michael Jackson, which is a system thinker and not a music artist.

Gael Duez (33:40)

And as usual, we will share all these references in the show notes. So it will be super easy for people to double check these books, all these articles. Maybe just for people already quite literate in systems thinking. mean, what is the latest cool stuff in the research field? Beside your work.

Laetitia Bornes (34:01)

I don't know if it's the latest cool stuff, I think that if you're already familiar with systems thinking, should follow conference called Relating Systems Thinking and Design. So I'm making an advertisement for systemic design, which I think is really useful and interesting and I think it's definitely worth following the work of Ryan Murphy, whom I mentioned earlier, because he a lot of really interesting stuff.

Gael Duez (34:36)

Okay, excellent. Thanks a lot. That's going to be a lot to digest for the readers. Maybe, and that will be my final and usual question, we shared a lot. was both very hands on with this Vinted case and very theoretical. And that's good sometimes to tool up with theories and models to be able to embrace the complexity of the world. But just to finish on a more optimistic note, would you share a piece of good news regarding sustainability, with the listeners.

Laetitia Bornes (35:07)

So it can be maybe related to systemic design, but what interests me a lot at the moment is the concept of protopia. I think that we have a lack of future perspective and that's a real problem. And usually in future scenarios,  we used utopias and dystopias, which are extreme future scenarios. So they are provocative, they are thought provoking, but they don't bring us together or they don't prepare us for the future. They don't open up any perspective, because they are so extreme and protopia is somewhere in between. And it's a way of imagining more plausible and desirable futures and I think that it's something that we need or or personally that I need so recently I've read a book called the Ministry for the Future written by Robinson and I think that we need more of these kind of books because it gives actually a perspective on what could really happen in the future without necessarily. Let's say, caricaturing things to the extreme. even if it's not a perfect perspective, that gives us some perspective.

Gael Duez (36:30)

I love the book that I didn't find the time to finish, to be honest, but I love the concept and I love this concept of protopia. I've never heard of it, but I was very aware of the pushback reactions that often come with either utopia or dystopia, with people saying, well, it's not plausible, as you've mentioned. Thanks a lot. Love the word. And thanks a lot for joining for this super long double episodes. I really do hope that listeners will at least pick one of the many resources that you shared with us to embrace a bit more system thinking systemic design and so on. Thanks a lot Laetitia and once again it was great to have you on the show, was great to have you on stage not technically speaking but represented by David at Green IO of Paris and I hope that we will meet again either in a conference another episode.

Laetitia Bornes (37:32)

Thank you very much for inviting me. Really, I really appreciated this discussion. So yeah, thank you.

Gael Duez (37:39)

You're welcome. Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other responsible technologists seems also a good idea to provide them with tools and resources about modeling and systems thinking. You've got the point, being an independent media. We rely mostly on you to spread the word to more environmentally aware peers. In our next episode, we will meet Erika Pisani, a seasoned software engineer, to debrief the last QCon edition from a Green IT perspective. Erika was indeed the MC of the sustainability track of this prestigious conference. Stay tuned. One last thing. Visit greenio.tech to check the next conferences we organise. New York was a blast two weeks ago and Munich is in five weeks with almost all the speakers already disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.

Dr Laetita Bornes conducted research on Vinted claims, investigating its data sources and the methodology used with her colleague David Ekchazer. Their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! Among the ones she share with Gaël Duez in this first part of the episode were: 

And because this conversation was so rich that it couldn’t be reduced to a one hour discussion, this episode comes in 2 parts, the first one focusing on the Vinted use case and the second one where we discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Green IO listeners can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Laetitia Bornes (00:00)

We shouldn't reduce this complexity to a single figure. I don't think we should stop a second hand platform at all, but I think we should rethink the way they are designed, service design, the platform design, the business model design, so that we improve the carbon emissions or maybe other social environmental

Gael Duez (00:26)

A lot of phones raised in the air at Green IO of Paris last year when her colleague, David Ekchazer shared their findings on stage. Not sure it was good for the people's individual footprint, but a clear signal of the interest of the participants for the topic of avoided emissions and how to assess the true impact of tech for good companies. And it was indeed big numbers which were discussed there, with Vinted, the second-hand marketplace at Behemoth now in the circular economy field, claiming they avoided 680 kilotons of CO2 equivalent thanks to their operation. It's not the only company doing so. Backmarket, another platform specialized in second-hand electronic goods, assessed the greenhouse gas emissions saved thanks to its operation to have reached accumulated 1 million tonne of CO2 equivalent in 2023. A CTO was in a Green IO podcast earlier this year and she made no mystery that these statements and their overall mission is a massive asset for employee engagement and retention, both PhD students, decided to apply the latest research in systemic modeling to investigate these claims and their findings were surprising and enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced. Yes, it's still possible to have a calm discussion about a complex topic these days.

Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Laetitia, the co-author of this paper, who couldn't be on stage at Green IO Paris because she was finalizing her thesis defense before completing her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design in Toulouse, France, Laetitia worked for five years as a UX designer. Her research has resulted in the development of a methodology and tools to enable designers and decision makers to address the complexity of sustainability with a particular focus on the indirect effects of digital technologies. Specifically, she has developed Rebound Archetypes, a workshop and a card game for anticipating and mitigating rebound effects, and Magnitude, a software for the consequential modeling of direct and indirect effects to inform environmental decision-making. So, welcome on the show, Laetitia, and congrats for your graduation. Shall I call you Dr. Borne now?

Laetitia Bornes (03:02)

Thank you very much for your invitation. And yes, you can call me that since last December, but really you don't have to. You can call me Laetitia.

Gael Duez (03:13)

Okay, so let's stick to Laetitia. A bit of context first about these IT companies positioning themselves as tech for good companies. And honestly, from an outsider perspective, it seems pretty obvious that they do. So the companies enabling or accelerating the circular economy seem to be part of the good guys in our fight to make our economic system, would say, compatible with the respect of the planetary boundaries for sustainable human life on Earth. Here the struggle seems to quantify this positive impact, this handprint, the opposite of a footprint, which has gained some popularity since the 90s. Vinted tried it and you somehow debunked or maybe shall I say fine-tuned its claim. Could you explain to us why you conducted this study and its main findings?

Laetitia Bornes (04:09)

Yes, of course. So that's a big question. So I will try to answer gradually and you can interrupt me if it's too long. So first of all, I would like just to add some nuance to the presentation of Vinted as a tech for good company. ⁓ That wasn't the original goal, in fact, of Vinted. So it was more about someone moving house and wanting to get rid of their clothes. So I don't know their intention now. in fact, wasn't ⁓ neither the communication until relatively recently, the slogan was, if you don't wear it, sell it. So it's more about making money. And in the case of Vinted, there are some clues in the design of the service and the platform itself that show that the primary goal is more profit. For example, the lack of any possibility to sort or filter by distance the results. It's because Vinted taxes transactions with delivery and therefore they have no interest in users meeting to do the transaction in which is in fact totally contradictory to reducing the environmental impacts. So I don't want to put Vinted on the trial now. And I can't speak for the other tech for good companies. And also, I want to insist on the fact that it doesn't mean that they can't have actually a positive impact in the end. And they can still bring their strategy in line with their communication.

Gael Duez (05:46)

Just to bounce back on what you say, that's for true that I put BackMarket and Vinted in the same bucket in my introduction. And BackMarket, right from the start, they wanted to be B Corp and they positioned themselves from a very clear environmental perspective and being part of this sort of tech for good movement. And actually you're right to correct me because Vinted… It was not the original positioning. It doesn't mean that they don't do good things, but then as far as I know, not a B Corp or they didn't chase any take for good label or things like that. thanks for bringing this precision on my introduction, much appreciated. But please, okay. So your findings now, what did you find and how it can help other decision makers and people working in the tech for good environment to have a nuanced approach on how much good and how much avoided emissions they can claim.

Laetitia Bornes (06:40)

Yeah, so first why we decided to do this study. So for my part, my objective was that I needed a case study to show designers the importance of rebound and indirect effects in concrete terms. So we have a specific case study and how design can be used to address those rebound effects. I don't know if I have to define rebound effects here.

Gael Duez (07:08)

I was about to ask you to define rebound effect to make sure that everyone is on the same page. I'm pretty sure that a lot of listeners are familiar with the concept, but it's not that an easy concept to apprehend. yeah, feel please free to so.

Laetitia Bornes (07:10)

Hahaha. Okay, let's say that the first observation of ⁓ rebound effect mechanism was called the Jevons paradox after the man who discovered it and concerned the coal train. So the introduction of a new, more efficient steam engine technology did not reduce the overall coal consumption and actually it increased it. And in fact, this mechanism is that the improvement in efficiency meant that less coal was needed per kilometer. So the cost of this transport per kilometer was reduced, making it more accessible to more people, increasing the overall consumption. So this is really the first definition of rebound effect. And in this case, it's the most serious case known as backfire the rebound effects is more important than the initial gains. But sometimes the rebound effects will just simply reduce the initial gains without exceeding them. depending on the community's concern, the term rebound effect is used to describe more and sometimes more complex mechanisms. So maybe we'll go back to this concept with some examples, but you can have not only the rebounds, but also the time rebounds, the skill rebounds. So if you make to people that wouldn't access it because of skills, for example, the driving license, if you have autonomous cars and you can take a car without a driving license, then we would call it a skill rebounds.

Gael Duez (09:11)

this skill rebound, is the rise of all this software as a service solution a good example as well. let's take the example of podcasting. mean, 20 years ago, recording, editing and broadcasting an audio show was truly for professional. Now I can do it, and I'm not a trained engineer in audio So would you consider also the software as a service solutions that are mushrooming all over our digital world as a good example for skill rebound effect?

Laetitia Bornes (09:49)

I guess actually it's a perfect example of skill rebound. Yes.

Gael Duez (09:55)

Okay, and so I've got a good grade. I'm happy with it. And the two other rebound effects that you've described, they were the time rebound effect and the economic rebound effect. Could you share maybe an example for each of these?

Laetitia Bornes (10:11)

Yes, economic rebound effect is the one I illustrated with the coal train. So something is more efficient, it gets less expensive, so you can use it more intensively or maybe more people can use it. Then the time rebound will be ⁓ if, for example, before when you had to mail to send a mail to someone, it was much longer because you had to write it on a paper, you had to go to the post station, and you had to send physically. Now you can send an more quickly. guess what? You are sending probably much more email than you would send a postal mail. So that's also a ⁓ time rebound.

Gael Duez (10:55)

Yeah. Okay, got it. and if I try to keep on having good grades with you, professor, I mean, you're not a professor yet, but maybe you want to consider an academic career, but you're a doctor. So let's go for doctor. I think one very good example of the economic rebound effect in the IT sector is obviously the rise of public cloud services with much, much, much cheaper access to computing and storage facilities than it was the case before. And a lot of people accessing servers by literally just snapping fingers while before it was really expensive. Is it good example of this economic rebound effect?

Laetitia Bornes (11:37)

Yes, yes, it's a good example as well. mean, you got it. There are a lot of rebound effects in digital technologies. And I didn't mention, but for example, for the time rebounds, you've got Gen AI. So all the things that you can do in less time, thanks to AI, you will probably do it more intensively or do other stuff that is carbon intensive with the time that you have freed. So

Gael Duez (11:48)

Okay.

Laetitia Bornes (12:07)

There's a lot of rebound effects in digital technologies, but in mind that rebound effects is just a concept. It's something to mentally understand some phenomenon. It's a bit fictional because you have to real scenario with a fictional scenario where a given technology wouldn't exist. So when I compare the postal mailing with email. Maybe it's a bit far in the past, you So it depends to what is your reference scenario. But yeah, in digital technology, you have a lot of rebound effects.

Gael Duez (12:35)

That's a very important point that measuring a rebound effect simply doesn't exist. We assess a rebound effect based on different models, based on different methodologies, I guess, and using different scenario, and we compare two scenarios or several scenarios together to say, okay, if that didn't happen, all things equal then we might consider that we had this rebound effect. So it's bit of a theoretical, albeit very insightful exercise. Am I right?

Laetitia Bornes (13:21)

Yes, absolutely. That's it. Yeah, you can't measure it precisely. You can just like, yeah, assess it. Exactly.

Gael Duez (13:29)

Okay, so thanks a for all this precision on rebound effect and how they are conceptualized. it's very enlightening. Can we go back now to your main study, which is Vinted, and what were the main results and how did you build these results and these assessments and these modelizations as we just discussed?

Laetitia Bornes (13:51)

Yeah, sure. So maybe a last word about the why. I wanted to have a concrete example about rebound effects and how design can intervene in the face of those rebound effects. And then I met David at a conference during the workshop on the assessment of indirect effects using specific methodologies, as you said that we called back in time, avoided emission methods. And we were both concerned about the potential limitations of these methods. David wanted to work on a consequential cycle analysis example. So we chose to work on vintage because it's a case study that illustrates many complex rebound and indirect effects as it's often the case, fact, in circular economy-based solutions. And because we had access to the results of a huge consequential study conducted by Valu on the vintage case based on a solid survey with over respondents, and which was very well documented, actually. So that's why we chose this case study. And regarding the main results of the study, there were two aspects. So first, the limitations of avoided emissions calculation methods that we identified. And then the opportunities that we identified in systemic approaches to answer to those limitations.

Gael Duez (15:30)

There is so much to unpack here, but let me pause just for a second and ask you for clarification's sake, what is a consequential life cycle assessment?

Laetitia Bornes (15:43)

Yeah, sure. as opposed to an attributional life cycle assessment, the consequential approach seeks to understand not only the direct effects, but also the indirect effects. And for that, we're going to compare two scenarios. One scenario is the real scenario where Vinted exists. And the other scenario is a fictional scenario, as I said, where Vinted doesn't exist. And to build fictional scenario, we rely on the answers of a survey. here, the survey that was conducted by Vyu, in this survey, they asked people, especially to buyers, what would you have done if Vinted didn't exist? So would you have bought the same item brand new elsewhere? Would you have bought the same item but secondhand as well in another platform like Le Bon Coin or at a charity? Or would you have bought it at all because this was impulsive buying and you were just scrolling the platform and saving for they asked if the seller would have ⁓ sold the item Vinted did exist or if they would it away or thrown it away, for instance. So then you can assess the impacts of each scenario. And when the impacts of the scenario where Vinted exists is lower, you can talk about avoided emissions.

Gael Duez (17:22)

Okay, got I would love and I think we will go back to this methodology, the potential methodology bias and all the complexity, I guess, with administrating 300,000 people questionnaire and all the analysis, the different analysis that can be done with the answers. But just to sort of go straight to the results you mentioned that you've seen some opportunities and some issues as well with the, I would say, traditional claim that they avoided several hundreds of kilotons of CO2. Could you tell us what are those limitations and what are these opportunities that you've spotted?

Laetitia Bornes (18:08)

Yeah, sure. So in the calculation methods, they ignored some indirect effects. to name a few, first, the study doesn't fully take into account impulsive buying, because in on the Vinted platform, you have some new or almost new clothes, sometimes new clothes with the tag. So in the case of impulsive purchases on the platform. If those clothes are new, the study doesn't take into account the additional impacts linked to the production of these clothes. They take into account the transportation of these clothes of impulsive buying, but not the production of the new clothes that were on the platform by impulsive buyers.

Gael Duez (18:59)

How would you quantify impulsive buying?

Laetitia Bornes (19:04)

It's with question actually so there is obviously a big bias because people just answer what they can and maybe they can have a desirability bias meaning that they will answer something think is socially acceptable. But ⁓ yeah the question is like would you have bought it if it didn't exist and if people say. Now I was just scrolling on the platform, then it's considered to be impulsive buying.

Gael Duez (19:36)

Got it. So that's the first limitation, not taking into account impulsive buying. What are the other limitations?

Laetitia Bornes (19:45)

So you have effects that weren't taken into account. For instance, fact that Vinted allowed ⁓ sellers to sell ⁓ their items. Some of them answered that without Vinted, it would have been too difficult to sell those items. They wouldn't have it on another platform. So they would have thrown it away or it away. So in those cases, the money that those sellers earn thanks to Vinted, the way they will spend this money will have some impacts, especially if they use this money to buy some new clothes from Fast Fashioned.

Gael Duez (20:28)

Was it the case that people are actually using the money from second hand platform to buy fast fashion clothes? Did you quantify or assess this trend?

Laetitia Bornes (20:42)

OK, so I quantify precisely because I relied on the existing Vayuu study. don't want to give some figures because I used the older reports from 2021. And there is a much recent report from 2023, I think. But you a part of the sellers who say that they will use the money earned from sale to buy brand new stuff. It's not precise if it's fast fashion, but I think it's quite obvious that you have, and it has been documented by researcher called Elodie Juge, that you have some vintage users who use the platform just to sell their clothes and to be able to renew their wardrobe more frequently without having to pay for it. So you'll have some users that buy some brand new stuff from fast fashion markets that will use items a few times and then sell it on vintage for almost the same price and then renew their wardrobe. So yeah, that's difficult to isolate and to quantify, but I know that from the survey. You could have the figure of people using the money earned from sale to buy brand new stuff.

Gael Duez (22:14)

And so that's the second effect or side effect. I don't know which wording shall we use. Is it like all of these are rebound effects or do you have a more precise academic wording for it?

Laetitia Bornes (22:30)

You have a lot of different taxonomies about indirect effects. They can be classified between the first order, second order, third order. You have a lot of different classification and personally in my research, to make it simpler to designers and decision makers, I consider all the indirect effects that are linked to a change in behavior or practice to be a rebound effect if it can have somehow negative social environmental impacts. So that would be, my perspective, not every researcher would agree with that, but from my perspective, this is a rebound effect.

Gael Duez (23:11)

Okay, got it. so you mentioned several indirect effects, which are rebound effects because they actually reduce the avoided emission claims that is made or assessment because it's not necessarily a claim at this time of the study. What other are worth sharing with the audience?

Laetitia Bornes (23:30)

So to conclude with the indirect effect, would say that in this kind of study of survey, not only the vintage one, the indirect effects that have social impacts are systematically excluded because they are difficult to assess. So that's one of the things we think is really big limitation is that those kind really focus on carbon emissions and not the other kind of impacts. And they also only on what can be quantified. And so for instance, by making it easier to sell their clothes, Vinted encourages people to stop donating to charities. And charities such as the Emmaus receive fewer donations, in quantity and quality. And this has an impact on their social and solidarity activities and on the vulnerable people they help. And that is impossible to quantify. that's not because it's not possible to quantify it, that it's not important. But that's why for me, a rebound effect can encompass things that are not initial gains, because initial gains are something we expect to happen, and this is linked to the intention and so on. So I would have a broader conception of a rebound effect, and those kind of rebound effects are not taken into account in these studies.

Gael Duez (25:04)

And overall, and I know this is an assessment and that might be wild guessing. So it's not like a very precise answer that I'm expecting, but overall, would you say that your study found that we should reduce what is estimated to be avoided carbon emissions or that it is actually completely offset and we're in the sort of a Jevons paradox again situation where creating a secondhand platform does not actually help producing carbon emissions, but would increase it. So basically, where do you put the needle? it reducing the avoided carbon emissions, which has been estimated, or do you think that we're completely wrong and actually they are contributing to higher carbon emissions because of all of these indirect effects cumulated that you've just described?

Laetitia Bornes (26:03)

It's a bit difficult to answer that question because there are so many uncertainties that sometimes you can't say if you are in the positive or the negative. What I would recommend, one of the statements of the paper that we worked with David is that it's not a good question. Maybe we shouldn't say, Is it good or bad? Maybe we should say, how can we improve it? also, if we focus just on the carbon emissions, because if you want to say if it's just good or bad, you need to have just one figure. So that's why we focus on the carbon equivalent. That's how you say it's positive, or no, it's not good, or it's negative. We have avoided emissions, and it's good. What we think is that it's more complex than that and we shouldn't reduce this complexity to a single figure. I don't think we should stop a second hand platform at all, but I think we should rethink the way they are designed, service design, the platform design, the business model design, so that we improve the carbon emissions or maybe other social environmental

Gael Duez (27:14)

Laetitia, you're a perfect guest because I wanted to move the discussion from what you found to what could be done with this question that I asked quite often. And actually it comes with two flavors this time. My first question was, if I were Vinted's CEO and I was genuinely concerned about the social and environmental impact of the world and of my platform more precisely. How should I react to such a study? I mean, your research paper. And what should I change? In my second question, and you might want to articulate both of them, is if I were one of vintage product leader or UX leader what should I do? Because it comes with two flavors. You've got like the overall strategy that the CEO having some sort of a wake up call, and saying, my God, we need to change quite a lot of things in the way we assess, the way we run our business, et cetera, et cetera. But there might be also things that can be done at a lower hierarchical level without a full change in the strategy of Vinted by a product leader and UX leader. And I wanted to drop the two questions so that you can decide which one you want to answer first and how you want to articulate this two levels of decision, I would say.

Laetitia Bornes (28:34)

So first thing, just the study that we conducted with David is not aimed specifically at the CEO of Vinted or at Vinted project or UX leaders, but rather at researchers and professionals who assess the indirect and indirect effects of digital technologies. So the purpose was not initially to evaluate Vinted, but to provide a critique of the methods used to calculate the avoided emissions or net impacts using Vinted as an example. being if the CEO of Vinted reads this study, he may have two reactions, I think. Either he is only interested in making profits and will therefore try to forget it or to discredit it or he may wish to improve on the social environmental impact, then take inspiration from the study or even contact us for more details and is invited to do So there are a lot of things that can be done at several levels and I think that they should be thought with a systemic perspective and that considering all these levels. For iinstance, I mentioned the example of the by distance of the results. You don't have it it would be bad for the business because the business model is to tax every transaction with delivery. If you change the business model to a subscription, instance, you will then want to have more users which will not want to have more transactions with delivery. So everything is connected and the way you design your business model, we have some impacts on the way you design your platform itself. And those things have to be thought all together. And that's why a methodology during my PhD, which is called modeling methodology and its collective modeling involving people from different hierarchical level in the company and also people from outside the company to reduce the risk of So yeah, I think that everything has to be thought all together. And now as a vintage product or UX leader, you can try to push for this kind of methodology to be put in place. actually occurred with a whose name I won't mention, but ⁓ they were developers, not designers, but they were sensitive to environmental impacts. And they a presentation of our work at a conference. It actually was last Green IO conference in Paris. And they contacted us to run a workshop just some awareness raising about indirect effects. And ⁓ one thing led to another, and we are now about to conduct the whole methodology with them over several months, involving a wide range of profiles, including different hierarchical levels. So that proves that it's possible as an employee to push this kind of methodology. Although it probably depends on the company you work in. But yeah, that's possible.

Gael Duez (32:04)

Okay, I have to say that you didn't tell me this information when we were preparing the recording. So I've got like a big stupid smile on my face like, oh cool, the Green IO Conference has helped connections and move things in the right direction. So now I need to focus back because this super interesting what you've just said, but thanks a lot for the feedback because you made my day. So getting some focus back and thanks a lot for stressing how important it is to have a holistic view and putting all the different stakeholders around the table and using the workshop framework that you've coined during your research. And I get this is the right approach now for the sake of understanding, and I'm not saying this is what you say that should be done, but just for the sake of illustration, could you share? One or two other examples of features, change in design that you would see in the Vinted platform to offset or to counter some of these negative rebound effect, or actually rebound effect are always I follow your definition, for the Vinted platform. And as you say, there's nothing personal against Vinted, it's just for the sake of illustration. But you mentioned already the absence of filter for the location of the good. But would you add other features, design changes?

Laetitia Bornes (33:37)

Yeah, sure. I worked with designers that weren't designers from Vinted, but that were professional designers interested in systemic approaches. And they worked on the Vinted case study. So I can share with you some ideas design to improve the social environmental impact of Vinted. And I definitely do not say that we should do all at once because it has to be strategy with different steps or let's say design interventions that must be coherent and that must be assessed before being put into place. you can have actions that can be from the lower level to the higher level. So a low level would be, for instance, acting on the direct of transportation. So for instance, using a better transportation system or things like that. We had the idea of promoting ⁓ group shipments, ⁓ providing local sales or collection points to reduce the transportation. Then you have other ideas to charities. Designer, they thought about a portion of the profits to charities or ⁓ redirecting users to donate to charities when a clothes didn't sell or when they reached a quota. with the tool that to the designers during the workshops, so the Magnitude tool, which is a modeling tool, they could compare different design strategies. And for instance, it was much more effective to redirect users to donate clothes in some cases, rather than donating a portion of the profits of Vinted.

Gael Duez (35:34)

Would you reach such a conclusion? How can you say it seems to more efficient to donate when I cannot sell it rather than reallocate a portion of my revenues to charities?

Laetitia Bornes (35:46)

So in fact, we modeled it in the magnitude tool. So we calculated the loss ⁓ of revenue for charities and we compared the difference between, for instance, donating 1 % of the profits of vintage, which would be huge, and redirecting the users to donate their clothes, maybe in, let's say, 5 % of cases. I don't remember the exact figure. So we just made that ⁓ seemed to be relevant to the designers during the workshop, and we compared it. And that makes sense, because when you give a portion of the profits of vintage you don't want to give a lot of this and this profit is just a few percentages of a given sale and if you redirect a seller to give his ⁓ item then whole price of the item goes to the charity so it's a much bigger impact, let's say. Does that make sense?

Gael Duez (36:59)

It makes total sense. Thanks a lot. And this modeling was from an overall economical perspective, from the charity perspective were you also able to model the perspective from the user?

Laetitia Bornes (37:17)

So this is part of the methodology, but it's not part of the quantitative model at all. So to be honest, the modeling tool is quite basic. It's like you could do almost the same thing with an Excel sheet, but it's dynamic. So you can have a simulation through different months or years. And it's more visual and it's easier to work with as a group of different stakeholders who are not experts in consequential modeling, for instance. But it's quite basic, and that's really a choice that I made. You have different, let's say that you have basically two approaches to model social complex systems. Or you can model with a top-down based on systems dynamics, and that's what I did. Or you can model with an agent-based approach that is more bottom-up and you are just describing the behavior of individuals, you put them together and you expect to have emergent phenomenon. my case, I considered that the people in the room, so the designers, makers, maybe academics, experts in textile industry and so on, would be more capable of imagining impact of something on the users than the model itself. So most of the things are in the brain of the modelers and the stakeholders involved. And a few things, just the orders of magnitude, and that's why the software is called magnitude, are in the model. So they would say, for instance, OK, we could put into place a virtual currency that really force the sellers in using the money they earn from sale on second-hand items, either on vintage or with partners. If we do that, we will probably lose this amount, this percentage of sellers. And we will just put in the model the variation of the number of sellers that we expect and the variation of the percentage of the money that is used ⁓ to buy fast fashion clothes, for instance. they will imagine all the emergent phenomenon, all the user's behavior, and they will make some hypothesis, and they will test it on the model just to have the impact on the final figures of the key indicators for them that would be carbon emissions, but also loss for charities and other impacts the model will be based on mixed data. of the calculation is based on data that you can find the literature, for instance, the carbon intensity of a kilometer traveled by parcel or a truck. Then you have some data that is based on the survey. So what is the percentage of people doing impulsive buying? What is the percentage of people who are actually buying clothes instead of brand new clothes thanks to Vinted and so on? And then you have the assumptions of the team of stakeholders working on the model. So that's how you use it. And it's really a tool for reflection, but it's definitely not a tool for prediction. That's more the way you use it.

Gael Duez (40:51)

Okay. You know what? There are so many things that I would like to unpack with what you say that actually I think I'm going to pause for a moment on this modeling things. And I think we will do a double episode if you don't mind. because I would love to ask you several questions regarding the limit to modeling and it's not every day that I have an academic on the show. So discussing a bit scientific methodology, see a lot of interesting angles here with this specific use case and even playing with model and what is systems but I would say to close our focus on the vintage use case, I would love actually to zoom out quite seriously and not talking about avoided emission of a specific company. But truly zooming out and talking about digital technology and the entire digital sector or IT sector. There are a lot of discussions about the assessment of the footprint and the handprint of digital technologies that goes way beyond the micro level, which you illustrated with the vintage use case. And maybe to quote a big name here, I'm a big fan of Gautier Roussille's job. And he wrote several articles on the… avoided greenhouse gas emissions thanks to digitalization, challenging the conventional assumption that ⁓ digitization is by default good for the environment. We hear this a lot, like the need for a twin transition or transformation with the digital working hand in hand with the ecological transition. I know that it's really going from micro level to macro level, but did you make some connections also between what you found in your research paper and his findings? And is this question even relevant or there are two different words and we shouldn't mix them?

Laetitia Bornes (42:52)

Yes, that's absolutely relevant. In fact, I totally agree with this criticism of the twin transition narrative, which seems to argue that digital technology will enable the ecological transition and which suggests that this is the case whatever the context. So the first problem that I see is that it seems to suggest somehow that since digital technologies will enable the ecological transition, we don't need to deeply rethink our lifestyles. And what's more, it seems suggested also that it doesn't matter if the direct impacts of digital technologies are increasing since they are offset by its indirect effects. So through the decarbonization of other sectors like transport, agriculture, construction and so on. first of all, there's nothing to prove that this is true in any case, not even close. And for this, I invite you to read the ADEM report, environmental assessment of the direct and indirect effects of digital technology on use cases. So it's a French reference, but it has been translated to English. And additionally, even when certain digital technologies actually help to reduce carbon emissions, they also lead to other impacts intensification of resource extraction and pollution. And on the top of that, the negative indirect effects of digital technologies. So in particular, the rebound effects we were talking about are often underestimated or completely ignored in the calculation, especially those that cannot be quantified as I mentioned. Of course, doesn't mean that digital technologies aren't necessarily bad either, obviously, but I think that the concept of Twitter transition is a bit techno-optimistic and a bit misleading. So in my opinion, we need to be much more cautious and nuanced. And that's exactly what the vintage case study and our study shows, in fact. So think there is a wrong thing with this narrative and focusing on each micro case won't results in a coherent transition. We have to plan it.

Gaël Duez (45:31)

This is the end of the first part of this long episode with Laetitia Borne. In the second part, we will deep dive more on the theoretical aspect of model and systems thinking with a lot of insights and a lot of resources that she has happily shared with us. So stay tuned. Episode will be released next week.

“It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering.”

Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and governance perspective of the ongoing AI Boom. 

Among the topics covered in this discussion with Gael Duez were: 

 And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in New York on May 14th and 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Prof PS Lee (00:01)

It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power,

Gaël Duez (00:24)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. One last thing. This episode is a bit special because it was recorded live from Green IO Singapore two weeks ago. The sound quality isn't as good as you have been used to, but the quality of the guests is as good as ever. Enjoy the episode.

Gael Duez (01:33)

We’re live and we're doing this fire chat session at Green IO Singapore, second edition, and we're trying something new, which is recording live with all the technical hiccups that happened for the last 20 minutes. So my dear listeners, you didn't experience them, but the participants, did. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor P.S. Lee and Professor Heng Wang to discuss the environmental footprint of AI, but from a very hands-on perspective based on the city-state of Singapore, because both of them are experts, Professor PS Lee from an infrastructure perspective, Professor Heng from a governance perspective. So how does this rise in energy consumption, resource consumption caused by the AI boom is concretely impacting the infrastructure of Singapore and the way Singapore governs its digitalization. Without further notice, I would love to leave the ground to Professor Heng Wang. Can you briefly introduce yourself?

Pr PS Lee (02:34)

First, thanks for having me. I'm Poh Seng or PS Lee from both Energy Studies Institute as well as Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. So my personal research centers around data center liquid cooling. So I've been working on this for past three to five years. Liquid cooling is not new but associated with the demand for AI now becomes almost as a part of requirement in order to sort of unleash the AI performance. But I more importantly is that the switch from conventional air cooling to liquid cooling, it can actually result in very significant energy savings as well as carbon footprint reduction. So think that to me is actually the more important question, how do we actually take advantage of various technologies to manage the carbon footprint of the industry so that we can allow the growth in the most sustainable fashion. 

Gael Duez (03:30)

Okay, thanks a lot. Professor Wang. 

Prof Heng Wang (03:38)

Thank you for having me here. Singapore Management University, Newport House School of Law. Before that I was a professor at the University of South Wales in Sydney. I work on the governance of digitalisation and sustainability. So the issue is about how do we align digitalisation with sustainability and one of the core issues about how do we navigate through the uncertainties because we are not necessarily have all the knowledge about that. How do we use the regulation governance, different tools to align the two together. And also I contribute to World Economic Forum, governance alliance from the perspective of responsible users. 

Gaël Duez (04:10)

Quite a lot to deal with. So without further notice, let's jump right into the main question. What is according to both of you the main issues, the main pitfalls with this current AI boom in your fields of expertise?

Prof PS Lee (04:34)

I think for the infrastructure side, the industry has been operating air-based systems for the longest time, the past three, four decades. So while liquid cooling is not new, think in general the industry does not actually have a lot of practitioners that are familiar with the design as well as the operations of liquid cooling infrastructure.

So I think there will be a period whereby there's quite a bit of learning as well as training that's actually necessary so that we actually equip the industry practitioner with the necessary know-how as well as tools to solve design and operate the liquid cooling infrastructure. Then obviously one of the natural questions is actually what about the CAPEX indication? We also gained the switching from liquid cooling to air cooling the demand while it's picking up is certainly not at the same volume as airbase is now. So that's why it's still the perceived delta in terms of the CAPEX Then I think even the more challenging is actually existing infrastructure. How do we actually allow wind retrofit of your existing data centers in a cost-effective fashion. So I think these are some of the issues.

the other is actually standards. think currently there is a lack of standards while there have been various guidelines, for example from ASHRAE, from OCP. But think there isn't a very well established standard when it comes to the new AI infrastructure. So I think it really needs to be a power-tracking of both the technical, the technology development as well as the governance including the standards.

Pr. Heng Wang (06:20)

I think I agree what you have said, standard is one issue. From governance perspective, or from knowledge perspective, I think we have a number of major issue. First, about knowledge. So if you use AI, AI is fast developing. have an issue about we have imperfect knowledge about AI, it's kind of beta version. And secondly, we do not have complete knowledge.

because you you mentioned about cooling, mentioned about energy transition, know, e-waste, and different context, finance and other sectors, so you have silos. You knowledge are not really distributed as much as we want. Certainly also, it's also been an issue about unpredictability, so the social response to AI is an issue. If you think about AI will compete with your drinking water, the feedback to that will be different. So that's the knowledge side.

imperfect knowledge, incomplete knowledge and unpredictability. From governance perspective, we have mismatches. Mismatches about one is if you look at horizontally, your short-term and long-term consideration. Short-term you want to roll out fast. You also have a bottom-up decision. You have the use cases long-term, you have a susceptibility. And also you look at the governance levels. have domestic ones, sub-national ones, to regional ones, to international ones, which has been pretty tricky nowadays.

And also if you look at the issue of the silo solution earlier, you also have to break that. So that's come back to the issue, how do we build the knowledge? And how do we engage with stakeholders at different levels and to forge the standards and also to evolve over time?

Gael Duez (07:58)

two questions to dive a bit on what you say. First of all, Professor Lee, it seems to me that you made the assumption that liquid cooling was the de facto solution to solve maybe partially the energy crisis caused by AI, but is it the only one? mean, if you take a step back and you position yourself as like an almighty father of Singapore, of Singapore's infrastructure, would you say, okay,

We need to go all in into liquid cooling, retrofit everything like this or is there different ways, different approaches that we should follow?

Pr PS Lee (08:38)

It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power, so you don't really mix to go to link cooling.

But even in AI, if you look at for example training versus inferencing, especially the later, inferencing you probably don't really require super high power chips. So in that regard, you can probably go with some of the air-based solutions, but maybe going from the conventional what we call the perimeter cooling involving crack-claw to a roll-based solution like in-roll coolers or rear door exchanger, which allows you to cool higher airflow rate.

such an AI influencing hardware. So I think it's always a case of fit for purpose.

Gael Duez (09:41)

And in the case of, just for the listeners who are not super familiar with the wording, AB is air based cooling So, for a city like Singapore, did you manage to estimate the share of the current infrastructure that should be sort of retrofit toward liquid cooling and the share that should go as it is today?

Pr PS Lee (10:04)

I think Singapore is actually quite unique because we have a moratorium about three years ago because back then, data center industry is consuming 7 % of electricity, obviously it's 7 % so it's actually huge. The government actually has its net zero commitment and obviously it's also concerned about the energy demand so that's why a moratorium was actually put in place which was actually finally lifted.

Thereafter, actually have a data center called for applications. But if you look at the licenses that were actually awarded, they are just averaging about 20 million. So I think for a mature data center market like Singapore, the reality or the fact is you have a bigger stock of existing data centers. Or you can call it legacy or ground-fuel data center. So I think the solutions that we should be looking at, whether or not you do liquid cooling or more efficient air-based solutions.

will be quite different compared to example Malaysia in particular, Johor Bahru because there's a lot of new data centers that are coming online. So for them, I suppose right from day one, they can actually start by designing or incorporating the coolant into the infrastructure. But for a merchant market like Singapore, I think likely we'll have to do it in phases.

without undue interruptions to ongoing operations, as well as undue delta in terms of the CAPEX But I feel that for mature data center markets like Singapore, the green retrofit data center, in fact, will be a lot more needle moving in terms of bringing down the carbon footprint compared to emerging markets like Malaysia.

Gael Duez (11:53)

That's interesting the connection with the governance issue when you mentioned the moratorium that happened three years ago. mean, what is today in your view, Professor Wang, the balance you mentioned like short term, long term, how do you believe that Singapore would position itself in this fast rhythm regarding AI adoption and even like investment in new infrastructure, retrofitting infrastructure and like

Pr. Heng Wang (12:21)

That is a great question. It involves the issue about understanding the costs and benefits. So you have to actually, it's a trade-off, which is a very difficult one. So I think it's very important to understand the risks, to build the knowledge It's only in this way you can make the informed decision. So that would be very important for the government's arrangements to understand what's happening, what's likely to happen. And you need foresight.

AI now is a landscape, move much faster. Like if you think of a highway in the past, you have 100 kilometers or 200 kilometers. Now it's 1,000, 20,000 depends on the speed of the development. So I think the first important step is actually we have to build a network of the stakeholders to understand risks and also the short-term and long-term considerations of that.

specifically you probably need to take more concrete measures like the Carrot and stick to launch towards that. So for example, for understanding risks, whether you want to encourage disclosure, disclosure of CO2 emissions, water consumption, so e-waste and other things, or you want to...

efficient labeling as we have done before you you utilize the adaptive existing tool for that or index or verification there could be also be industry use case for verification it's not only about the cost of money you can make money in a sense of it you can be as an ethical leader in that regard and those kind of things or you want to think of a monitoring forecast and also the early warning for example

I looking at thinking also being, it's also about the technology side, which I looked at earlier, is that whether it's also useful to train the AI models with those kind of training principles. So in this way, actually even if you use a prompt answer to the prompts, bearing in mind those kind of issues. And also you should like, whether you're thinking of what something you can do now, like the tendering offering requirements. So if have a project, and you're

for energy efficiency, so you have raised to top instead of raised to bottom. So there are other things you can do. You think about whether regulate AOMs and others. So I think a coherent approach and engage with different stakeholders and use different tools will be very important to make that happen.

Gael Duez (14:50)

And if I can wrap up what you said, it's all about gathering the different stakeholders and using a mix of carrot and sticks. Could you maybe provide one or two examples of each in Singapore? Did the Singapore authority, maybe government, maybe governmental bodies, started to use the stick? I mean, they used a pretty big stick when they forbidden any new data center facilities three years ago.

but it has been lifted now. But what sort of sticks do you from the Singapore government, and what sort of carrots?

Pr. Heng Wang (15:27)

I think that's actually as mentioned, you mentioned example the government may take measures about the developments of new data center, that's one example as you mentioned. But also that Singapore has a green data center roadmap. That's also been a way where they're trying to promote water and energy efficiency because actually if you have energy consumption over a certain threshold, then you are expected to have those kind of monitoring or the water usage of that.

think that's maybe probably more things to be done because this is a very new area. that's the reason why, mentioned earlier, that you can't think of adapting existing tools for that. Instead, everything starts from scratch. So that's the issue about when you talk about carrot and stick, energy and that going as mentioned earlier will be one way where you can give a reward because consumers will know what it means. Or for large energy models, you never requirement things, taming what are the energy consumption of that. So consumers may choose which energy actually more environmentally friendly. So what I try to make is that actually we have to think creatively and adapt to that. But not necessarily everything will be able to do that. One example is environment impact assessment. This is a tool which is difficult to apply because it's, you know...

So I just want to say that you have to adapt and risk one, but also think about developing new ones.

Gael Duez (16:51)

I think the Singapore green data center roadmap was mentioned earlier today by the IMDA representative Dr. Lawrence Wee But it has been something that has been existing prior to the AI boom. Is it correct?

Pr PS Lee (17:09)

There was an earlier version, I think they called it the Green Data Center Research Roadmap. So I think even back then, I think they mentioned things like liquid cooling, but I think the latest version which was actually launched last year is really about pushing for accelerated adoption of various solutions. I think like what Prof. mentioned, it really has to be done holistically. It's not just...

one singular solution like liquid cooling. You also need to look at the details right, are you still end up rejecting the heat, are you still end up consuming a lot of water operating the wet cooling towels. So I think the Green Data Center roadmap the latest edition I think it actually sort of put up a holistic kind of framework right, so that operators as well as their so-called partners, vendors, equipment vendors.

consultant can really adopt a holistic mindset in terms of looking at different aspects all the way from the procurement of your energy sources to the adoption of some of the latest energy-efficient solutions including liquid cooling to possibly recovering waste and actually putting it to productive end-use. So I see that as a progression.

But I think for me the next step in my view is really to come up with a holistic green or sustainable data center standard. I think we have different pieces, including I think one of the new standards that me together with my colleagues among the audience that's developing essentially on the liquid cooling standard. But I think it's more than just liquid cooling. So I think really I look forward to Singapore showing the leadership to establish a holistic standard for green or sustainable data.

Gael Duez (19:05)

And just from our understanding, the roadmap as it is today, it's a set of best practices and things like that, but there is nothing compulsory at the moment. There is nothing sort of related to what the European Union did with the energy efficiency directive. But now, if you're above a certain power capacity for your data center, you need to waste heat as you mentioned, share of energy renewable. This sort of reporting, is it already in place in Singapore or not yet?

Pr PS Lee (19:38)

what it would extend that the EU is doing but I think what we can see is actually IMDA and EDB is actually tying for example the PCCF8 to for example the green data center roadmap as well as the green mark for data center 3G green and 4 version so I think it still serves the purpose of actually really compelling the industry to sort of be very intentional as well as be very the

holistic in terms of assessing the different aspects that would actually lead to the more sustainable operation of the data centers.

Gael Duez (20:14)

And maybe to close this fire chat, can we reverse the question? What do you see both of you as the greatest opportunity leveraging AI for sustained purpose in Singapore?

Pr. Heng Wang (20:30)

Yeah, I just been seeing a lot of new ways that AI provides the possible way to do with that. So something I'm thinking of, you know, can use AI to simulate. So if you different governance or regulator arrangements, you could have agents. And then you can think about using AI to simulate what an outcome of that would be. So that probably will inform your decisions, you know, and also bring the different positions of actors into that.

And of course, AI will be used in the allocation of the energy resources and even allocation of the human resources for free energy generation, so on and so forth. So many ways that we need to explore.

Gael Duez (21:10)

And just a side question because I didn't mention it in the introduction but you're an expert in blockchain techniques, not necessarily cryptocurrency but blockchain use. Do you see any related use between the AI boom which is a machine learning boom, now let's be honest, it's just a marketing trick to name it AI, and blockchain today or for you are there still two separate topics?

Pr. Heng Wang (21:36)

Yeah, I'm not sure about blockchain technology expert, but I think that actually blockchain will be one way that nowadays we're thinking of synergize or work with the AI. So people even in the area like finance, example, or FinTech areas also looking to the AI's more important use of that, including how do you leverage technologies to do the compliance, regulatory compliance, for example, if you have an environmental.

regular requirements, whether we can use blockchain and other tools to make that happen, and AI to assist that process. So that's also been a possible way that we try to explore. But we have to see what are the rules by that. So for example, people may say we want regulation by design. So we require you to have the designer to build into your green stability in your AI or similar arrangements to make sure you comply with the requirements.

Pr PS Lee (22:27)

Pr Wang already mentioned that can obviously leverage on AI for the simulating performance, can use it for optimizing the operations of the data centers. But I think the other aspect which I think really the AI can be sort of leveraged on is actually to orchestrate your computing, your power and cooling. Currently it's done in silos

But if you are able to time the workload to match with the availability of green electrons, then obviously you can actually better reduce the operational carbon. So see AI has a lot of potential in various aspects. In fact, can even leverage on AI for the entire life cycle of the data center, all the way from design, operation to end of life.

Gael Duez (23:15)

Thanks a lot, of you. That was the first time we record live a podcast. I hope that, I mean, the sound obviously would not be studio quality sound, but I hope it will be understandable. Thanks a lot to the audience for attending. It was a great exercise. And yes, let's meet next year.

Pr PS Lee (23:32)

Thank you.

Gaël Duez (23:36)

Thank you for listening to this live episode from Green IO Singapore. Don't forget to share it on social media or directly with other data center practitioners. Our next episode will not be about the AI energy score. We had to postpone its recording, but with Letitia Bornes to talk about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to digital technologies. It will be based on a study she co- authored about Vinted, the massive second-hand platform. Stay tuned.

By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the GreenIo Podcast and its newsletter. The link in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. One last thing, visit greenio.tech to check our next conferences. New York is in two weeks. The lineup is a blast. And as usual, you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 10 remaining

tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! And now, you can join us on the Green IO Slack.

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.

📣 Green IO Singapore is next week on April 15th and 16th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Sarah (00:01)
I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions.

Gaël Duez (00:15)
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favourite podcast platform and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.

A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O'Reilly. Since Tim Frick's book, Designing for Sustainability, eight years ago, O'Reilly didn't publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So it's a fair statement that this book was long awaited.

And watching the line during the book signing at Green IO London last year, I guess its launch was a success. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why I'm delighted to have the last of the Building Green Software's co-authores, who didn't join the show yet, to be with me today, Sarah Hsu, to talk about the trends she witnesses firsthand in the green software engineering field. Based in London, Sarah is a pillar of the Green Software Foundation where she chairs the Principles of Green Software Engineering institution as Site Reliability Engineer. And on top of being an author, she's also a regular speaker at Kubernetes Community Day, LeanAgile and GreenIO conferences. Welcome to GreenIO, Sarah. And first of all, congrats for your Tech Woman 100 Award last year. How does it feel?

Sarah (02:21)
Hi, Gaël I'm so excited to be here. I love, welcome to Green IO spill. You say that all the time. I feel like sometimes I can hear it in my sleep, you know.

Gaël Duez (02:34)
Excellent.

Sarah (02:35)
But anyway, yeah, thank you for asking about the award. Winning it, it did feel great. And while it's fantastic to have my own hard work recognized, and it really is a celebration for everyone who has been part of my journey. It honors the dedication of my incredible teams, my work team, my GSF team, and of course, my book team and it's celebration of the success of all our project. And I guess personally, I think the most important thing that came out of this is that it's a massive, massive kudos to every single person who has invested their time and effort to support me along the way. And that includes you, Gaël things like we met two three years ago at the very, very inception of like green software and green IO.

Gaël Duez (03:30)
I wasn't expecting to be included in this amazing crowd that you gathered around you I'm a bit surprised, but happily surprised. Thanks a lot. And I have to say that it's great because this recognition, it really highlights that sustainability is a teamwork, but it also shed a very positive light on sustainably being a hot topic in the IT industry and I think we need all these positive signs, especially at the moment. So, congratulations again.

Sarah (04:06)
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (04:07)
And without further notice, the I don't know how million dollar question, but actually it could be a Gartner title for one of their study. According to you, what are the main trends that you see in green software since a year ago, since the release of your book?

Sarah (04:29)
Well, how much time do we have? I'm joking.

Gaël Duez (04:32)
Between two to three hours. No joking.

Sarah (04:35)
Hopefully we're not here that long. Well, the space, the green software space has exploded in the past couple of years. Like look at Green IO and the popularity and the engagement has just been amazing. So I guess the first and foremost trend I think is the people, right? The incredible people that we have all met in the past couple of years have been absolutely wonderful.

There really is a real sense of camaraderie. People are here all to learn from each other, to help each other. We are comparing nodes and most importantly, we're celebrating every single little wing within the space. And even though the space really, really has exploded in the past year, we're still in a critical stage of raising awareness among the wider software community. And personally for me, my keynote at Ling Agile, Eddinger Conference last year is one of those moments I probably would never forget. The energy of the crowd that day, it was just incredible. And how appreciative people were of my talk and my time. It really made all those late night and weekend sacrifice worthwhile. So yeah, I think that's the first trend. And it's not strictly technical, but still so important to highlight and hopefully serve as an encouragement to all our listeners out there. We should keep it going. We've got to continue this broken radio energy in every single direction we can to make green software. Not the afterthought, but the first thing everyone discuss in any technical meetings.

Gaël Duez (06:20)
And I do agree that I can feel this energy and growing concern and the growing commitment of many responsible technologists, would say, whether they work in design, ops, cloud, you know, obviously software development, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have any other trends on top of this people trend, I would say, then don't worry, I've got plenty of much more technical questions.

Sarah (06:47)
Okay. Yeah. So the second trend, I guess I want to mention is the realization that green software really is not an ivory tower. We're not asking the overstretched engineering team to work on something completely new. The way we see green software is that it integrates seamlessly with software engineering practices. And it really isn't here to disrupt your established workflows. And I guess that nicely leads me to my next trend, GreenOps. I know I feel like we need to make a catchy tune for GreenOps. So yeah, Gaël, maybe that's something you can help us out since green IO opening is so catchy. But GreenOps is getting very catchy and it is the most trendy kid on the block right now. And just so everyone is clear, when we talk about GreenOps, we mean green DevOps, not the fossils. But yeah, guess green DevOps is here to rule us all. So I would say that is the third trend that I've seen for the past year.

Gaël Duez (07:58)
So I would say to wrap it up, first trend, people, large awareness raising movement amongst people working in our Second trend will be, we're not in an ivory tower and we need to connect to every other specialties building amazing software to make it work. third is definitely green DevOps, be more precise. On this one, actually I have a question. Is it a leader or is it a follower of the FinOps movement? And by that I mean that we talked a lot about the mutual reinforcement of GreenOps and FinOps especially for all the tech stack based on cloud and especially public cloud services.

Do you see this reinforcement happening and do you believe that the rise in GreenDevOps has been mostly fueled by the rise in FinOps or are they two separate movements enjoying mutual co-benefits?

Sarah (08:56)
Again, I'm saying in on behalf of myself, I personally think GreenOps extends really naturally from DevOps and FinOps. And I think GreenOps is, can stand on its own weight, but FinOps is just a lot more mature in the space and it's already had amazing framework and not a lot of thought process going out against it. So yeah, I personally think FinOps and GreenOps. They are basically just two sides of the same point and they have the same goal, right? Which is optimization. and I believe that we, we're soft engineers, right? We are inherently lazy people. So why would we want to reinvent the wheels? Why will we not incorporate try and tested practices that the FinOps people has already done for us to achieve this optimization utopia? If you know what I mean. So yeah, I know there are some really strong arguments against using cost as proxy for estimating software's carbon emission. And I tend to agree. However, we really should not overlook the important lessons that FinOps is trying to teach us. Firstly, it's all about accountability, Sustainability is no longer just an ethical headache.

It's every single person's responsibility, from the finance people to legal to operations to HR and of course to us engineers. We all really need to play our part the second point in my opinion is all about transparency. We need that transparency to empower everyone. If the legal guy who sits two rows behind us can't feel that sense of accomplishment, why would there be an incentive to take part, right? And lastly, I think the most important point that FinOps already outlined for us is the knockoff benefits or as we would like to call it in the book, co-benefits.

One of the messages we really, really want to get out there with the book is the core benefits of green software. So yeah, similar to FinOps, achieving cost optimization has loads and loads of knock-on benefits.

Gaël Duez (11:10)
That's very clear. mean, there are technical debates. You mentioned one that cost is not the best proxy for carbon emission, water consumption, etc. I would say that at the beginning of the journey, usually their best friends at some point, they might diverge a bit. That being said, You said you see a very strong trend in the GreenOps movements. Is it more on awareness or do you already see tools and patterns? You mentioned that FinOps is much more mature when it comes to framework and tooling, et cetera, et cetera. Do you see some no brainer techniques or patterns or frameworks being adopted in the GreenOps movement or are we still in a would say searching and exploration mode.

Sarah (12:01)
I think, yes, a lot of the things are already being adopted in the grown-up space, but people just don't realize they're already doing it, if that makes sense. I'll give you an example, right, like automation. Like automation has been everyone's best sidekick for people from SREs to devops to engineers to testers, automation is there to allow us to continue to the bandwidth to innovate, to work on exciting business problems, right? And automation is not just a way to achieve in DevOps. Automation also have loads of other co-benefits when you think about it through the GreenOps perspective.

Gaël Duez (12:50)
I would say that I see these adoptions and especially in automation, getting a lot of interest. I'm still concerned about the gap between willingness and action. Which leads me to this very related question. In the chapter on operational efficiency, was it monitoring? I don't remember, but that's okay. You mentioned that reliability engineer and sustainably advocate should be best friends. And Wilco, who's a regular listener of the show and I were discussing about it. And his question was a very pragmatic question that he wanted to ask you. Where are sustainable site reliability operational practices hitting a roadblock? And what should be the key focus to drive them forward in 2025?

Sarah (13:40)
Right, so I guess the biggest roadblock, not just for SRE or sustainable advocates or anyone really, is the measurement piece. We really can't improve what we can't measure. I guess speaking as an SRE, we really, really need that standardized real-time metric across the board. We SREs have like perfected production monitoring in the last 10 years. So if the sustainable people really have this metric ready for SREs, we can then just throw this metric over the fence and have them start treating it like one of the golden signals. the four golden signals of production and monitoring, or as I would like to call them similarly in the book. the fore horseman of matrix based monitoring, a latency traffic error and saturation. So, so yeah, what that means is that we SREs use them alone with the concepts of SLO and SLI, service level objectives and service level indicators to serve our clients. And I'm hoping, I'm really hoping that everyone who's in the software business can agree with me that everything we do, really everything we do comes down to our clients, right?

It really is measuring, but we really shouldn't be inventing the world of how we should treat this real time metric. We really should be using the concepts of SLOs and SLIs and aeroboject to drive the actual needs of what our client wants. Right? For example, I can go on and on and on. Sorry.

Gaël Duez (15:05)
But I'd love to listen to your example.

Sarah (15:25)
Okay, so for example, if any of those fancy new feature we talked about is going to disrupt one of SLOs, then why are we really even pushing out the new features? We should be looking at how to stay true to our promises to our clients based on the service level agreements and service level objective that we have established already with them. And moreover, if for the past months we have had many late night incidents, should we really be pushing out new features? Shouldn't we be focusing on fixing the reliability and the resilience of our website? Again, using the concepts of SLO and our project to make business decisions. And sometimes I think engineers. Forget the enormous complexity that comes with supporting a four nine services. And if you really want to strive for a four nine services, and in this context of four nine of availability, I means a system being operationally available 99.99 of the time, which means that a maximum of 52.56 minutes of downtime per year. And what that means, per month is you only get to have 4.38 minutes of downtime per month. And downtime here, what we mean is we don't just mean the time we might have spent solving an incident, but also any time when the system is not working. For example, some people might have CI-CD set up to do automated upgrade security patches, or they are not allowed to do continuous rollout, so they need to have rollout schedules so yeah, I am really, really, I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions. Why are we pushing our new feature? It's just going to massively drive up our product's rate of carbon emission, right? So yeah, I really should stop, otherwise I can go on and on and on. But really long story short, believe, site reliability engineering principles are pretty sustainable already as lay out a set of disciplines that keep us honest in delivering what our clients truly want.

Gaël Duez (17:47)
It's just that. Let me think a bit. I think it's really, really enlightening the parallel that you make. And that's for sure that with the SRE framework and all this tool, the SLI, the SLO, could even go to the SLA, et  et we could copy past sort of this methodology or incorporate within it the environmental impact metrics. What I see two pitfalls at the moment is the first one. There is no such direct business consequences of not respecting an SLO when it comes to environmental impacts, at least until now and until we have got some serious regulations regarding carbon emissions or other environmental impacts, which are unfortunately not happening that much at the moment. Now, it could still be the case if there are some very strong internal commitment or if some company had very committed stakeholders requiring to meet a certain carbon budget, a certain water budget, etc. But my point is for the general company, the feedback loop is not as strong when we discuss environmental impacts than when we discuss reliability, site reliability impacts. That will be my comment number one. And please feel free to comment. What I would just add also on top of it is that, and you're going to hate me for this, do we always need 99.99 % of reliability to sell vegetables? If a simple cohort analysis will show that 99.99 % of our customers are sleeping because we are very focused on a single area for eight hours a day and they never visit a website. And I'm a bit provocative here, but I see your point. also see that sustainable leach should also help challenging what should be our SLO. And the dogma that I've been following thoroughly when I was CTO, like 99.99%. And I remember these dashboards and I remember this hard discussion with product managers wanting to push new features, et cetera. So it's really ringing a bell, 100 % resonating with my past experiences, what you've described. However, if I were to be in the same reading room today, I think I will challenge much more the SLO and maybe make it a bit more subtile, sorry for this poor use of word, by agreeing that SLO should be adjusted for time for certain categories of customers, because that will also dramatically help to reduce the system footprint. So that will be my comment number one and my comment number two. And feel free to disagree entirely with these two comments.

Sarah (20:41)
Okay. So the, so the first comment is that, because there's no strong sense to come to, be compliant with the SLOs that people set out for the green software metric or something that people will not be as willing to like uphold what promises they've made. Is that, I getting that correctly?

Gaël Duez (21:06)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Sarah (21:07)
Yeah, you know what, like… I think sometimes SRE principles are more than just a technical set of problems that we're trying to solve. They are more of a cultural problem as well. And it really is trying to solve cultural problem between teams, how to get teams to work together, how to get everyone to understand that reliability of a system is our one true goal, right?

That is not just so for self-ingenious who are just pushing our features, they need to understand how difficult is it to support their own features, right? So I think SRE is a great set of disciplines, but people sometimes forgot to look at the other side, which is a massive cultural problem, right? Like having people to buy in on this of principle is not that easy.

Sarah (22:00)
And I think that can be said about having people to buying on green software slightly as well. But I just think it's so important to put a message out there that we are ready to treat this important metric as one of the signals that SRC already tracking. And we already have this framework of SLO census lie and error budget to really consider how reliable and how reliable not even just in the sense of availability and resilience, but how reliable we are with the promise to our clients of how much carbon our thing should be emitting. So I think it's a lot easier to say than done. And when we talk about SRE, a lot of the time people forgot the culture side of the clash people have when they start bringing SRE principles. So yeah, I do agree with what you just said. It's really hard for people to stay compliant without the regulations. But the message we want to get out there from the book is that there is this framework. It's being tried and tested. It's working. And we should now reinvent. I think that's the message. And then I think for the second question, right, is about the wheel.

Like you want a full night services, but just for the eight hours that your customers are maybe awake. But I think that's not how availability work because availability is soft, like average for months. So for example, like you, you are building an internal web app and, and then the, the, the user of those internal web app lives in, I don't know, in Singapore, right?

Do you really need those web app running when those people has come home? And then you would take the average of all availability, not just the eight hours they're working, but then the time they're not working. So I think that just means you really are not aiming for four nine services. is, I really feel like people use four nine as a badge of honor to say, hey, my service for nine is so complex we really shouldn't be using four nights as a badge of honor. Like you really need to figure out exactly what's needed for your clients, not like what you want to do, right? Similar to like the whole embodied carbon argument, people...

Gaël Duez (24:27)
Absolutely.

Sarah (24:32)
Want to use the latest and greatest technology to build a mobile app. But do you really need that though? Like if you're just having, I don't know, like a news reading website, you don't need the latest chips or the latest technology to run that kind of app. So, so yeah, I think it's all about compromise and trade-offs and, and it is hard for engineers because it is a lot of fun to work on the latest stuff. Yeah.

Gaël Duez (24:56)
Absolutely. And it's part of the cultural game, I fully agree. Now, just going through all this very interesting straight of thoughts around SRE, implementing this SRE framework, tested and reliable, as you said, requires to be able to monitor and to monitor, there is also the question of to observe and observability. So my first question would be did you notice any significant improvements in monitoring the environmental impacts of the code in production? Because this monitoring is a prerequisite to implement all this SRE framework that you've mentioned before. And you touched upon this point earlier in the episode. So what are the trends regarding monitoring at the moment? And maybe you want to add observability. mean, answer it the way you want.

Sarah (25:51)
So yeah, I think we have made good progress, really, really good progress in this space. Even though, again, I already said, we still don't have that standardized real-time carbon metrics, right? Well, we are seeing more and more projects popping up around in the cloud-native space, in the Kubernetes space. Now we have Kepler, which use EBPF to work out the real-time power consumption for Kubernetes workload. You're probably thinking, yeah, but… Power consumption doesn't take into account the carbon intensity of the sources, right? So again, we are making progress, but not to where we want to be yet. But it's great to see those progress. And of course, I have to mention SCI right? We have now SCI being recognized as an ISO standard, not just universities are teaching about them, but a researcher team in Germany has now extended OpenTelemetry Java agent to generate SCI score automatically, which is really, really neat.

And yeah, so I think we have seen significant improvements in the space and the second sort of like the second tale of the questions about observability. So yeah, I guess like, again, I should spend the better half of an hour to talk about how great monitoring is, but the world has now slowly moved on to observability. And so should we slightly? And right before we get too excited, let's take a step back and then let's discuss what is the difference between monitoring and observability. And to borrow the phrase, all you used earlier, this is a million dollar question that every SRE has been brewing over for the past couple of years. So yeah, it's very nerve wracking, but yeah.

Gaël Duez (27:48)
We're gonna get rich!

Sarah (27:53)
Anyway, hopefully I don't get it wrong trying to explain what the differences are. So as we all know, microservices architectures are our favorite frenemies. They have not just brought us incredible agility and speed to push out new features, new way for the team to work as a team to collaborate, but they've also made our system rather complicated. If anyone at home can look up something called the Romsfield Metrics, it's basically a framework not initially designed for software engineering or software operations, but a paradigm that has been broadly applied in different fields across various So the framework can help us get a better grip on our understanding of uncertainty and certainty when we are making decisions rise of four quadrants basically divided into like knowns, knowns, knowns, unknowns, unknowns, etc. So yeah, so traditional monitoring is really, really good at helping us figure out a set of problems, knowns and unknowns, which is quite mouthful, but I'll give you an example. If we have a monolithic application experiencing performance issue, we are probably know which hand of metrics that we need to instrument and monitor. And for example, it could be a CPU problem. And what that means is we then need to set up a plot of graph, maybe set up an alert, monitor the CPU usage of applications to make sure our system never become overwhelmed. And well, probably everyone can agree that the issue of an overwatt CPU is very well established problem that many people have already faced before. So generally speaking– It's a relatively painless bug to solve because CPU usage is a metric. We already know how to monitor and the problem itself is well-astooned. However, bugs can become very, very tricky really quickly as we move through the quadrants to problems that are known as unknowns and unknowns.

Think of it this way, right? If you're a mobile developer, and what kind of metrics and dashboard do you need to set up to detect an issue that only affects the Pixel 7a in Taiwan, right? And you as a mobile developer, you probably don't just support one generation of the phone, but you support the past five generations and maybe different flavor of Android phones as well, right? And Taiwan, it's just one small country. There are so many other countries that you have to support. So again, traditional monitoring does need a bit of spruce up as it's really, really hard to predict what could have gone wrong and where things might have gone wrong. And you guys know how much I love making analogies. My favorite analogy for debugging an unknown problem is to think of it as a murder mystery without any clues So yeah, what is observability?

Observability originated from something called the control theory. Specifically, we define it as a measure of how well the internal state of a software system can be understood from its external outputs. So the way we can think of it is that observability will not just help us identify that something has gone wrong, but where and why something has gone wrong. So in green software terms, we want all this. We want to be able to pinpoint exactly where in our system maybe is a process that has violated our green promises to our clients, right? And we don't also just want to know why, we want to know where and how so we can fix it.

So this emerging topic is again another set of like thinking and principles that serve as a really good exercise for us to start thinking about how exactly will we fit into the space, if that makes sense. And again, why are we reinventing the wheels?

Gaël Duez (31:55)
In me, again, as you say, and it makes me think that this is a big, rabbit hole and I really want to dive into it, but I cannot because you're not supposed to do too long podcast episode and because otherwise my boss wouldn't be happy, my shareholders wouldn't be happy, my advertising companies wouldn't be happy. But the good news is I don't care. I've got an answer of these. So let's ask the question. connecting when you mentioned observability and sustainability, it was really, really connecting two dots in my mind regarding the unknown and the unknown unknown, which is exactly the issue we've got with the carbon intensity of most of the electricity grid. I the question is not we want to monitor most of the time. If you look at electricity maps, and sorry, you can have the same with what time. I'm not advocating for one solution or the other. What strikes me all the time is how much unknown we've got. And even when you zoom in most of the time, it's in many, many countries, it's still country level So when we are trying to take decisions, with an SRE framework, for instance, as you mentioned, we are facing a lot of unknown. And you can even go further with the unknown of the embedded carbon, because with the supply chains today, it's really wild guess to assess what is a true amount of carbon or water or rare resources that are embedded in any piece of equipment. And every time that someone actually does it chemically, to reverse engineering the composition of an IT equipment, they discover new things which add the impacts. And I had beautiful examples recently where people were like, product carbon footprint is so far away from what we are experiencing in our lab. But anyway, sorry, I'm rambling. My turn to be too talkative. My point is, it's very, very interesting to embrace all of this. Observability approach because in the sustainability world, we know that we don't know that much. Now, my question, because there is a question, is do you believe that we sort of embrace fully this observability approach and onboard it within this SRE framework that you mentioned before? Or do you believe that because this is a nascent area, and sustainability, carbon awareness, water awareness, resource awareness are also nascent areas or topics. Adding the two of them will create way too much complexity and people will sort of reject it like it's not mature enough, come back in 10 years when things will be clearer, more structured, easier to use. That's a one million dollar question. Another one. We're going to get very rich at the end of this episode.

Sarah (34:59)
Haha. Why not? Again, I, don't know, speaking, speaking as someone who does write code every day in enterprise setting. what's really important for me as an engineer is that there, there definitely should be space and time for deviation, right? That you can't always be following like I know other people hate the word best practices but you can't always be following what someone at a completely different organization say the best practices is right. We need to allow time and space for people what best practices mean for them in their context and I agree that while everything is very convoluted there's too many unknowns, unknowns not just in necessary world in the observability space, we figuring out what's going on with our systems. But like, again, you were saying like, the carbon awareness, water awareness and all that. But it's just so important that we just keep tap on each other. Right? Because I personally don't see observability take a backseat. Like it's going to be how production systems are being run in the future. And then sustainability, I mean, we're on a podcast called Green IO is going to stay, right? So how do we make sure two disciplines that maybe things very, Orthogonal, orthogonal but move up at the same time, right? Like we should still be orthogonal, but we should not be more than orthogonal, if that makes sense. Like we just have to keep tap because it is two separate issues, but there's a lot of overlap and then synergy to share. But it's just important to know why two fields of engineering, these two fields of engineering will have to coexist in the near future. And it's time to make sure we keep tap on each other. Right. And hopefully, observability can influence how green self-engineering field evolved and vice versa. I don't know whether that's the answer you look for.

Gaël Duez (37:11)
I was not looking for any specific answer. I'm really enjoying the conversation. It might be a bit conceptual, but for whoever has coded I think it will ring some bell. Now you mentioned, and I want to have just a bit of time to talk about the book, but I've got one last question related to exactly what you mentioned right now, which is the Green Software Engineering principle. We had a discussion on the trends and the future tools and framework that should be used. I mentioned in introduction that you are actually the chair of the principles of Green Software Engineering Committee. Can you tell us, because we do love insider information, that we can trade yet for another million? So could you tell us more about the new area where you focusing and maybe some changes that you foresee in this principles?

Sarah (38:09)
Okay, I'll try to be short, sorry. I do just want to say that it's principle green software engine, just principle green software. anyway, so some of the area we're focusing on. I'm pretty sure you probably have heard about green software patterns. So Leah Matthew, who I work very closely with is now one of the coaches for the patterns. A loan was Francisco. And they're both amazing. I love working with them. Really great to see them thriving in Green Software Foundation. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, principles and patterns have always been a very tightly working group and where we meet very regularly to talk about principles and patterns. And principles, after we published version one, sort of come to like a natural end. We still answer to loads of questions. We now have loads of different translations to different languages. We have French, we have Dutch, we have Italian. I think we also have Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. It's absolutely incredible to see the commitment from not just GSF, but then the wider community on translating the principles, principles of So we're sort of like at the tail end of like where the project is for the moment, but now all our energy is on patterns. And I don't want to spend too much time talking about patterns. I'm hoping maybe like, Gaël, you can invite Leah and Francisco to talk about patterns when they reach like a natural milestone. But right now the main focus is about patterns. And you're probably thinking, you keep saying the word patterns, what is green software patterns? So patterns are set up of like vendor and tool agnostic best practices that people can do when they are trying to achieve green software principles.

So that's sort of how I see patterns. They are a set of best practices from a persona sort of view and how to achieve the three Holy Trinity's of Greens of Virginia, which is carbon efficiency, electricity efficiency and hardware efficiency and carbon aware. sort of was happening with principles and patterns.

Gaël Duez (40:00)
Hardware efficiency. A true focus on pattern. And fun fact, before you actually mentioned it, I was taking notes and the note was Leah plus second semester 2025. I guess. So you say. I guess that we are really aligned here that once the work is finalized enough, they will be more than welcome to be on the show. And that's crystal clear that you focus on pattern. Maybe it's time to leave or wrap it all. Honestly, I think I could spend another hour discussing with you, there are also… much smaller second part of this episode or at least a few questions I wanted to ask directly related to the book. So if you don't mind, we will move on and I'd like to ask you five questions, but I've got a very hard challenge for you. Are you ready to tackle it?

Sarah (41:11)
Yes, and I do think we shouldn't have the poor class too long. So I'll speak quicker and I'll shorten my answers. And if we think a question's not working out, let's just can it.

Gaël Duez (41:15)
Ha ha ha ha. So the challenge is one sentence answer. You can do it. So I don't have the options to put some music like, and I'm a terrible singer, so I won't do this. But a few questions I wanted to ask you about the book, because also brings valuable information about

Sarah (41:25)
Okay, wow. I can do it, I can do it.

Gaël Duez (41:49)
its reception and what it says about the current trend in green software. But my first question is, well, you the first feedback is commercial success. So can I ask you how many copies were sold or distributed?

Sarah (42:02)
So unfortunately, I actually don't know. But what I can tell you is that the book has now been translated into Spanish and it's in process of being translated to both simplified and traditional Chinese. So, know, sorry, mom, you still need to read my book.

Gaël Duez (42:20)
Well, that's usually a positive sign because you don't start translations if it's a flop.

Sarah (42:27)
Yes, and there's also, why is it called? An audio book version as well. Forgot to mention that.

Gaël Duez (42:34)
Okay, so if someone from O'Reilly listens to this episode, we would love to get the figures, especially if they're really good, but I know that they're not bad because I've seen the, you know, as I say, the line and people queuing up to get a book signing and yeah, a lot of traction around, but that was okay. That was me being very curious. My second question, which chapters are most suited for a version two? According to you and maybe your co-author if you started to discuss it.

Sarah (43:01)
We haven't, so this is from me and I apologize to Anand and Zara. But probably I would say again, monitoring chapter, because a lot has happened. We now have like real time EVPF way of getting power metric for Kubernetes workload. So there's a lot of interesting space to explore out there. And measurement, because it can definitely do a bit of sprues up. It's already a great chapter, but a lot has happened in this phase. And I guess again, GreenOps right? I think we got to do what FinOps are doing. We need to have the formalized principles and framework written down in a way that's like bite-sized. People can just use it. So I think that's probably the three chapters I think could really do with some spruce up if we're going to do a V2.

Gaël Duez (43:51)
Thanks lot for you, very direct and honest answer. And my last question will be, what's next?

Sarah (43:57)
I am going to make the same joke again. sorry, everyone who's already heard this joke. But what I'm doing next is I'm continue my tour as a rock star talking, signing and hopefully singing about all the good work Anne Sarah and I did for the book.

Gaël Duez (44:15)
Ha ha ha

Sarah (44:19)
So yeah, personally, I will be at QCon London early April on the sustainability track. And then I'm heading off to Devol XX in London in May. And most excitingly, hopefully go to in October in Copenhagen with Zara. This will be third time meeting Zara in real life. So it's very, very exciting. So yeah, that's probably what's next for me.

Gaël Duez (44:38)
Woohoo!

Sarah (44:47)
And yeah, I spent a little bit more time in the how to get SCI into the outer space is probably something I would like to do as well.

Gaël Duez (44:56)
Hmm. Yeah, got it. Congratulations for joining QCon And I must admit that I'm pretty proud because in QCon this year, QCon London, I will have, as far as I know already, two of my former guests speaking because Ludy Akue is also deliver talk about sustainability in IT. So I take it as a very positive sign and I'm very happy with it.

And among all this great news of you talking and being able to push the message and to raise it onto the asm among crazy crowds of fans yelling at you and sending flowers on stage.

Is there any positive piece of news that you'd like to share to close this episode?

Sarah (45:48)
I guess, I actually, don't know. I feel very being put on the spot, but I guess the most positive thing is that, I guess like a quick thank you. I know it's so cheesy. We have enough cheesiness already, but it is a good, a great thank you to every single person I've met in the past year to talk about Green Software to talk about the book and the energy, the synergy and like, and I think you said,

Gaël Duez (45:51)
You don't have to you don't have

Sarah (46:15)
Something, I can't remember exactly the word you said earlier, but what's so great about like, we know climate problems are hitting us hard in the face and the world is on fire. We're getting flooding every other day. But then the positive energy that everyone has to say, if we just get our ducks in a row, we can solve this problem. And that is my feeling that I got from everyone. And it's amazing. It's just amazing. And that's something. I think is a great news that I'm hoping we're hoping to encourage anyone right to get into the green software space. And yeah, it's one of the most amazing space you will feel so welcome. So so yeah, it's that does that count as a good news?

Gaël Duez (46:59)
very good news to close the episode. And once again, thanks a lot for joining. Thanks a lot for joining this episode. Thanks a lot for joining several Green IO conference. all the great work that you're doing looking forward to seeing you again later this year.

Sarah (47:14)
Thank you, No worries

Gaël Duez (47:16)
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know, it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but it's worth it. One single rating on a podcast platform equals 1000 likes on YouTube. Maybe this is why they made it a challenge to use, but I trust you to succeed. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other software practitioners seems also good idea to provide them with inspiration on GreenOps, SRE, observability and the likes. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to spread the word to more responsible technologists. 

In our next episode, I will welcome Boris Kamazayoshikov to debrief all the announcements made about sustainability at the Paris AI Action Summit, starting with the release of the AI Energy Score. Stay tuned. 

By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the Green IO Podcast and its newsletter. The link is in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. And one last thing. Visit greenio.tech to check the next conferences we organize. Singapore is in one week and its full agenda is now available. New York is in one week and many speakers have been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket to any Greenio conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability and reliability. The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, Gaël Duez welcomes Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki, 2 experts in Kubernetes who are also pillars of the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability workgroup. 

This episode might beat the record of acronyms: KEIT, CNCF, TAG … And yet Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki provided crystal clear explanations when they covered: 

   🍳 Why Kubernetes is a lot like a restaurant, 

   ⛈️ The challenges with sustainability in cloud computing, 

   🛠️ The CNCF KEIT project, 

   🌱 CNCF’s reorg and what might happen to the TAG Environmental Sustainability,

    💪 The power of open source communities, 

And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 6th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Flavia (00:00)

I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year, it was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, join forces to build something together

Gaël Duez (00:16)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript are in the show notes You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech.

Cloud computing is nothing but material. It is just someone else's computer, as a popular quote says. Yet, using cloud services comes with its specific challenges for whoever is willing to seriously monitor its environmental footprint. And with the rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions, came extra layers of abstraction and remoteness with the bare-metal servers which ultimately compute and store the data.

One of these extra layers is the use of containers in the orchestration system. And they have been massively adopted in software engineering and cloud operation, the so-called DevOps. The software containers market is now a multi-billion US dollar industry with a double digit gross rate. Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability, and reliability.

Flavia (01:41)

Thank you.

Gaël Duez (02:08)

The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, I'm glad to have two experts in Kubernetes, by far the most used container orchestration solution in the world.

Gaël Duez (02:24)

Flavia and Niki who will be at CubeCon 2025 in London next week.

Gaël Duez (02:32)

Flavia is CTO at Agnostic and a tech lead in the CNCF TAG Sustainability Screen Reviews Working Group. She has decades of experience in software engineering, and in her early days, she co-authored several O'Reilly books on AWS and also built an IoT platform She is originally from Argentina and now lives in Utrecht, Netherlands. Niki Manoledaki is a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, where she's part of the platform engineering team but she is also an environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker and a community facilitator, starting with co-chairing the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tags Green Reviews Working Group. She's based in Barcelona, Spain. And fun fact, reflecting the 2024 year for the Green IO Podcast, I was concerned by the lack of Spanish speaking guests in the lineup. And I've realized that in 2025, there are a majority so far. So I do hope that all this episode will help spark meaningful conversations, both in Spain and in Latin America. And at some point I will have to consider hosting a GreenOil conference in Barcelona, Or maybe in Amsterdam first.

Niki (03:48)

Barcelona is a great place to host conferences. We do have the Mobile World Congress already happening. Actually, it's happening soon.

Gaël Duez (03:57)

I also happens in...

Flavia (03:57)

It would be nice when there's a train that goes from here to Barcelona, but they're still in progress.

Gaël Duez (04:05)

I know. At least Paris is well connected by train, both from Barcelona, the Netherlands, UK, etc. So at least for Green IO Paris, it will be easy to join by train. That being said, hello, both of you.

Niki (04:19)

Hello.

Flavia (04:19)

Thank you for inviting us.

Niki (04:21)

Yes, it's great to be talking with you both today.

Gaël Duez (04:23)

Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting episode. And my first question might sound a bit dumb, but could you explain Kubernetes to our non-ops audience for a start?

Flavia (04:37)

There's maybe an analogy that I read once and I thought it's pretty clear. If you think about a very busy restaurant where you have a lot of guests and you need to make a lot of food and you need to organize this so everything comes out. So there's enough food for everyone at the right time. can think about Kubernetes in that way. Kubernetes is the chef organizing all the cooks. You have maybe the containers can be thought of as the individual chefs. And each individual chef has to be in charge of making one specific dish. And then you have the nods, which are the kitchen stations for different purposes, like a kitchen station for grilling, another for baking, another for chopping. And then the pods are like a team of cooks working on one single order. like in Kubernetes, you need to handle load or scaling properly, right? You need to make sure that the orders go to the right people so that they don't get overloaded. You need to put more cooks on a specific dish which is more popular, et cetera. If one group of cooks have a problem with something, then there's always. Yeah, the authority and the organization to fix that. So concepts like scalability, reliability, you want your meal to get to the table and on time. Those are maybe nicely included in this metaphor.

Niki (06:34)

And just remember for listeners who may be less familiar with the cloud, we're talking about hundreds of servers. So hundreds of computers and, how do you get the dish, which is the, application that a user is trying to, to access, available for hundreds if not thousands of users. So we need to make sure that this application is available on every server. And that's what Kubernetes does is it orchestrates that all of these dishes are available at all of the tables. So all of the applications are all of the servers for everyone to be able to enjoy them.

Gaël Duez (07:16)

Got it. And now that you've mentioned all these servers, let's go to our main topic, which is what are, according to you, the top sustainably challenged running containers and maybe more specifically Kubernetes.

Niki (07:32)

So monitoring and auto scaling is what I would say the two branches of sustainability in Kubernetes. So we need to make sure we run everything as efficiently as possible. So we need to make sure resources are allocated in the most efficient way. So to do that, we need to be able to observe these resources how much CPU, how much memory, energy, and various other things. And then on the auto scaling side, we need to ensure that we are not deploying more than what you need. So everything needs to be basically packed together as tightly as possible so that we don't have idle resources just laying around and not being used.

Flavia (08:23)

So that's a really good document. And I hope that these resources translate around what you are being used.

Gaël Duez (08:30)

And is it the case today? Because I've seen some numbers in non-scientific studies, so I won't quote them here, but saying that in general, we are facing a massive over-provisioning of resources due to auto-scaling and all of this, is it true or is it a urban legend according to your experiences?

Flavia (08:51)

Yeah, it is very true. Last time I was at FOSDEM giving this talk and I asked people, did it ever happen to you that you found servers that were running that were not they didn't let me finish my sentence. Everybody was like, yeah. So, I mean, yes, this is, this is a very common problem. And I think it roots from the fact that, ever since we started using cloud, we can spin anything, anytime very easily without realizing the consequences immediately in terms of, yeah, not only price, but impact the environment

Gaël Duez (09:36)

And this tendency to overuse them, how can we fight back, especially from a sustainability angle? I know that both of you, you've been working on a project named KEIT which, the goal to automate the monitoring of the energy consumption, but maybe it goes beyond and it goes all the way to carbon estimates. So you will correct me if I'm wrong

Flavia (10:02)

So with KEIT, we are basically showing in what way your software and infrastructure and hardware cause an impact and what is source of this impact. Basically we use the software carbon intensity formula which is an ISO standard it considers three aspects. It considers the energy consumed by the software. It considers the carbon intensity of the energy used and the emissions of the hardware. in a way, you can see with the software carbon intensity, you can see where you have the most potential to improve. Or at least you can, you can observe it. can make changes and then you can improve. You can see as well which part of your software is, is generating most emissions. For example, looking at different namespace, looking at how many nods you have, et cetera.

Gaël Duez (11:06)

OK, got it. And my question is, where does this number come from?

Niki (11:11)

From the past two, three years while I've been building the CNCF environment sustainability TAG I've worked on the open source technologies that underlie the KEIT project. So I haven't worked on the KEIT project directly large part of what it's based on is open source tools that I've been maintaining or helping to build. And that includes, for example, Kepler, is an energy monitoring tool within Kubernetes. that is a tool that we could get very technical. Like really, some of the measurements from the kernel of the server. We basically, through Kepler, we're able how much energy is being consumed on the server and what is it linked to? which application is emitting or consuming this energy, which is measured in millijoules. So that's one of the components of the software carbon intensity specification to the same of that we have.

Gaël Duez (12:26)

Niki, just to clarify, I've got a bunch of questions regarding KEIT. The first one being, when you extract the energy consumption from the kernel, is it a measurement or is it an assessment via some sort of a low-level model?

Flavia (12:45)

You have both options because either have the, I don't know what it stands for, but the RAPL

Niki (12:53)

Running average power limit.

Flavia (12:54)

Okay, yeah, so component in the chip which lets you measure the energy consumption of the hardware or if not the nice thing of Kepler is that there are models to estimate them if you don't have a chip with the RAPL. But yeah, in general, course, everything is an estimation. even this RAPLE measurement. It measures only, I believe, the CPU but not everything else around it. So we do have to accept as engineers, even if we don't like it, that everything is an estimation and just work from there. It's better to have estimations than to have nothing.

Niki (13:41)

Yeah, it's a model, right? So everything is a model. Some models are more useful than others. there are so many different ways to measure energy consumption. But then there's embodied carbon and the energy that went into building the physical components of the server, for example. But as Flavia mentioned also, we do have gaps there are gaps such as networking. like gateways and other networking components are notoriously hard to measure. I know there's different communities, like different open source communities, and there's conversations amongst us, but still networking is something a lot of people are working on and that is really difficult to measure.

Gaël Duez (14:34)

So, if I understood right how KEIT works, you've got this energy consumption, either via RAPL or via other estimated model, that you translate into carbon emissions. Maybe this is the missing point. I guess you're using solutions like Electricity Maps or WattTime. Am I correct to assume this?

Flavia (14:56)

Yes, exactly.

Gaël Duez (14:58)

Okay, and then you add on top of it the embedded carbon from the servers, but you could not really include all the networking part. Is it correct summarize what you've said before like this?

Flavia (15:11)

Yes, yes, I think so. So it's those three sides of it and their limitations, I would say, almost in all three parts of the formula, because for the embodied emissions, for example, it's very difficult to get information, already difficult to get embodied emissions, but they are usually incomplete because there's not information about the disposal or the recycling of it. It's not disclosed by data centers or by cloud providers, or they don't say how many years the hardware is being used because that also has an impact on the embodied emissions.

Gaël Duez (15:54)

And do you use the data from the manufacturers or do you have other sources of data?

Flavia (15:59)

We use Boavizta, which is from a French, non-profit. so they have a whole database of the different hardware. so they have an API. You can say, I have this. I don't know, instance type. Tell me what are the embodied emissions. in KEIT we do that dynamically because the instance types can change to include this in the formula and calculate the SCI score.

Gaël Duez (16:33)

Thanks for the clarification. And do you have any success stories to share yet about how KEIT has been used in some organization or within some teams?

Flavia (16:44)

Well, I do have to say it's at the very beginning, project, but We are the moment working with one client, which is the Consumers Association, a non-profit in the Netherlands. so we installed it because basically you have your cluster, can deploy pretty easily and then you have an overview of your score. But we also added this widget to show the number of nods that you're running. And then we immediately saw like, okay, we're running too many nods in an environment which is just for development. So we are now working on improving that on setting up carpenter consolidation to make sure that only the necessary nods are being used at a certain time that's a very, for me, very nice example where it's helping.

Niki (17:43)

And at Grafana Labs also we're deploying Kepler at scale. It's quite challenging because Kepler for example, we mentioned, which is one of the components in the SCI and it relies on certain information that it should be able to fetch from the kernel but in the public cloud such as AWS, example, or GDP or Azure, this information may not be accessible. So there's certain other estimate methods that it needs to use. So all this to say that running this energy and carbon estimation models at scale is very difficult. And from my side at Grafana Labs, We are trying to run this at scale and kind of find which issues we come across and how can we deploy it in a production environment with as little issues as possible. So all of this is still a work in progress, but it's really great that we can come together in the open source community and kind of exchange this knowledge.

Gaël Duez (18:56)

For the clarification that this project is still an early stage project. People interested in this specific project, they can join you at TAG sustainability group. And actually that leads me to a question I wanted to ask in the beginning of this interview could you help us maybe make some sense of the true alphabet soups around CNCF What is CNCF? What is TAG? What is the Green Reviews work group, for instance?

Niki (19:26)

So the CNCF stands for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. it's a project actually of the Linux Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization that hosts a lot of open source projects. And the CNCF was created, I think in 2015, to host Kubernetes when it was

Flavia (19:41)

I think 2015 took host Cabrera's when the organization was initially created by the...

Niki (19:49)

Initially created by Google and then was donated to the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation created the CNCF to host it. And then other projects were hosted also by the CNCF such as Prometheus, which is a monitoring, well, a time series database for monitoring metrics. And then other projects joined and now there's, I don't know, like maybe dozens if not hundreds of sandbox projects. I'm not really sure on the number. But Kepler, which we talked about previously, is one of these sandbox projects that was donated by Red Hat and Intel the CNCF. So then with different subjects around this tool such as security, there was the creation of are technical advisory groups. And one of these tags that was created two years ago is the environmental sustainability TAG. And in this TAG, we promote and advocate for tools and use cases around cloud native sustainability, including Kepler, for example, and KEIT and other things like the SCI, the software carbon intensity specification. We talk about this at KubeCon, one of the biggest conferences that is related to the CNCF and FOSDEM as well. There have been talks about this cloud native sustainability tooling.

And finally, we come to about a year and a half ago, we wanted to have a technical project where we can really get into the nitty gritty of how do you deploy Kepler? How do you link carbon emissions metrics such as WattTime and Electricity Maps, how do you get the embodied metrics from Boavizta and how do you calculate the rates of the software carbon intensity of tools and we created the green reviews working group. The idea for that is create reports or we report on the sustainability metrics such as energy use and carbon intensity and other more traditional metrics such as CPU usage and memory usage. we've been doing that with Falco, which is a tool. It's a security tool, a project hosted by the CNCF to work with the students and care for the students. And other things so we've been basically trying and innovating and just new ideas come, new people come to contribute their ideas, they want to try something, and we have this space to make it happen. And KEIT is kind of emerged from this work, I think. Flavia, maybe you can tell us more. yeah.

Flavia (22:53)

Well, we had this idea of making, we initially called it a sustainability plugin. So trying to reflect in a Kubernetes environment, the environmental impact of the infrastructure and software. And we a lot of ideas on things that we wanted to see there, only I thought it was pretty complicated. So I thought, how do we do this? And then I started looking around what's out there then I found the CNCF environmental sustainability TAG and I joined I saw this green reviews project and the software that was being worked on. I thought this is at least very good reflection of what we want to build. But for generic Kubernetes clusters. So I learned about the SCI and deploy actually maybe these things, because they are not so concrete, you don't see the power in it. But when I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year. It was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, join forces to build something together.

Gaël Duez (24:15)

Actually, it's an interesting mention that you've done because I wanted to ask both of you a bit more about how it is to run source projects and to have this open source community working together, especially for, I would say, greater good project. Just before we jump on this of questions, to understand clearly what the Green Reviews Working Group is. I understood well, it's a bit of a permanent brainstorming work group on everything related to sustainability within the CNCF space. Or does it also has, I don't know, sub-team fully dedicated to maintain or code or create new products. I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between this work group and the tools that you've mentioned before, such as Kepler or KEIT.

Niki (25:20)

So the environmental sustainability TAG is kind of the broader brainstorming group. In the Green Reviews working group, we are creating a benchmarking pipeline. So we are doing benchmarking tests for cloud native tools such as Falco.

Niki (25:40)

to measure the softer carbon intensity rates. it's very similar to KEIT essentially, and we run benchmarking tests measure the different factors of the software carbon intensity specification. So that's the runtime energy, the emissions impact, the embodied carbon, and all of this using a unit of work, so like a rate. So yeah, the idea was, to take the software carbon intensity ISO specification when it became public last year, and to create an example using cloud native tooling to show how it can be done in Kubernetes.

Gaël Duez (26:20)

Okay. And one last logistic question. If people want to join you, do their organization needs to join? Can it be done on a voluntary individual basis? Do they need to fill a form or how does it work concretely?

Niki (26:38)

It's fully open source, so everything is completely out in the open. a Slack organization for the CNCF. And if folks Google CNCF community invitation, they will get a portal to where they can put their email address and get an invitation to join the CNCF Slack. I know that a lot of organizations join the CNCF, but we don't require that in the TAG or in the working group. So anyone can join the meetings. The meetings are twice a month. And we do a lot of planning during those meetings. And we talk about the different pull requests that people are working on or that need to be reviewed. then we triage some of the issues And we do have like a agile workflow. So anyone is welcome to join. And then we have our GitHub repo where people can see issues that are open and that are beginner friendly. And we have the issues board where people can see which ones are next and ready to be picked up if they want to contribute. So people often will join for a bit, maybe pick up an issue, contribute a way, learn. And then maybe they'll stay for more long term or some people come for a bit just to like learn. So just like any other open source project, really we're looking for contributors and long-term maintainers and we're open to everybody.

Gaël Duez (28:22)

Talking about open source projects and Flavia mentioned it a bit earlier. FOSDEM celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Shall we say that everything is doing well for the open source community and maybe more specifically for the projects related to sustainability? Or are there some challenges that we don't necessarily see beyond the success?

Flavia (28:46)

Yeah, there's always challenges. especially that people find time to work on it. Because is an area where people get attracted to it because they want to do something good. They want to have a purpose. So you do find a lot of people wanting to join the environmental sustainability TAG or help in the green reviews project. But it's hard to find people who have the time or who are ready to spend some time on it.

Gaël Duez (29:23)

Flavia, before discussing more specifically the time constraints, I had a specific question regarding the KEIT project when I see how imbricated it is with other open source projects. How do you manage to build something that is so heavily relying on other components which are also open source?

Flavia (29:47)

Well, first of all, it's great to have those tools because otherwise we couldn't have built what we built. We just put them together. what we needed to check is the licensing to make sure that we are not infringing any of the licenses of the software that we are using. so far we've had good experience. for example, one of the projects that we are using is so there's electricity maps and there's an exporter for Prometheus to get that data into Kubernetes. It's called the grid intensity, From the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's also open source and there was something that didn't work exactly like we expected or we needed to make an improvement and we just made the change. Applied our PR. It was approved and problem solved. So in that sense, it can be easy because given the need, you can just make the changes yourself.

Niki (30:53)

I think this is the issue of open source tooling and how well maintained it is, or if there is enough contribution to keep it running is kind of a bigger problem in the industry and for Kubernetes and the Kubernetes ecosystem as well. Like even though a lot of these projects are hosted by the CNCF. Oftentimes, there isn't everything that you might need your use case. And maybe someone needs to find time to contribute back to the open source project. For example, like if there's a feature missing or if there's a bug. Oftentimes there needs to be that kind of instinct of like, okay, this is missing. I'm going to take some time to contribute upstream. Upstream meaning to the open source project. And that's how the tools can continue to exist. But there also need to be long-term maintainers who are sponsored by their company, maybe, who are given the opportunity to take time to contribute to open source projects as part of their work. one of the main challenges in open source projects, I would say is, people finding time to contribute to this project.

Gaël Duez (32:18)

Niki, that's very interesting that you mentioned people being employees of corporations, large or not, and having some of their professional time allocated to open source. Because I've been recently recording in releasing actually an episode on the WordPress sustainability group that has been quite brutally dismantled. And that was part of a bigger drama of WordPress governance it made me realize how much the WordPress community is dependent on automatic. Is it something that you fear also for the CNCF? Is it something that is more the exception than the rules or what is your? Yeah. Point of view on this dependency that we might find from time to time.

Niki (33:09)

the CNCF has managed to build a huge community of people who are excited and able to contribute to their projects. And this is an extraordinary feat of like modern technology and like community building. So I would say I'm not. I'm not worried about Kubernetes itself or the really large projects hosted by the CNCF, there's always an underlying worry or an underlying realization that we need to contribute back to what we're using. And maybe that's kind of part of the success of all these open source projects. if a lot of companies are depending on it for their operations and then they have an incentive to contribute back to keep things running. a sociological aspect, I find it fascinating

Gaël Duez (34:09)

And maybe because you've sort of already explained it, but if both of you, had to, I don't know, bring three ingredients to create the perfect recipe for a thriving open source community, such as the that you belong to, what would it be?

Niki (34:29)

Great question.

Flavia (34:30)

I would say purpose is one all these people also that you see in the open source community, like in conferences, like FOSDEM, they really believe in something. They are not just techies, but they, I mean, they are techies, but they, believe in the power of the people building something and being free and open. So purpose is one. Now what I was going to say, so everybody who is there really wants to be there, contribute to something bigger than themselves. And I wanted to mention because the TAG ecosystem in the CNCF now is going through a restructuring because well, after many years of the development of the Kubernetes software ecosystem, things changed. And so we used to have the TAG environmental sustainability, TAG security, TAG application delivery, and a couple more. And now this is all going to be restructured. Does this have anything to do with the current situation? Because the NCF, even if it's a… and nonprofits, it is based in the United States. Does it have anything to do with the political situation in the US? I don't know, maybe. So the TAG environmental sustainability will be renamed, will be part of a different TAG. My point being that even through all of this, there's all this bunch of people that I'm part of, which is want to continue. We don't care the naming. We just want to continue with what we are doing. I don't know in the case maybe of WordPress I don't know because I couldn't finish the episode of last time I don't know if the people who were working on it will continue because in the end it's all open source. You can still do what you want.

Niki (36:35)

I mean, I think that the open source community enables us to work on things that otherwise would be difficult to do on the day to day. Because there will always be changes in the business direction, for example. Whereas open source work means you can always get back to it and continue some work and do it for as long as the community decides to work on that. So it does give a lot of freedom. another thing I would say is that new problems require new solutions. think innovating in the open is a great way to build new solutions. For me, innovating in the open is the best way to really bright and motivated people involved to come together and try to solve this together rather than behind closed doors, which is what business often is like. So it's really great to be able to maintain those spaces. And I'm glad that the Green Reviews Working Group will continue to exist as a project in the CNCF, despite of the reorganization that is happening. And we'll know more around KubeCon Europe, which is going to happen in April

Gaël Duez (38:01)

Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and your feedbacks on how to run successfully in open source community. I could not not hear some or expectations regarding this reorganization? Do you already have some information which has been shared or will it all come as a big surprise at KubeCon Europe as you say there, Niki?

Flavia (38:22)

It was already shared, the reorganization. So there's going to be like five TAGS and sustainability will be part of, operational resilience, I think. So it will be more up to us to make this visible and to keep it going. the community is there, people want to improve. So we'll keep going.

Gaël Duez (38:57)

Concretely speaking, it's a general reduction of the number of TAG groups within the NCF, am I right? Or is it just specifically targeting the environmental sustainability TAG?

Flavia (39:11)

It's a reorganization of all the tags. So some are merged, some are new

Gaël Duez (39:13)

Okay. Okay, got it. And so now you've got bigger tags, five only, and I guess they will structure in subgroups, subworking group, like some of them working more on operation or resiliency, efficiency, sustainability, or how will all those different projects will be maintained with this single big TAG, for instance.

Flavia (39:38)

Yeah, there will be, I think, like sub-projects. in theory, working groups will continue running. They will just be part of a different TAG. So we will have to see if the chair of the talk where we are in, we hope that they all that is also someone who considers sustainability important. it's all volunteer work, but we get from the CNCF, we get resources for, for example, infrastructure and where to run our software, pipelines, our databases. So yeah, we'll see how this develops, but we all want to continue.

Niki (40:25)

I'm excited also to see how sustainability can fit in the operational resilience kind of story, includes, for example, it observability, more concretely, like traditional observability, as opposed to like carbon observability, right? I think it's interesting to see how it will become part of that operational resiliency story. think it might actually, in the best case scenario, might help folks to explain how sustainability fits in software.

Flavia (41:09)

It's software.

Niki (41:10)

I guess

Flavia (41:10)

I guess.

Niki (41:11)

If we're talking about resiliency, I don't think it's too far away. I'm hoping to learn from that. I think having closer proximity to other domains will mean there will be a lot of like cross pollination of ideas and lessons learned and more contributors maybe, maybe contributors who would not have approached sustainability, learn more about it by being in the same TAG. So I'm hoping to find like positives from this and I guess we'll talk about it more at KubeCon and we'll see how it will go.

Gaël Duez (41:52)

That's a good point and it's a very optimistic way to see things that I really enjoy. Maybe we will have to redo an episode in a few months or before the end of the year to see how, yeah, to be continued. Yes, absolutely. to understand a bit how things developed. The WordPress situation was a worrying signal, but it doesn't mean that all the open source community needs to be continued, shut down sustainability or reorganize it. So if you feel optimistic, that's great. And I think on these very positive notes we can close this podcast.

Flavia (42:29)

Yeah.

Gaël Duez (42:32)

I really want to thank both of you for joining and explaining both the projects you've been running, but also the way you've been dealing with these open source projects and how this open source community at CNTF works. that was really enlightening. So thanks a lot for joining the show today.

Niki (42:53)

Thank you so much for having us.

Flavia (42:53)

Thank you, it was fun.

Niki (42:54)

Thank you so much for having us.

Flavia (42:54)

Thank you, it was fun.

Gaël Duez (42:56)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it on social media and TAG your connections working in cloud operations and DevOps. If you attend KubeCon next week, this would also be a useful tool to kickstart conversations. And of course, don't forget to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. It helps us reach out to more soon-to-be responsible technologists. 

In our next episode, we will celebrate a birthday with Sarah Hsu. A year ago, her book, Building Green Software, was released. And she will tell us everything about its impact, the feedback she received with her co-author Anne Curie and Sarah Bergman, and the trends she sees in green software, including AI training and inference. Stay tuned! 

One last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. 

Green IO Singapore and Green IO New York are just around the corner, respectively in April and May. Early bird tickets are gone. But you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Lucky you. Just make sure to have one before the 50 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

 

This often heard sentence from product managers or CPOs, led to this dedicated episode on agility and sustainability where host Gaël Duez welcomes 2 seasoned agile coaches: Joanne Stone, the founder of Agilist 4 planet and the We Hope Magazine, and Joanna Masraff, co-organiser of the the Agilists4Sustainability meetup group, and the Agilists4Planet conference. In this interview, filled with positive energy, they covered: 

   🛠️ Sustainability twisted technics,

   🏃 Urgency vs sustainable pace of transformation, 

   🎯 Objectives or Key Results when incorporating Sustainability into OKR framework, 
   🎬 How to kick start sustainability transformation, 

   🔥 The importance of passionate people and influencers, 

   🧙 Agile coaches as alchemists of change.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 16th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Joanna Masraff (00:01)

I think this is where sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually, we need to take that step backward and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right?

Gaël Duez (00:24)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters, but we can't add more non-business requirements, and have agile teams. How many times did I hear this from product managers, CPOs or tech leads, not really knowing how to move from awareness to action? So it has been a while since I wanted to have a dedicated episode on agility and sustainability. And when Marjolaine Pillon pointed me into the direction of Agilist for Planets, I gladly connected with Johan and then Johanna about their work which was perfectly aligned with those questions. Joanne Stone is the founder of Agilist for Planet and founder also of the We Hope magazine. She has more than 30 years of experience in IT and was an early adopter of agile practices. She lives in Brooklyn, Ontario, Canada. And Joanna Masraff is one of her very early adopters.

Jo's journey in the agile world is marked by her role in co-organizing the Agilist for Sustainability meetup group and the Agilist for Planet conference. to be honest, sustainability has been part of a professional journey almost from the beginning with other topics such as inclusivity and equity. And she's also a co-founder of Green PO in the UK. I have also to tell you that I'm recovering from a pretty bad cold, so my voice is a disaster. But the great news about this episode is I'm not going to be the one talking as usual, so my guests will do. And anyway, I'm delighted to have them on the show. Welcome, Joanne. Welcome, Joanna.

Joanne Stone (02:33)

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Joanna Masraff (02:34)

Thank you very much for having us.

Gaël Duez (02:37)

Glad that we've eventually managed to have this recording.

Joanne Stone (02:40)

Yes.

Gaël Duez (02:43)

So maybe starting with the basics, you are both part of the Agilist for Sustainability group. is this group about and what is this NGO Agilist for Planet about?

Joanne Stone (02:55)

Go, go,

Joanna Masraff (02:56)

So Sustainability came about actually due to the XP 2023 conference because they had, was the first agile conference that we were aware of that had a sustainability track. So suddenly the group of us who were already working on agile sustainability got together and said, right, we're speaking at this conference. Let's gather ourselves together and let's actually create a group, a community because we have more, we know of a lot of people who are trying to do this work. So why not create a group to share the learnings that we're going through, the things that we're finding out, the things that we're trying, the experiments that are working, that aren't working. And so Agilent for Sustainability group was born. But before that, we actually had Agility Impact, which Joe Stone started. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Joanne Stone (03:52)

I guess I'll start off with Lisa Atkins has been very much a big supporter in terms of sustainability and Agilist and sustainability. if you're not familiar with her, she's done a lot of really great work in Agile coaching teams. She knew that basically from an agility perspective that us, Agiles, could do more She felt that we can work in certain disaster areas All over the world and at that point time when I was talking to her about it. This is when the Australian fires were actually happening and I got really curious as to how Agilist can actually be part some of these climate-affected changes and like how can we actually be part of something like that? And so I started basically interviewing tons of people all over the world. And Lisa kept on kind of like carrying this torch about how could we, how can we actually bring Agility, Agile Coaches in Sustainability. What she did then is she had been, I think she'd been tapping into a lot of people, a lot of stories all over the world. And she started a keynote panel back in 2022 in Nashville. And that got a group of people together and Yuda Eckstein who's been doing this work for a lot longer than a bunch of us have. She was there and we just kind of like started to get introduced to others who were doing that. And then the, so basically what we wanted to do and Joe was actually starting to talk about as well is bring this awareness of the work that great people are doing all over the world. So we met at the XP conference, and we just kind of like kept collecting their incredible, incredible stories of what they've done by using agility and with sustainability. So whether that's economic or environmental, we would say. And it's incredible the amount of people that are actually doing some of this work right now.

Gaël Duez (05:54)

And that's an interesting question because you mentioned some examples coming from using agility with a Tech for a good angle. And we tend here to focus quite a lot on green IT, which means making sure that IT teams and product teams in do take into consideration in the way that produce the IT services, produce the digital products.

some sustainability principles. how do you see the connection between agile and sustainability? And maybe it goes both ways. So could you elaborate a bit on it?

Joanna Masraff (06:30)

the way that I'm coining it now, which I think really works and everybody, as soon as I say it, they're like light bulb, right? Is that Agile has been bringing social sustainability to the workplace since it started. So if you think about Agile's true mindset underneath it all, which is what true Agilists talk about, if you know what mean, it's really about bringing collaboration, communication, and the people to allow divergent thoughts and divergence in people to be included within the solution, to allow everybody their own space to be who they are within the team that they work in. So really, this is the bottom line social sustainability within the workplace. So that link, that connection between Agile and sustainability, at least on the social side, has always been there. So it's really a case of expanding origin into the kind of economics and environmental spaces within sustainability.

Gaël Duez (07:33)

I love the idea that it's in the DNA of agility to embrace sustainably at least the social angle I've never considered it that way. But it makes perfect sense when you see how rooted in human focus values, I would say the agile principles and the mindset of agility is. So now how did you manage to onboard into it, also the environmental aspect of it?

Joanna Masraff (08:00)

So the way we see it and what we've had people try out, not many, let's be fair. This is very still kind of experimental stage, but we have had teams and people who inject sustainability into every technique that they use within the team. So I call it the sustainability twisted techniques. So for example, if we take Scrum, you can inject a sustainability goal into your product goal, into your sprint goal, into your definition of done, into your definition of ready. know, into every single user story that you have in your backlog, there can be an item that determines the metric that you're using to measure the sustainability of this piece of work, which you as a team have chosen beforehand. Or even taking it a step slightly higher, you can think about your team charter. What you as a team agree, matches to you when you start working as a team or at any point, working in a team, you can say, stop, really this it matters a lot to me. Let's inject this into into the DNA of what we do as a team. What we found though, which is quite interesting is that a lot of people are still in that awareness stage. They're not quite at that stage where they're ready to think about how they measure their carbon footprint off their software, which I'm sure, I mean, the people who are listening, you are the forerunners, right? So you're trying to help the rest of your teams get on board with what you're trying to do, I'm sure. So what we find is that a lot of teams start with something like accessibility in the sustainability arena, which is a bit sad for accessibility, because how long have they been knocking on the door saying, let's be more accessible? However, at least they're starting with something, right?

So it's interesting when we start talking about sustainability, especially when we start talking to product people, they think about the social sustainability angle much more readily than they do think about how they can make their products more environmentally sustainable. So this is where actually GreenPO work is kind of based in that space of raising the awareness as to what environmental sustainability and digital product means. And also how they can inject it into all of their processes and techniques that they're already using.

Gaël Duez (10:23)

A lot to unpack here. And I would love to ask you two questions, and they may be bit interconnected. The first one is, can you share some concrete example regarding the carbon footprint, regarding all the environmental footprint, or how you can create this, quoting you, agility twisted techniques, just to illustrate and to make it concrete what you've suggested. I really love the term actually. And the other question is, as you rightfully said, most of the teams, most of the company, they're still in awareness phase, sometimes even early awareness phase. So how would they kickstart with this techniques?

Joanna Masraff (11:07)

Sure. So concrete examples with regards to carbon footprint. We had a team who are measuring the carbon of their product. And so what they did is they injected that into their OKRs basically. So their overall goals for their year was to reduce the carbon impact of their products, which they managed to do just by having OKRs. I don't have specific numbers I can give you, but I do know that they did manage to reduce the overall impact of their product by injecting it just into their OKRs. However, on the other side, have had members of our meetup group, and Joe can talk more about this, I'm sure, who they tried to start it. They brought up the question in a retrospective, for example, and everybody was like, is that a thing? I didn't know that was a thing. I don't know how to do that. But she kept bringing up the question. And eventually what happened is that in the company, she found the other passionate individuals and they grouped together and they had a hackathon on it. So they had a hackathon on digital sustainability and the carbon footprint of their products. And they were able to figure out how to start measuring the impact of their product from a hackathon. So it's not a quick win. It's not, let's talk about this and something immediately happens, of course. But we have had quite a lot of our members kind of tell us of their stories, their struggles actually, and how they overcame them. You know, the continuous resilience towards the lack of knowledge and lack of awareness and how they kept pushing towards it becoming a part of the team's work.

Gaël Duez (13:02)

And Joanne, this is also the approach that you see quite a lot or  got different stories

Joanne Stone (13:08)

for me, it is about bringing the the planet into the conversations with the specific teams. So how can we bring that that conversation in so people can start figuring out how best to do some of this work. we trust the teams. Like we trust that there is a lot of intelligence within the teams that they can figure this out or figure out what is really super important for them. you know, those conversations can lead to towards concrete things that the team itself will actually do. And this could change from one team to another. think within some of the stories that we share, which is, which some of the agile coaches will do is we'll work with some of the leaders as well. So one of the big things is that we're in an entire system and that system is actually sometimes controlled by the shareholders or by the performance management, by the accounting and how they have to report on all the different stats, right? A lot of things are driven outside of the teams, is, can be really, you know, it's scary in a way, especially if you want to, you feel that you want to make a what we found is that some of the coaches that we're working with in the story with Carolyn's wife is probably one of them. Like she, she worked with some of the executives to start repositioning their purpose of the vision or their why.

Joanne Stone (14:38)

so that it's not profit over planet, but it's planet over profit. And so she got that as part of their strategy, So it started to become embedded within the actual culture of the organization. And those are really cool, because if you start embedding it within the culture of the organization, it then to come down to the team perspective. And we have something more than just a recycling program. I think what I find in what I get really frustrated about and I mean we have beautiful people on the ground We have developers we have coaches. We have so many people that are out there that really want to truly make a difference But yet they're stuck within this sort of like container and unable to control and do what they would like to be able to do Right, so it's really quite frustrating

Gaël Duez (15:27)

That's a very interesting comment because I wanted to ask a question to Joanna about when she mentioned OKR, if it was the O or the KR. And actually what you described is really the O, the objective. The overall objective is putting planet over profit, which is a conversation that hopefully will happen in many, companies in the next years, but honestly, that doesn't necessarily happen a lot. And I was about to ask a question to Joanna about the KR, which is that even if the objectives are not, you know, focused a lot on the planet, is there some leeway to do things, playing a bit with the key results, whether it's, I don't know, incorporating in the design phase, for the definition of ready, a person, with other metrics? Because we know that we talk a lot about carbon footprint since the beginning of the episode, but it's not always easy to measure carbon footprint. You could try maybe to make sure that any devices older than six years would still work on it or whatever. You've got different approaches. So my question first to you, Joanne, is do you believe that it's necessary to tackle the O first and that there is not that much room for key results or even in a regular company, in a company really focusing on making money at almost any cost an agilist can find some way to incorporate a bit of sustainability in their practices?

Joanne Stone (17:05)

It's where I think this is why Agile is, we've got a lot of background in terms of doing transformations, right? So what typically happens is we have a lot of people on the bottom level that really want to adopt this thing, right? So I don't care. It's Agile, AI, whatever the flavor of the day is, right? Really passionate about wanting to do this. And right now the passion in my mind is all around climate sustainability, right? And people are frustrated and wanting to do it. So the way that we've seen this work is like a bottom-up and top-down approach, right? yes, it's great if you can get the whole organization, if you're Patagonia, right? And you're able to do this through in, throughout. Right? The cultures change. It's beautiful. But we know that there's two different ways. Agilent, we always wanted it to be done from the top down because we know that that's where the biggest impact will be. And it'll be a lot faster if it's adopted from there. Because then all the systems that are required to support, you know, the objectives and it be passed down straight to the team. reality is that doesn't happen. Right? So it really has to start from the two different spots.

But I think from the bottom up, this is where your tech community is super smart. So they know that there is front end changes that they can make, the back end changes that they can make. They know that they can make changes at a lot of different levels. And so really it's back to them. I would be going at the team level having the first step as to what discussions do we want to have? Modify the product in whatever way that we feel that we can make it greener. If we don't know, can we research it? Can we come to podcasts like this, where I can figure out different ways? I was listening to one of your podcasts around how do you balance the energy, basically, and where can we host some of the servers so that it's more greener? And that was so brilliant. I think we have to go out and we have to figure out the different ways and different parts of our applications to make greener. But it could just start with a bunch of different ideas, a backlog, something that we can then incorporate every single sprint and then ask the question though, because from an agility perspective is how will we know it will work? So it is one of those things where we create experiments where we kind of look at and try and figure out what the results are that we want. So we run that experiment every single sprint to kind of see whether or not the results, we're gonna get the results and then we reflect on it and figure out where we need to go next after we've learned it. So that's the way that I would sit there and approach it. I don't think there's any concrete kind of way in terms of we start here in the front end or the back end or whatever the case may be from a tech perspective. I think you have to work with the team and the team's expertise and start getting them excited about doing this and start including it as part of the backlog so that they can start working on it. So that's the way I would kind of approach it.

Gaël Duez (20:21)

It's a great reminder that agility is about experimenting things and that we don't have necessarily to change the definition of ready or the definition of done, whatever, so my question might be to you, Joanna, is like, what kind of experiments did you experience in the different coaching situations that you've been doing?

Joanne Stone (20:25)

Yeah.

Joanna Masraff (20:44)

Yeah, absolutely. can I just jump and answer a little bit of the other question first, if that's okay. So just to bust a myth a little bit, because one of the things that you said, struck a chord was, you know, what key result can you use? Yeah. And actually cost generally you can use. So if you reduce your cost, you are making your digital product more sustainable.

Gaël Duez (20:50)

Be my guest.

Joanna Masraff (21:12)

So, and that is one of the ones which is a win-win-win, let's be fair. It's a win for the people who are interested, a win for the company, and it's a win for the planet. there's lots of studies out there that are ongoing and information you can get to show that being sustainable is profitable. So if you have some stakeholders who are, you're trying to talk about sustainability and they're coming back and saying, we don't want to do it or whatever, you can go to them and you can say, do you want to save money? Because this will save you money. Whether you care about the fact that we're destroying the world or not, that's up to you. But if you're only interested in money, then actually we can save you money by doing this. And I believe that that's actually one of the experiments that one of my coaches did was to actually look at their cloud costs as they reduced their energy use rather than trying to translate it directly to carbon. Because let's be fair, I'm sure most of your audience are aware that the figures that you get on our hyper scalers and our cloud providers are not correct when it comes to their emissions. So instead of looking at that, they actually chose energy. They reduce their energy usage a variety of different ways and managed to reduce their cloud costs as well.

That's just kind of one of the experiments I can remember off the of my head. So it's thinking about who are your stakeholders? What might they be interested in seeing and therefore setting up your experiments so you're not just kind of satisfying your own curiosity, but also you can help push the agenda for the planet towards your stakeholders as well. and I think this is where… sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually we need to take that step backwards and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right? And now I've forgotten the second question that you had.

Gaël Duez (23:21)

Let's put it another way. If I'm an agile coach, seriously convinced about the sustainability challenge and starting to work with an average team, not like climate denier, but not people waking up every morning thinking, how am I going to save the planet? Okay. Just average, nice folks. What kind of ideas should I put on the table for them to start thinking about it?

Joanna Masraff (23:45)

Yes, it's a great question. And I'm a little bit stumped by it, be fair. So in my mind, this brings us back to awareness, because it always starts with the awareness. one of the things that we've done at Anne Digital, so this is not a team level, this is more thinking about… and just to kind of go backwards a little as well is what you'll find, especially in Europe especially, is that a lot of companies do actually have something in their strategy now, which relates either to sustainability, net zero policies, or even responsible business, which is such a wonderful phrase, isn't it? Here's sarcasm. So maybe take that bit out because I might get fired.

Joanne Stone (24:34)

HAHAHAHA

Gaël Duez (24:35)

Keep it, but I will use AI a to mask your voice. And nobody will ever know if this is you.

Joanna Masraff (24:43)

That's it.

Gaël Duez (24:45)

So you see I've got a use case for AI.

Joanne Stone (24:47)

Hahaha.

Joanna Masraff (24:48)

Nice. So yeah, we're finding a lot of companies, especially in Europe, because of the new regulations, you know, they have some form of sustainability within their strategy. But there was some quote, I think it might have been Reuters that came out with it, which said something like, I'm going to forget the numbers. So I'm going to have to check it for you. it's 65 % of those businesses that have it in their strategy have no idea how to action that strategy. So they have it up there, but they think, you know, your recycling policies or cycle to work policies or, you know, electric car policies and things like this are going to solve that problem for it where of course it's not going to. So this is where you start with the start of your company's sustainable transformation where we believe you need your agile coaches.

What we did and digital is we started with an awareness week. So sustainability and inspiration week. We had various speakers from both inside the company and outside the company come and tell whoever wanted to attend to tell them about different aspects of digital sustainability. So it was one week this year and over 10 % of the company decided to come along off their own back, which was excellent. But we didn't stop with awareness. What we did then is we took that and we created an action week. So the action week was basically a discovery split over two days to allow people to come and take all this awareness that they had established and determine a very high level roadmap for the company as to how we can become more sustainable and create more sustainable products. So instead of it being, you know, completely a top down transformation, which we know, again, if you force change upon people, it doesn't work. What we did is we brought the strategy together with the passionate people at the bottom who were interested in what to change and how to make this change. So we created this high level roadmap. And one of the top items that everybody came out with was upskilling. So training for every different capability within the business.

So we're currently creating that training material internally, again, because then you have internal experts on specific areas that the rest of your company can go to. However, of course, there are specific people who are doing digital sustainability training that you can reach out to. But we're in the middle of creating these training sets among the different capabilities so that each different capability, starting with those who are interested, and then of course it will become mandatory as the company take on new policies and regulations. But everybody's going to end up going through this, but we start with the passionate people, the people who want to, so we're not forcing change upon them. We use those people as the influencers, the proud shouters of, I did this. You know, it was cool. I learned some really new stuff that was wonderful. You you use the power of the people rather than the power of command.

Gaël Duez (28:09)

But then it takes quite a lot of time mean, let me play a bit the devil advocates here, but basically this company had an awareness week, which then lead to an action week, which then lead to, we need to train people. And sorry to be a bit provocative here, but there is not a single gram of CO2 or water or material or whatever that has been saved so far. Am I right? Or they also managed to get some quick actions.

Joanna Masraff (28:37)

Well, the quick action was the CTO realized that he needed to clean up the cloud space. So that was great. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I know that that's what he, scooted off quickly to when he had that awareness as to how much money again, that he was losing because of the unsustainable practices with how we were using cloud. He was like, yes, we have to adopt this.

Gaël Duez (28:42)

Okay, that's good.

Joanna Masraff (29:05)

So we made a, not a denier, but maybe not a huge supporter, a bigger supporter, and we cleaned up our clouds. So not as much as I would like, and yes, it's a lot slower and I grind my teeth a lot, let's be fair. However, I believe it's the way to bring the people with us in the transformation.

Joanne Stone (29:23)

And I feel this urge of action, right? Like we gotta get in there and gotta do it, right? Because, know, the time is of the essence, right? And I think this is when we talk about agility, what I really like is the fact that we do these things at a sustainable pace so we don't burn ourselves out is one thing. the aspect of what Joe's,

Joe's saying is how do we inspire people to get into action? How do we get more people on board? what's the minimal amount of energy that we need to expand on to kind of get that going, right? That is indeed an approach where you can, you know, get everybody, the people who really want to be able to do, bring them all together in a room, talk about it, figure out exactly what we need to do and then start creating the plan. You know, get the leaders on board, know, realize that they made this, you know, my gosh, this is, this is the, this is the mess that we've created. You know, that, that starts to inspire people to get into action as well. But I think when you're asking the question, like I have a team, I'm an Agile coach, I don't care, Agile coach, Agile leader, person X, right? I want to do more work in from a sustainability, right, or to make

Joanne Stone (30:37)

like from a climate perspective or environment perspective, I want to improve what we're doing right now. And the thing that I've heard in and out of all the conversations that we've been interviewing people is the Green Software Foundation. So what Joe was saying, I think you were talking about this before too, but this is aspect of bringing in knowledge or awareness. You know as a team I might come in there and go, hey guys, let's just, why don't we go to the Green Software Foundation and learn exactly what's there. Take a course, one of us take it, let's do it on one of our learning days or whatever the case may be so that we can learn more as to how we can actually apply this. So that would be potentially a place where I would start, how we as coaches work, we're known to utilize and empower the team, right? So, the word, not the, it's been overused a huge amount of time. But within that is like, we know that we don't have all the knowledge, right? But we can point them into different directions. But starts within the team itself. So, either they have the knowledge or we have to there's a quest for knowledge, right? So it's like, we gotta learn more. Okay, where would you start? Software foundations. Okay, let's go there, right? But I would actually, for me, always starting with the team, having a conversation, putting it out there. What do you guys feel about this? Do you guys wanna do something about this? Can we try something about this, right? And then just start it, like those conversations, know, week over week when we're building the backlog or planning out what we need to do next. would do that. And if I was a leader, a manager or something like that, I would work with the team to go, okay, will be our objectives? How do we wanna measure this? How do we know we're successful at it? I would be, let's try and improve our product by, or improve our product, or basically let's ensure that 20 % of the stories that are coming in every week, it has to do with sustainability, right?

So I would do something like that. So it would encourage the team to actually start taking on the work. We did this, by the way, with DevOps and tech debt before in the past. And it was one way to allow for space for the team to actually do that work, which is really important because it's hard to stop doing the product work that we need to do right now. So someone has to create the space for the team to actually do that work.

So by giving it like 20 % or whatever the case may be is a great way of allowing for that space for that team to actually create some of that work. But I would definitely be starting off with that conversation.

Gaël Duez (33:29)

And if I try to wrap up what you've both said, it's old story again, because it's all about raising awareness, getting some training, empowering teams. as you say, Joanne, starting the conversation. Having at some point middle management some space, that's crucial here because otherwise… You know, the good intentions are squeezed between the bottom of the top down approach, but hey, it's middle manager most of the time who have the key to truly kickstart and even ramp up more than kickstart ramp up things. So is there anything specific about sustainability and more specifically environmental impacts in this discussion or is it? Quite similar to how we had to incorporate cyber security, inclusivity, or accessibility, as you mentioned. Is there anything specific to the environmental topics when it comes to onboarding them into agile practices?

Joanna Masraff (34:31)

The only thing I is back to the thing that with all of those other things you've mentioned, it hasn't been a cost saving. So that one thing generally makes it easier to bring your middle managers in because their bottom line usually is cost. Apart from that, the transformation itself, it's really not that different, which is why...

Gaël Duez (34:42)

Okay.

Joanna Masraff (34:56)

We brought Agile and sustainability and Agilist and sustainability together because we, you somebody called us, a friend of ours called Agile Coaches, the, the alchemists of change, which I really liked. So that's why I'm using it. So we really are change makers. We know how to come in and help make those changes. And I believe in JoJo's, the two Jo's minds, the next transformation is the sustainability transformation. And we can help with that. We want to help with that.

Joanne Stone (35:35)

And the reason why is because I look at all of these particular problems and challenges as wicked challenges. So and when you look at the definition of a wicked problem, right, like it's like something where, you know, we have many stakeholders, many different symptoms of the specific problem, many different solutions, right? There isn't one specific expert that knows how to do that. You need to have a diversified team in order to solve it. You, the only way that you can actually work on it is through small little experiments where you iterate and adapt, there isn't a linear way that we can actually tackle that problem. So the problems and challenges that we have today are all wicked, very much wicked. And the practices of Agile are perfectly suited to this space because we're utilizing the collaboration of the team. We have to empower the team because we experiment, because we have to slice things into small little things.

And we also have to do this at a sustainable pace because these problems won't be solved in our lifetimes, right? It'll be solved in multiple lifetimes. So we need to be able to do it in a way where we can thrive and be resilient at doing that. So that sustainable pace and the way that we've been doing things from an agility perspective has set us up to be able to work on these particular wicked problems. The cool thing though, The ability to kind of like what Joe was saying in terms of cost reduction, we can totally make that transparent, right? you know, we're all about outcome basis and producing the value and making sure that we do it in the most effective and efficient way, right? With people. And we're all about doing, not actually about planning forever. We're into doing action. but in a sustainable pace way, using the word sustainable from that perspective.

Gaël Duez (37:39)

And I really enjoy the way you wrap it up because I won't have to do it in the conclusion, but also because it's sort of a reassuring that if I'm an agile coach, if I'm a product manager with a good grasp of agile techniques, actually all my tools are not to be challenged. And that's a bit reassuring. You say it's like, okay, so I've got this extra burden But you know, my way of thinking, my way of working, the agile practices that I've honed over time, they're there. I don't have to challenge them. It's just yet another issue, yet another wicked challenges, as you said, that I need to incorporate in into my way of working and I don't know, I find it reassuring. Even if you say that problems will not be solved over a lifetime, it's still, at least this, don't need to change how I work. I just need to incorporate this question and these challenges in a, well-crafted way of working, Am I right also to see it in such a positive way?

Joanne Stone (38:46)

I would say that the one thing I would add, because I struggled with this too, is how do we bring the planet into what we're doing? there's so many great practices that we can learn from the sustainable area, for sure. Circular economy, doughnut economy, regenerative. There's so many beautiful things that the sustainability experts in this world have been doing.

And those things are not incorporated in our practices. So I say, on to our practices and bring together all the other sustainability practices which are out there and how we think about how do we reduce the waste.

Joanna Masraff (39:26)

I agree and disagree with Joe, because I think, yes, of course the sustainability has added ways of thinking about our product and about the economy, which bring the planet further in. But I don't think the changes that we may need to make to our techniques are… big, if at all. So this is why I call them the twisted techniques, right? And you've mentioned some of the ideas, you know, bringing in Maria Len, Planet as a stakeholder. So that idea can actually be added to a lot of our design techniques that we already use in the product space, right? So your customer journey mapping have a persona who is nature, for example, this can also be applied into your product techniques your and delivery phases.

Gaël Duez (40:14)

Really interesting. Thanks a lot, Joanna, for adding this other perspective. There is one angle that we didn't discuss that much is putting things the other way around, which is not usually what Green IO does, but it's also make a bit of sense to have this other perspective, the two of you, you work on, you know, agile for sustainability rather than sustainable for agile. have you been using agile techniques to accelerate projects, even if they're not like in IT per se, and even if it's not about reducing the environmental footprint of the structure using them? Because I think that, Johan, when we had early discussions, you mentioned something was a food bank, am I right?

Joanne Stone (40:58)

Yeah, love to experiment, right? So one of the things that we started to do was work with our local communities. So my first experiment was, OK, let's get in there and try and see if I can work with this restaurant owner who wants to make the restaurant more sustainable. so I brought a team together and I thought, okay, let's just do a little small little slice of that particular problem we can figure it out. But we took about two months of just discussing what sustainability is. this is where, you know, we went, okay, like, is there another practice? Like, what other tool I pull from my backpack? And so one of my friends is a design sprint facilitator, And so what we did is we utilized the design sprint techniques. We found this beautiful, passionate lady not too far away from me who has a local community garden. And she says, well, you know, I have a problem right now. I want to get more volunteers in because I want to produce more food. And if we can produce more food, I can give more food to local food bank. We went, sure, OK, let's try this thing out. So we did the design sprint. And so we have people from all over the world. And they come in. And we interviewed the clients. We interviewed the subject matter experts.

Gaël Duez (42:12)

Excellent.

Joanne Stone (42:22)

You know, we had a huge amount of problems and challenges. had stickies like galore of the problems. We sliced it down. We got it into what is a small specific thing that we can do. We created a prototype, right? So we created a flyer would bring in more volunteers, that would attract more volunteers. We tested it out, and then we provided that data back. So this is us in action. Like, Gaël I cannot believe how this is. I don't want to overanalyze. I don't want to blah, blah. But Google and the technique that they have for doing design sprints is Bella. It's brilliant. It's beautiful because it's done within 32 hours. And it has the only interview so many people. You only get just enough information. So that you can test it out, so you can figure out what to do next. So we call it SIPs, Sustainability Incubator Projects. we're SIPsters. yeah. And it was a bunch of women who were actually doing it. So it's been amazing what we're doing. Like I am really excited about it. But back to your point where we talking about earlier, and you brought it up, Gaël.

Gaël Duez (43:31)

Got it.

Joanne Stone (43:41)

We have as Agilist a lot of these beautiful skills it's not just scrum like it's not just Kanban right we've done change management we've changed culture we develop software right and it allows us to get right in there roll up our sleeves make a change make see something and then and then allow people to figure out and learn what to do next. By the way, it's been amazing. The success stories are great, and I get paid in hugs and drinks. So I'm really super happy right now. But it's lots of fun, and the people that are with this right now really enjoy it, and they want us to continue to do more.

Gaël Duez (44:25)

Agilist, get paid in hugs and beers or drinks, Join the sustainability space. Okay. It's excellent, but it's also a good illustration that you can use agile techniques also for doing tech for good

Joanne Stone (44:28)

Hiya! Hahaha!

Gaël Duez (44:41)

Being mindful of your time, I'd like to wrap up. mean, you've beautifully wrapped it up, Joanne, so I'm not going to add on what you've said, but just maybe, is there any resources that you didn't share or that you want to mention?

Joanna Masraff (44:56)

So the Agile Alliance actually has a sustainability initiative and they created a sustainability manifesto, which is really quite also, Ines Garcia is recording conversations with all of the signatories to try and spread the word that we do have an Agile sustainability manifesto.

Gaël Duez (45:00)

Okay.

Joanna Masraff (45:17)

So it's well worth people going and having a look at that. even if you don't agree with it, come and discuss it with us, you know, we'd love to have that conversation.

Joanne Stone (45:25)

Yeah, the resources that I feel would be really great is in the We Hope magazine. So there's some really amazing stories which are in there. We've just launched the last third edition. And it gets into some of the Agilists which are out there. They're doing different things from leadership to some of the projects that I've done in the past we have some tech people that are there as well. So I think that a lot of those stories that are there are a great, specific resource for people to actually look at as well.

Joanne Stone (46:01)

including what Joe just said, and that's Garcia's just doing some amazing, amazing work.

Joanna Masraff (46:07)

Interestingly, the We Hope magazine is on the Agilist for Planet website as well, that also still has, recordings of our old, the last two conferences. if you're interested, go and have a look, there's some great presentations on there. We touch into regeneration. We have the business case for sustainability. We talk about circularity, degrowth. We talk about cleaning up your digital space in your personal kind of digital space as well, your digital data. There's lots and lots and lots of different stuff on there. So please go and have a

Gaël Duez (46:42)

That's a positive trend to close the podcast as well in this episode. So thanks a lot, both of you, for joining. It was really interesting to deep dive a bit more in the agile world and agilist world, which I'm not that familiar. I've used the techniques, but I've never been an agile coach. Thanks a lot for joining.

Joanne Stone (47:00)

Thank you.

Joanna Masraff (47:00)

Thank you so much for having us. Lovely to chat.

Gaël Duez (47:04)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We are an independent media, relying solely on you to get more listeners. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative would be a nice move. Everyone deserves to get this energy booster than Joe and Joe provided during this interview.

In our next episode, which will be quite technical, I will welcome Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki to talk about sustainability in cloud computing using new open source solutions for containers and orchestration in the Kubernetes world. Stay tuned. And one last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Singapore is in one month, and its full agenda is now available. New York is in two months, and many speakers have now been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket on any Greenio conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.

Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

   ☁️ Why they switched from AWs to GCP

   📏 The needed granularity in carbon measurement 

   💸 Why FinOps is a no brainer to boost sustainability

   🏦 The importance of carbon P&L in decision making

   ⚖️ The Dilemma of running GreenOps between carbon reduction and faster cloud instances

   And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 6th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Dawn (00:00)

It is always important to be controlling costs when you're a CTO and infrastructure is always a significant component of the PNL. And if you can make sure people are focused on the environmental impact, it will have a cost impact. And so you can advocate for GreenOps because it is tied to the bottom line.

Gaël Duez (00:04)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Migrating to a new cloud provider because of the lack of sustainability commitment from the previous one is almost never seen in our IT industry. So I was really impressed with the talk delivered by two Back Market senior engineers at Green IO Paris last year. So impressed that I wanted to learn more about Back Market engineering culture. I discovered teams who have seriously embraced the GreenOps approach and whose feedback could greatly benefit product and tech teams, no matter the industry they work in. This is why I'm so excited to welcome Dawn Becker, Back Market CTO, on the show today. Dawn is a senior engineering leader who has managed infrastructure, operations, and software development teams in organizations ranging from 50 to more than 100,000 employees, from startups to Fortune 500 companies and her functional expertise spans across many layers of the technology stack, including data center, network systems and database operations, software engineering, course, you name it, I guess you understood that she is a very versatile expert. Welcome to the show Dawn and thanks for making room in your busy calendar for this interview.

Dawn (02:06)

Thank you for inviting me, Gaël. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gaël Duez (02:09)

Pleasure is mine. I'd to start asking you what is the achievement from your teams which you are the proudest in terms of sustainability.

Dawn (02:19)

So it is definitely the migration of our infrastructure to a new cloud provider. We did it in under six months. And we have up to 40,000 containers in our infrastructure. So it's a significant achievement. And it's been great results for us so far.

Gaël Duez (02:42)

Yeah, what was the result that you were looking such a massive project? just before you answer this question, for the sake of understanding, what size of the tech stack and the human power are we talking about at Back Market? How many engineers?

Dawn (03:00)

Yes, so we have about 260 engineers at Back Market. We operate up to 40,000 containers and we have about 4 million unique visitors a day to our site. We work really hard as a company to be conscious about our impact on the environment. And so when we were evaluating our next steps for infrastructure. were at a point where we needed to modernize our infrastructure. We're a 10 year old company and as happens in 10 year old companies, we had a bit of debt that we needed to pay down and it was going to require us to recast our infrastructure. And to do that, it gives you the opportunity, which doesn't come along very often to do a change in cloud providers.

Gaël Duez (04:00)

That was also an opportunistic move because it's not like you were scaling up the tech stack and suddenly in the morning you say, okay, enough is enough. I want to change my cloud provider. It was also connected with a reflection on the current state of your tech stack and the level of technical debt you have reached. And okay, enough is enough. We need to refactor a bit and maybe even that's a great timing to ask ourselves on which platforms do we want to be hosted? Am I correct to state it that way?

Dawn (04:31)

Exactly.

Gaël Duez (04:32)

And what were the results that you wanted to achieve in terms of sustainability by migrating from, I guess we can name them, it was made public in Green IO Paris that you migrated from AWS to Google Cloud Platform.

Dawn (04:48)

Yes, so the biggest factor in the decision in the end was the impact and our ability to track it. number one, the visibility we get from Google Cloud on our CO2 emissions and the ability to locations with renewable power was a big factor in our decision we're a B Corp and this becomes a very important aspect of what we do is to be able to report on that. So that became an important component of the decision-making process. And it's also that we can start to break down and start to invest in breaking down not only that information for the infrastructure, but each component of what we run and be able to align teams around the impact that they have. we're still at the early stages of this because we've just finished our migration in April. But we have ambitions to create greater and greater insights with more and more detail so that we can have a clear view of what it costs to serve our users specifically for certain functionality and be able to make decisions about engineering investment on ways to improve that over time.

Gaël Duez (06:11)

So it means that the ultimate goal is that each team, feature team, impact teams, I don't know how you name them, are accountable of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they emit.

Dawn (06:27)

Yeah, exactly.

Gaël Duez (06:28)

And that was the number one reason for you to migrate into Google Cloud because they can provide this level of accuracy.

Dawn (06:38)

it was the biggest weight in the decision. There are of course other factors. There's a better visibility and higher impact we have on the roadmap and discussions that we can have with our, our account team, the level of partnership that's provided. were also big factors. We run on Kubernetes. So having the managed GKE offering with definite uplift for us.

Gaël Duez (07:06)

You mentioned Kubernetes. There are several projects around incorporating sustainability natively in K8 and also putting them in the CI-CD. Is it the sort of project that you're looking for

Dawn (07:22)

Well, first we want to be able to have the level of granularity, which doesn't really exist today, on knowing for what type of instance that we choose, what can be the carbon footprint for that. And we did this. One of the engineers on my team, Florian Valeye he wrote an open source contribution that would, for AWS, using data set provided by Teeds. They did some research in 2021. So he wrote an open source tool called Track Carbon. And that allowed anyone to track the energy consumption and calculate carbon emissions for their use in AWS. That research course was a point in time and it didn't continue to evolve. And so we didn't have the data for the evolving instance types. So it became obsolete. But we would love to be able to do that at this level of detail, not only for ourselves, but make it available to others as well so that we could track with greater accuracy the impact at the instance level.

Gaël Duez (08:22)

And on Google Cloud, because maybe I missed some recent updates, but I remember that Google shares some sustainability metrics for the different instances that are running. the feedback I had so far is that it's not that much actionable for engineering teams, mostly because of the lag that it is updated on a monthly basis.

Once again, if I remember that well, that most of the time a software engineering team, want to experiment things and see the next day or within the next few days if the change they made in the architecture, in the code, whatever the design has provided an impact. So maybe could you clarify a how teams are actually using this information from Google Cloud to reduce their carbon footprint?

Dawn (09:29)

So today, we're not actually using it to reduce our carbon footprint. We're using it to create visibility. And visibility is the first step for accountability. If people are aware of the impact that they're having, they are more likely to take action on their own. And you're right, the data doesn't come in fast enough, right?

Gaël Duez (09:36)

Okay.

Dawn (09:56)

Which is part of why we are looking at what different tooling we could have for ourselves to be able to take it a step further than gets provided from Google today. One of the things that we envision doing over time is having costs to serve through infrastructure costs, but also through carbon impact because how well optimized your code is uses more or less CPU and uses more or less energy. And it correlates of course to how much spend you have, but not only. And so being able to have that picture, think is really important. It's also, I think every organization at some point starts to scrutinize the amount that they're spending on infrastructure because you get to a size and scale. If things are going well, that it starts to become a significant part of your, of your P and L and every team then ends up having to put focus on cost cutting optimization. never fun, right? It's never a super motivating task for people. When you think about the other way you can look at this, that is a different cost cutting measure, far more motivating and highly correlated is thinking about how can you reduce your carbon emissions? How can you reduce your impact on the planet? And it's a very different way to think about how to optimize your code, how to optimize your infrastructure to have an impact on, yes, the bottom line from a cost perspective, but it also has a big impact on the cost on the planet.

Gaël Duez (11:53)

And so is it something that, I mean, do you have FinOps team today at Back Market?

Dawn (11:58)

There's, I would say it's a, we don't have a specific team. have a focus area on FinOps

Gaël Duez (12:04)

Okay, which means that each team has at least one person who's in charge of paying attention to the FinOps detail.

Dawn (12:13)

Right now this is concentrated in our platform teams looking at this to create the visibility across the feature teams.

Gaël Duez (12:24)

And is it the same people within the platform team who will have the same focus on carbon accounting and creating visibility on carbon or will there be different profiles?

Dawn (12:38)

It's the same people for us today. Again, we're at the beginning of this journey and there are not a lot of models out there to follow.

Gaël Duez (12:51)

I got it. actually going back to what you've said previously about the tooling and the fact that you're still in search of the tooling, what are the tools that you've considered using, whether they're open source or paid tools, or are you actually considering building your own?

Dawn (13:08)

Well, one of the reasons we are looking building our own tooling around this is because to do what we want, which is reproduce some of the work that was done by Florian on that open source project is that it doesn't exist today. There's not a tool that will do that for us there are some tools, I think, that show up that can give you some help but they're still very high level and a bit generic and maybe not as actionable as they could be with a little more detail. And so us trying a path forward that would allow us to give real insights to our engineers to be able to make everyday decisions that can have an impact they do their work to optimize for carbon emissions.

Gaël Duez (14:07)

Really interesting because there are several tools popping up here and there. There are obvious open source tools such as Cloud Carbon Footprint or Cloud Scanner from Boavizta There are also several paid solutions. and most of the time they take the, financial inputs from cloud provider, they cross it with an emission factor or information from providers such as electricity maps, for instance, to get the carbon intensity of the electricity grid at a certain time in a certain day. And I was wondering what other features do you find missing? Especially you mentioned the granularity that you want to develop your own tool.

Dawn (14:55)

All of those things you said are true and there is definitely... We have the ability to look at what type of power in which data center, what percentage is renewable. When are, when can you run your, your intense job so that it's not competing at the time where there's a heavy load on the grid? So all of that is true. And there are things certainly today that we could even do better with the tools that exist, sure we are able to scale to zero at times when everything's idle right, and to do that in an automated way. There's, think, more work to do there. And again, very tied to cost as well in those cases. But when it comes to what can, and I think this is the question that everyone has about their daily lives, is like, what can I do? Like, I'm just one person out of, you know, seven or eight billion on the planet. What does it matter what I do? And when we think about this, there's, I think there's so much that we're not. We don't pay attention to, such as, and I'm going to put this in terms of the everyday human experience, where people don't think about it. And then let's talk about how that translates into engineering. So if you think about how many email addresses do you have and how much storage are you using and how many photos do you have that are uploaded into the cloud? When was the last time you looked at all of them, right? And every bite that is out there, your digital footprint, it also has a carbon cost because it's costing for that. And so when we think about that from an engineering perspective, what are the things that you store and never access? You know, how much logging are you doing? And do you need to do that much logging? How long are you storing it for? And do you need to store it that long? And having some visibility into that, that is your daily dashboard would be hugely, hugely helpful to hold yourself accountable for, are you putting your effort and the cost that you're doing in the right way.

Gaël Duez (17:28)

That means that you're incorporating in this green ops dashboarding that you're building at Back Market also management approach. You want to focus on storage, not only the amount of time that you're doing computing or using servers at a certain time of the day and certain location, but also incorporating this data management principles that we store too much, we load too much, et cetera, et cetera. Am I right?

Dawn (17:58)

It's a, part of my vision for it. And I would say maybe a little too optimistic to say that we're in the process of building that functionality right now. But when you think about how people as individuals can have the impact. This is, you have to go to that level of detail because that's where it starts. Everything starts from just a small amount of impact that compounds over time and suddenly it's huge.

Gaël Duez (18:30)

and that you can scale this impact. And what other features do you envision for this environmental dashboard and tooling that you want your teams to be able to build now that you've migrated to Google. So obviously, we mentioned carbon aware and was also a bit of grid aware. We've just mentioned data management. Is there other aspect where you want to empower your engineering team to make better decision?

Dawn (18:57)

That's a big question. I think the perspective of software engineering work that we do for writing and executing code and hosting it in production. Because that is also really important. the run part of software development is where probably the highest carbon costs are because it's going all the time and it is the most obvious place to look. It's not only that, right? Because we're also doing monitoring. We also have a bunch of other tool sets we run to do our job. And all of those things combined. It's just one on top of another, on top of another that is consuming energy I think would be an advanced step here. Because the first most obvious place to look is absolutely on the run, on how what you're doing runs every day and what that impact is. And it's the biggest chunk. At least we think that right now. I don't know if it would turn out, it would, it turned out to be true if you add up all the costs of day-to-day operations that aren't really about what's running. It's probably not, not as insignificant as we think, or we don't think about it. So I don't know, but it's an interesting place. think that we should start to look and validate where do we have impact and where along the way can we optimize it? Because I find that when you start to think about this, start to make different choices.

Gaël Duez (20:42)

Could you give us an example of one of these choice that you've made differently thanks to sustainability inputs?

Dawn (20:51)

Okay, so we are reconsidering our business continuity disaster recovery planning and there's a non-zero cost to having a solid plan in place, right? And being able to make sure that we have the best possible RPO and RTO for the most reasonable impact, right? Because you can go… can do warm backup and you can do full redundancy. full redundancy obviously has the largest impact. It also costs the most, but it gives you the greatest peace of mind. You end up with so much just sitting and unused completely cold is a bit too long for recovery time at scale, right? So it can be a pretty long time. But especially in a cloud environment, having a warm, small footprint that you're able to manage closely can be a really nice compromise between two and gives you the flexibility with a much lower impact.

Gaël Duez (22:17)

Got it and that's interesting to see that the carbon price has become part of the equation as much as the financial price of recovery plans. And that leads me to another question which is how do you make GreenOps efficient and part of the discussion on almost every aspect of your engineering culture? Because we took the example of the cloud migration, of the example you just provided about the recovery plans. But I got it that you don't have yet all the tools that you want to provide the most accurate insights possible. But when I've discussed with your engineer, they were already very, very focused on green ops. I was wondering, how did you achieve this focus on green ops across your teams?

Dawn (23:12)

So we're at a slight advantage maybe in this area because we are a mission-driven company with an environmental mission. And one of our corporate values is that it's not green enough. So this is a mantra that shows up everywhere in the culture. And having that kind of mindset, it's not only about your job, it really is about your life and the mission and the values that the back market holds attracts people who are aligned with them and it becomes a part of everybody's thought process.

Gaël Duez (23:52)

That raises a very interesting point because do you believe that achieving such a green ops culture in focus would have been possible in, I would say, a regular Fortune 500 company? Or does it require first that the environmental culture is high enough? And, my question is for all the other CTO and CPO and head of engineering listening to you, like, do you have a chance to actually move the needle in the right direction to embrace green ops if you work in a more like, you know, business as usual, I would say company.

Dawn (24:31)

Yeah, it's an interesting question. when I first started talking about carbon PNL with my peers,

I met Patrick at an event for Google Cloud. And I was talking with him about Carbon P &L because we at Back Market have started on the journey of a Carbon P &L. And his company does it already. And they're a very big company. And they have a very active focus on this. And so it's possible. And I think that that is very inspiring that that's the case.

Gaël Duez (25:05)

It is.

Dawn (25:07)

I've also, so I've seen the power of the employee base in this way as well. spent some time at Google. The employees at Google are very environmentally oriented and they do make noise about this. And Google as a company does respond to the things that their employees value in this way. It's harder, I think, in companies that are perhaps not as successful as that to get it to be a focus. There was a lot of discussion during the time I was at Fitbit from the employee base about making the devices more recyclable, having a better sustainability mindset around it which was difficult to make a focus. when the company isn't hugely profitable or hugely growing, you know, when you're facing business headwinds, it is the first thing to fall to the back. is a hard to fight against.

Gaël Duez (26:06)

That's interesting because the way I framed the question was the wrong one. I expected that the mission of the company would influence how much a CTO has some leeway to implement GreenOps practices. And actually your answer points toward a slightly different directions, which is it's not really the mission in itself, but it's more the power of employee engagement and the financial situation of the company, which might be even for a B Corp, highly environmentally focused company, facing a lot of turmoil business-wise, we might actually experience a reduction in the to achieve some environmental goals. Very interesting point of view. Thank you.

Dawn (27:02)

Yeah. So on the question you were actually asking, I do believe that a CTO in any company can push green ops because today, younger generation of workers is far more aware of environmental impact than anyone was 20 years ago. And as I said earlier, it's always important to be controlling costs when you're a CTO and infrastructure is always a significant component of the PNL. And if you can make sure people are focused on the environmental impact, it will have a cost impact. And so you can advocate for GreenOps because it is tied to the bottom line. And I do believe that the business. We'll buy into it because the correlation is there.

Gaël Duez (28:00)

Which is a great enabler. And you were discussing about advocating and that's another question I was wondering how much you managed to have a discussion with your CPO or CMO. I don't know how you're structured regarding product and marketing, but basically people pushing for some features,

when it comes to Green Ops, like, do you manage to say, hey, well, maybe we shall not use video or maybe this feature is not that useful how much they are involved in this Green Ops process? Because we know that design set the tone for most of the music when it comes to Green Ops. So CTO, if they ask to provide more and more features or more and more products, that can completely offset all their efforts to reduce their environmental footprint. So how is the level of the discussion at back market?

Dawn (28:51)

Again, because we have the it's not green enough value, it is the topic that comes up. I think we can do better than we're doing and, and the engineering team has a greater responsibility and a bigger role to play in this than any other department, because we have that information. either have access to the information or we can get access to that information in a way that is a bit more difficult perhaps for the CMO and the CPO if engineering teams are very conscientious about it, and if we provide the carbon impact as part of the planning, it can have a different impact and change people's minds. We are also the ones that are best positioned to propose alternatives and say, you are asking for this, for an objective we understand as this, and we can achieve that same objective with a lower impact. One of the superpowers of engineering that we forget that we have. It was just to have this level of influence over the entire corporation because we have the information, we have access to it or we can get it. And with a little bit of effort, we can educate people and really influence the decisions that get made and costs

Gaël Duez (30:25)

And maybe just to close the episode, because you've already shared in full transparency and humility, I must say, it's not all shiny and perfect at Back Market, but it's really this focus and these first steps that you've already started and this culture that you managed to But we've briefly mentioned Back Market has being environmentally focused because of its very nature. How the discussion regarding e-waste, and maybe you can explain a bit what Back Market is doing to the audience, how this focus on e-waste, which is at the very core of Back Market mission, influences also the discussion within the engineering teams when it comes to green ops. I was wondering how much weight do you put on creating software that will not… Accelerate hardware obsolescence.

Dawn (31:22)

For me, that's a super interesting question. We have a fight against ways of working for the OEMs, which is to make their devices obsolete. They stop updating them. You can no longer get the latest OS update, the security updates, et cetera, beyond a certain model. And thanks to government regulations, these things are being extended more and more. And you see commitments from companies to provide longer term support for the devices that they make than they were 10 years ago. It's a good trend. So from a influence perspective, this is a focus at Back Market is to make sure that we are active in this discussion and advocating for every person out there who wants to keep what they have and they just want it to work longer because they're happy with what they have and through software development, that is what we do and what we advocate for and what we educate people about. Again, something interesting that I think we don't talk about very much is that we are, as engineers, probably almost worse than the general population when it comes to pushing for the latest technology on things. And I don't know how to change this, actually, because when you think about every time new cloud provider or our cloud provider puts out their newest version of instances. They're faster and they're more efficient. And you have a dilemma in that you want to get the speed gains and the efficiency gains you can get from the latest hardware refresh. But the very nature of that hardware refresh can create e-waste. And so we have opposing forces and the best that we can do to serve our business because there's a, have to stay competitive and responsive to fulfill the mission of getting people to buy through the circular economy this is where the carbon PNL comes in as well, to make sure that you're holding yourself accountable for what you put out, what you emit and what you try to save, what you can save. But can we extend, can you choose providers or hardware if you're doing on-prem that is upgradable in place? So maybe you don't have to replace entire chassis every time you're doing an upgrade. Can you choose a cloud provider that has documented and certified recycling practices because we haven't found a way today to get out of this cycle of the constant upgrades for faster, better compute power.

Gaël Duez (34:36)

So if I understood you right, that's a very open and transparent way that you put the issue on the table it's a day-to-day dilemma of running green ops based on carbon PNL. I think it could wrap up the entire episode thank you joining and sharing that openly. And it was a pleasure to listening to your team also on Green IO Paris stage. So thanks for all the support.

Dawn (35:05)

Thank you, Gaël It was a pleasure talking with you

In 3 sentences, almost 3 years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel archived on the spot. To get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of her digital services, Gaël Duez welcomes 3 of the 4 founders of the original sustainability team: Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros. 

In their much more nuanced exchange that could have been expected due to the current situation, they covered many topics including: 

   👏 The power of applause to kick start a sustainability team

   🔧 How changing HTTPS check made WordPress save 471 kWh / month

   🌱 The importance of having sustainability tools as close as possible to software practitioners tools

   🏛️ The subtle art of creating a foundation while keeping control over it via intellectual property  

   🎁 How to “enforce” contribution in an open source community

   And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conferences are in Singapore (April 16th) and New-York (May 15th). Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Csaba (00:00)
So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact

Gaël Duez (00:15)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez, and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech.

Today, I learned that we have a sustainability team. Thank you for your effort in this area. Looking at results of the team so far and the return on investment of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely. In three sentences, almost three years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel was archived on the spot. It reminds me of the Elon Musk style when he arrived at Twitter, except that WordPress CMS still powers almost 40 % of all the websites around the globe, with many being heavy traffic websites. And with heavy traffic comes significant environmental impacts. So to get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services now that the sustainability team is gone, I'm glad to welcome today three people who are active members of the WordPress community, especially on sustainability topics. Actually, they were part of the four founders of the original sustainability team.

Csaba is a sustainable web designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator. And Nora Ferreiros is a freelance UX UI designer.

and both Nahuai and Nora are based in Barcelona. So welcome Csaba, Nahuai and Nora. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Nahuai (02:49)
Hello.

Nora (02:49)
Thank you.

Csaba (02:50)
Hello, hi.

Nora (02:51)
Thank you for

Nahuai (02:51)
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Csaba (02:52)
Hi, hello.

Gaël Duez (02:53)
You're

more than welcome. So maybe before we start, could each of you share what is the main fact or figure that leads you to care about sustainability as a WordPress practitioner?

Nora (03:09)
Well, actually, Nahuai is the person who led me to care about sustainability in WordPress and in the details sustainability and life in general,

Nahuai (03:20)
That was super nice to hear, Nora. In my case, the eye-opening moment was a lightning talk by Roberto Vázquez in a work camp that just putting together the energy consumed by data centers and the environmental impact. It's pretty straightforward, but it was the first time that I it was like, okay, this makes sense.

Gaël Duez (03:22)
Now you have to deal with this.

Nora (03:24)
It's true.

Nahuai (03:48)
and I started to go down the rabbit hole. And short after that, I started to talk with Hannah Smith, who has been a key person in my sustainability journey. And yeah, pretty much in that point, I started to research and start giving talks about it. And yeah, probably.

Nora (04:06)
Yeah, have to say that I was in this talk also, but for me it was later. Nahuai was the one that said to me, look at this, sustainability is important, but I also was in this talk and it was important to me to think about internet consumes energy.

Csaba (04:23)
For me, it's a bit similar, just like you mentioned, and as you mentioned in the intro, like WordPress having a large market share. So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact and maybe a lot more interesting for other people to...

profit from as well.

Gaël Duez (04:50)
you're right, Shaba, that WordPress is just huge in terms of CMS share and I was delighted to hear about the creation of a sustainability team at WordPress. I've heard, but maybe I'm wrong, that it all started at a WordPress convention with Nora speaking up on these aspects, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Could you enlighten me a bit on this?

Nora (05:16)
Yeah, it was kind of this way and honestly it was kind of around the situation, it wasn't something planned because it all started at the WordCamp Europe in 2022. This is the annual big WordPress event in Europe and it was also my first international event and I was super excited and nervous because I was about to spend...

four whole people who I only could communicate in English. I'm in Spanish, so you can imagine it is a little tricky. So I was talking one day, I was talking with Rocio Valdivia. She's a lead of global WordPress community programs. I had to read this because I have not been able to remember it. So she...

Nahuai (05:49)
you

Nora (06:03)
blindly believing my newly acquired language skills. And she encouraged me to ask a question during this Q &A session with Matt Mullenberg and Joseph Heiden-Champonsy, who was the executive director of WordPress at the moment. So basically two of the most important people involved in the project at the time. And for some reason I said, yeah, sure, why not? But the thing is, as time passed,

I started to panic because I had no idea what to ask about. So I turned to Nahuai and I asked him for help and he rightly suggests sustainability as a topic. So with this in mind, I knew, I yeah, I knew if I ask a general question like, what about sustainability? I would just...

Nahuai (06:35)
You

Gaël Duez (06:36)
Ha ha ha ha.

Nora (06:56)
get a polite non-committal answer like, cool that's interesting we will think about it, thank you. So I decided to directly ask them for a team or at least for a Slack channel and for whatever reason they went for the latter. So I did it and when I returned to my seat 18 people had already joined the channel and are rising but the funny thing is I never intended to.

achieve this. My goal was just to, I don't know, get sustainability on the table or maybe use this visibility to draw some attention of some attendees interested in the topic and then maybe connect with them after the event or whatever. But things went unspectral differently and I'm very happy about it.

After that, the four people that finally make the team work as a working group for a year and the next WordCamp Europe, we have the support of some amazing people and we could officially became a team. And this is the story. And I would clarify something. I think it's really important. I voiced the demand, but I'm pretty sure that

was the people who cheer and applaud the thing, my suggestion. That main matter, and Joseph said, okay, let's create the channel because the people want something and we have to do something. So if any of the personnel listening to this, thank you very much for making it possible. And remember that voices lead, but it's the community that moves things forward.

Gaël Duez (08:34)
Power of applause

Nora (08:36)
Yeah.

Csaba (08:36)
Hehehe.

Gaël Duez (08:37)
so you wanted to put sustainability on the table. You actually managed to put sustainability within the Slack workspace of WordPress. Csaba, were you one of these people jumping on this newly created Slack channel?

Csaba (08:55)
I think I was actually one of the first people to join because I remember, I remember Nora asking this question, but the funny thing is that I was like kind of falling asleep during the question and answer, not because it wasn't interesting, but then I just heard the word sustainability. I was, what, what? So I started listening and then I heard that the channel was created. I think I was one of the first and I remember.

Gaël Duez (08:59)
Ha ha ha ha.

Nahuai (09:06)
Thank

Csaba (09:21)
Thijs was there as well and we already arranged something to meet during the conference, the after party, let's say, which we did as well. And the other funny thing is that I ran into Nora and Nahuai as well somewhere during a walk. So we actually really met in Porto and yeah, that's where things probably started up. still we had a long way to go.

Gaël Duez (09:46)
Yeah, the stars were aligned. And maybe for the non-adverted listeners, we talk a lot about the WordPress community at WordPress, but as far as I've understood, WordPress is an open source software, but there is also a company called WordPress. And when we talk about a sustainability team, a lot of people could believe maybe that you're employees at

WordPress or some sort of WordPress company. could you maybe Nahuai you clarify a bit this ecosystem

Nahuai (10:16)
Yeah.

It is kind of tricky to make sense of it because of the naming. So I will try to keep it simple. you said, WordPress, the thing that we've been talking till now is the CMS, it's open source. And it has a vibrant community doing things because they believe on that open source and democratizing the publishing and everything that is behind the motto or the meaning of WordPress. But then after, and this was...

co-founded by Matt Mullenberg and Mike Little. Shortly after this creation, Matt Mullenberg created the company Automatic. And Automatic owns WordPress.com, which is a huge confusion for a lot of people. So WordPress.com is just a hosting company using the CMS WordPress. And that's pretty much all the resemblance between the two of them.

Gaël Duez (10:54)
Mm-hmm.

Nahuai (11:10)
And the tricky part to make it a bit more difficult to understand is to the community, we are all volunteers. This is an open source, but some companies are putting people, sponsoring people to contribute. And Automatic was until one month ago, the one that was putting more people and time on it. It was around 4,000 hours in people, the sponsor, to move forward.

So some of the teams that are in Make WordPress, that is how it's leader by people on automatic. Okay, because since they have a lot of people contributing, it's more than a hundred people. A lot of teams had someone from automatic having 40 hours week to put into there, which is super cool. The sustainability team...

Gaël Duez (11:44)
Hmm.

Nahuai (11:58)
we were a bit different in that sense because we were created in this special way as Nora explained. And the 14 reps were self-sponsored, meaning that we were putting our time because we believe in the CMS and in sustainability and then more people of course joined to the Slack and the meetings. But we were mainly people self-sponsored. There were also some sponsored by companies, but

the sustainability team was quite diverse in that sense. it was not run by, none of the teams are run by automatic, okay, just to be clear, but some teams have a lot of, or had a lot of people from automatic because one month ago, more or less, Matt decided to reduce the time that are putting back into the project. But this is because our legal,

battle that we didn't discuss yet, so I don't want to go down there. I hope I made sense a bit of how it's organized.

Gaël Duez (12:55)
Okay.

actually, thanks a lot because it's crystal clear. I didn't really understand what was automatic. And this is not the first time in the open source community that you have actually a software that is sort of maintained by a company, even if it's an open source software. you think about Red

but usually it's a bit clearer because they share the same name and sometimes the intellectual property is even clarified in that sense. Okay, got it. Thanks a lot. What did you do,

Nora (13:31)
Great question. when we make the team, they ask us to work on sustainability, not just on environmental

Csaba (13:31)
Mm-hmm.

Nora (13:39)
sustainability but also in social and economic part of sustainability. So

We have been working together with other working groups like Fight for the Future, for example, or the V Groups for Diversity. So we can together cover all the things because it was a big thing. And the original founders, we were more into environmental sustainability and it is the part we work more on. For example,

we worked in a handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable. We published it. We were able to translate it to Spanish and to French.

And we were actually working on making guidelines for creating a WordPress website in a more sustainable way. It was, for me, the more exciting project because we were making something similar to what W3C guidelines were making, but applied to WordPress.

And we were also working in a plugin that I think Csaba and Nahuai can explain better about how it works to help on this about creating more sustainable WordPress websites.

Csaba (14:57)
Yes, we

were working on a plugin. Yes, plugins are like kind of extensions of WordPress, functional extensions of WordPress. And the plan was to create a canonical plugin, which means that it's supported by the community or even maybe on the long-term be included in core WordPress. So the WordPress software itself. And the idea was to spread awareness about digital sustainability to give people an idea about their websites in the sense of carbon footprints.

And the two basic ideas were to surface whether the website was hosted on renewable energy and to measure the home page's weight and carbon footprint and to compare it with data from the website's carbon API, like compare it to other websites, other webpages measured and warn people if their homepage has a too large footprint. And of course give them

feedback or assist them how to improve it. And that's where the guidance part would come

Nahuai (15:57)
I wanted to point out as Nora said, we were collaborating with working groups, because this is the naming we are using in WordPress. And one of them was with the performance team, which are also working and job, by the way, reducing

the energy that is needed. And one of the things they did because of somehow the synergy between us was a saving, changing some technical part of how to check the HTTPS. But the number was like 471 kilowatts hour a month was saved because of the large market share of WordPress.

our idea in the sustainability was to raise awareness. So maybe in the performance team, they are already doing great work to reduce the emissions.

But our team, sorry, I have to laugh because our team is no longer alive. it's strange to phrase it this way, but I'm going to continue this way. So our team, the idea was to raise awareness of what the performance team was doing or create guidelines as Nora said. So it was not only reducing the CO2 or whatever, but...

Nora (16:56)
Yeah.

Nahuai (17:15)
is spreading the word of the impact that a website has.

Gaël Duez (17:19)
That's an important point because I was about to ask, but what about other environmental variables or what about using other proxy than just the web page weight? For instance, know, some other tool, they check the DOM size or they check the number of API call, et cetera. But I think if the main idea was really to raise awareness, the simpler you keep it, the better it is.

correct to assume things that way.

Csaba (17:50)
Yes, I think so. funny enough, it's sometimes very hard to keep things simple or just give a quiet, good estimation on what's, what's wrong and what can, what people can do about it. so it wasn't a simple task.

And I also have to note maybe that there is a site help feature of WordPress, which is quite a cool tool, which actually gives you information. does a couple of tests on your environment and gives you a couple of things you can improve for your website. And the idea was to include this.

into that tool, is a native tool of WordPress Core itself,

Gaël Duez (18:27)
And today, the plugin that you developed, is it still available somewhere? even if it's not included in the core WordPress, but can anyone still use it?

Csaba (18:39)
Yes, it's not in the plugin repository, but you can download from GitHub. it probably should undergo a couple of refactoring, but you can try it and use it as it is now.

Gaël Duez (18:50)
and what were the feedback from the community?

Nora (18:54)
The feedback from the community, I was thinking about this thing you said about keep things simple. And it was really hard to keep things simple because people were to use two numbers, like what have you achieved? Numbers. And sustainability is kind of difficult to do that if you don't want to stay in the tunnel carbon.

Gaël Duez (19:08)
Hmm.

Nora (19:18)
so there were many people interested in I want to do something to make WordPress more sustainable but they were feeling really confused because the team didn't have many resources to make practical things so we were in a theoretical place most of the time creating awareness and so and

I think people were interested, motivated, excited maybe, but confused about what they should do to make things more sustainable in a practical way.

Nahuai (19:58)
and having the aim of touching the three pillars of sustainability, the environmental, the social and the economic, made that even more difficult. Not that I didn't like it because I like the holistic point of view, but it was more difficult to communicate sometimes. So yeah, that didn't help to simplify. as Nora was stressing out, we moved

slowly because we were self-sponsored people and that was also something to take into account. And we could just allocate maybe two, four hours a week, but not more because we are mostly freelancers and trying to make our own living. So that was also part of the thing that was not easy to balance, let's say.

Csaba (20:42)
Also, I think it's important to add that you're also spending a lot of time in searching for how to get things done within the community, how the procedures were, which is not always clear, let's say not clear. so you have to, yeah, you have to dig in and then it takes a lot of time to find that out.

Nahuai (20:49)
Yep, the bureaucracy.

Gaël Duez (21:00)
maybe before we move to what happened in the dismantling quite abrupt as I mentioned in the introduction, I'd like and I'm very sorry for this to play a bit the devil advocates here and ask you a naive question. Why do we need WordPress guidelines when we start having W3C guidelines?

Nora (21:24)
Well, from a point of view as a designer, I am always in the side of the user. So for me, the WordPress guidelines were important to specifically explain people who is not into sustainability What they specifically have to do with their WordPress

website in the WordPress world. I suppose all the CMS works this way. There are many users, I think the most of the users making their own websites. So I thought it was important to explain these people are non-developer people, how to specifically set in their WordPress or use their WordPress.

to make things more sustainable.

from the WordPress perspective alone

Nahuai (22:11)
I couldn't agree more. I'm part of the group of the sustainable web of the W3C and it's an amazing work. What we are doing, mainly other colleagues, I have to say I have limited time to put into it, but I love it. And I try to do my best on that regard, but it's a very technical and long document. So even if sustainable web design did a great job filtering, because there is an open API, so you can go and grab the

different criteria and filter it. It's really nicely done, technically. Even if you go to the Sustainable Web Design, It's website in general, which is super cool, but I think that people that is working every day with WordPress, having something more linked with visuals and things that they say, okay, I know where I can do this or this other, I think

Nora (22:53)
you

Nahuai (23:01)
this really helps because it's more familiar. So I think everything we can do to make it easier for people that is interested on doing something, it's a move in a good direction.

Gaël Duez (23:13)
Fair point.

I was expecting that kind of answers

but I wanted to understand how much overlapped was possible there because actually I was wondering if it was one of the reasons why the WordPress SustainB group was dismantled. And maybe now it's time for the three of you to explain what you feel and how you analyzed the, let's be honest, of

brutal dismantling of the sustainability group as I described in the introduction. hypothesis number one, we've got W3C guidelines, no need for anything specific WordPress. I think you already answered this point, but hypothesis number two was like, is it some kind of a Trump-fueled backlash against everything which is sustainable and...

you want to look nice to the new leader of the United States and as some other big tech behemoths just did recently kissing their new ring. So was it like a political move? Was it more maybe some sort of internal feud? What led to such abrupt end of your working group?

Csaba (24:24)
I have been thinking about it and to be honest, I don't think there was really that much of thinking behind the decision. It was a bit of a one-sided decision without any discussion questions asked. So it happened also very quickly after Thijs has resigned, let's say between quotes. Maybe what strikes me the most about this is that we were a group of individuals, contributors, not sponsored.

most of us who were just contributing to WordPress and trying to make it better or at least environmentally, socially and so on better. yeah, it's kind of somewhere surprising, but also not regarding the current situation of WordPress.

Nora (25:06)
I don't have a clear picture of the whole thing because I wasn't into WordPress drama until it affected me and some community fellows I don't know Madd or his circumstances well enough to have a solid opinion about the why I think it is a personal thing it's not something bigger

Nahuai (25:20)
Thank

Nora (25:27)
I mean, I don't have an explanation, but it's pretty obvious to me that we can draw up parallel between his attitude and that of attitude of other big tech founders also at the moment. But I don't know.

Nahuai (25:42)
I have an hypothesis trying to be a bit more specific maybe for the people that is not inside the community and the WP drama and everything. So I think we cannot understand this decision without talking about the legal battle between automatic math because both are and WP engine. And this started in September of the last year and

The main reason to keep it simple was that Matt went into the stage in the keynote and publicly said that WP Engine, which is a WordPress hosting that is making a lot of money from WordPress, was not contributing enough. In that moment, they were contributing like 40 hours a week, something like that. And Automatic was contributing around 4,000. Okay. So he felt that it wasn't fair.

if every company went this route, WordPress would probably die because there wouldn't be enough resources. So fair point till here. At least all I'm going to say is my vision. Okay. So don't take it as a representation of the sustainability team or anything. It's just now I took it. So after Engine started a legal battle against Matt.

basically damaging the brand. Okay, let's say, let's put it that way. And there is more things that Matt say and everything, but I don't want to go down that road. And from this moment to the, probably the sustainability closing, team closing, it has been a different Matt.

for us at least, maybe Matt was always like that. But what happened is that Matt asked to the community to take part on this. So he wanted to know if you were behind him or if you were not behind him and his...

opinions and the things he was doing, you were against, pretty much, just to keep it simple. So the people that were vocal and going against Matt or his opinions, some of them were banned from Slack or from WordPress.org and things like that. again, my hypothesis is that Matt is...

kind of in a battle mode because it's in a legal battle and he needs the community to be behind him. And I think the trigger point in our case, was Thais stepping down as a team rep of the sustainability team because he was not aligned with the new direction that Matt was giving to WordPress okay?

And he made it public and he made it clear to Matt directly. And I think this was the trigger point. as I say, don't think there is much thinking about it. I think it was like, okay, these people were doing something. I don't recall knowing about it. Oh yes. I don't know. He said he didn't. And he was another power move. He made other power moves before. So this is my...

vision. Of course, it's subjective and maybe it's wrong, but I felt like Matt took it as a little attack somehow. And he said, okay, this is not very dear to my heart either. And so we can close it. Well, he can close it. That's probably the more frightening part is that Matt can do a lot of things

without anybody saying nothing and that's the part that is yeah more difficult to swallow.

Gaël Duez (29:11)
you're actually reading my mind because I was about to say that sort of reassuring that very bad decisions are still taken not because of a grand schema to change the world in my humble opinion for the worst and having like this kind of a techno crazy agenda and all this, you know.

movement that we see since the beginning of the year in the US within the tech sector, but just because of good old internal dilemma, feuds and the it should question

any source of open source or community of goodwill trying to achieve something about the governance model? Because how come that so many unilateral decisions were able to be made at WordPress? I mean, maybe the decision to close the sustainability was the right one. don't know. mean, obviously, I believe no, but I was not part of this community. So, you know, from an external perspective, I don't know. But what I do know for sure is that

Nora (29:46)
you

Gaël Duez (30:14)
when as a manager you take such a big decisions, literally firing people, there is a way to do things, even if different cultures, you do things differently. Usually you don't do it the way I've just presented in the introduction. And you must get all people's opinions and you absolutely need to get all the insights, starting with the people who are obviously the most involved in the situation, who are the members of the teams.

and in your case, the sustainability team. that really strikes me. what would you do differently?

from a governance perspective to prevent this to happen if you were to work again in a very engaged and good-willing community as the WordPress one.

Nora (30:56)
Well, for me,

as I have seen the community from external perspective is we trust too much in a voice, in a lead or in the vision one person had.

But as I said before, the voice is not the community. Contributors are the community. I think sometimes we forget this. I think we have to do the effort to step up the inertia in the communities, not just WordPress, but any other.

open source community and reflect on the continuity of the project

And I personally think we should go more into a democratic way of managing the thing, as many other people have said, like a governance with few people, not just one people, not because it is mad. I think a huge community or any other community should not be led by

just one person, but for a group of person choose or representative of the community itself. I don't know, for me it's kind of obvious, but when I get into this community, things were this way. So I was like, okay, if you are happy with this, I'm here just for working. So let's go for it.

Gaël Duez (32:09)
Hmm.

So I got your point that even the most powerful voice is powerful because of

the the community behind But there is something that I still don't understand is what is a governance structure? Actually, what is WordPress? what is the legal even structure of WordPress? Is it a foundation? Is it an association, an NGO? And how come that one person has

all the power

Nahuai (32:39)
It's tricky because there is a foundation, there is a WordPress foundation, okay? And Automatic gave the trademark. So this trademark, which is a huge trademark, was moved to the WordPress foundation, which is good, okay?

Gaël Duez (32:43)
Okay.

Okay.

Nahuai (32:56)
And the WordPress foundation, it has a board of three people, Matt and another two members. But even if there is a foundation, the more important part of the community is probably the WordPress.org, which is the domain and everything make and everything and the plugins and everything is behind.

Gaël Duez (33:10)
Mm-hmm.

Csaba (33:15)
you

Nahuai (33:16)
that domain and Matt is the owner of that. That's why he has quite a lot of power. Indeed, one of the moves he did was blocking the possibility of WP Engine to access to the repository of plugins, which is a kind of a big deal. Okay. And he can do it because he is the owner of the domain. So that part is not in the foundation. That's why it's tricky. And we discovered this lately because of...

Gaël Duez (33:35)
working.

Okay.

Nahuai (33:45)
these things that didn't happen before. Because I have to say, I've been following Matt's path and I was pretty happy with the direction that WordPress was going. Mainly because of the community, but also because Matt was going in the same direction

Gaël Duez (34:00)
that's very interesting what you're saying,

because you can create a foundation, put some intellectual property within it, even the brands.

But if you withhold some strategic assets, such as a domain name or some small pieces of intellectual property, actually, your foundation is still some sort of 100 % under your control. Am I right rephrasing a bit what you say that way?

Nahuai (34:25)
I think so. Sometimes I have doubts if we understand well enough the structure, because it wasn't clear enough before this storm came. Not the team closure, but the legal battle against WP. So I'm pretty sure that this is the way I described minutes ago. And I think if it is like that, it's not optimal, because

Gaël Duez (34:37)
Hmm.

Nahuai (34:50)
As Nora said, I think these big things like the domain of WordPress.org and this kind of decision should be taken by more than one person. And till now there was no problem because Matt was being quite generous with the time he was putting with automaticians into the, in the community and with the trademark and everything. So till not that much time, it was pretty okay, everything.

Gaël Duez (34:59)
Hmm.

Nahuai (35:16)
And this battle kind of put into perspective how much power Matt has.

Csaba (35:21)
I very much agree upon how Nahuai has explained it. And also I think the bottom line we have learned, we learned a lot of things the last couple of months, but the bottom line is that we are very much dependent on WordPress.org for plugin updates, for team updates, everything that is very much hard-coded in WordPress. And that's something that we should, yeah.

Gaël Duez (35:25)
Hmm.

Csaba (35:44)
Think about a bit more if that's the way to go and probably not so.

Nahuai (35:47)
Yeah.

I think Drupal has a pretty interesting structure of how they have the governance structure. And it would be super cool if we moved to something more closer to Drupal or other CMSs or other open source products for that sake. I'm not sure if right now it's going to happen. I still feel like...

we are in a battle somehow, kind of in a battle. So I'm really hoping for the legal battle to finish and maybe the dust settle a bit and maybe some of the proposals can be look more calmly because there are some proposals right now. But I think Matt still sees them as a kind of an attack or power takeover or something like that again.

My opinion, I'm not sure I don't usually talk with Matt about this, but hopefully if this goes, this inflammation, let's call it, goes down, maybe we can talk more calmly about how we want to move forward. That's my hope.

Nora (36:42)
Yeah.

Gaël Duez (36:56)
Nahuai you are a perfect guest because I was about asked what were the repercussions of this battle mode in the WordPress community, quoting you for other CMS providers. And if we could get lessons from other open source projects and you mentioned Drupal. So maybe

Could you elaborate a bit on how Drupal is organized

Nahuai (37:19)
Yeah, probably I'm not the best person to talk about Drupal because I'm not inside it, but

I really recall well is a post from the founder of Drupal, which was explaining how they try to reward the companies that are giving back to the Drupal project. Okay. And there is a system of credits on how if you give more back, you can...

take some advantages, like being, I don't recall exactly, but maybe being highlighted as a plug-in maker or as a company or whatever. So that was one of the ideas that I found interesting because at the end, the main problem that we started this is that WP Engine was making a lot of money without giving anything back or very little back.

But maybe if we put some kind of rewards on people that is giving back, we could solve that part.

Gaël Duez (38:15)
thanks, Nehru, to clarify this Drupal governance Did you get some feedback on how did people react to the closing of the sustainability teams and what do they want to do now to keep on moving on their sustainability journey?

Nora (38:31)
Well, something I'm happy this all brings is many people ask, or at least ask me, the question why technology thing, why WordPress, why any other project like that need a sustainability team or a sustainability group working on this. And many people were asking,

in a bad way, like, we don't need this, but I think this question is important because many people, like Hannah Smith, for example, were answering this question, or even many people were just thinking about it, like, we don't need this, maybe we do. So I'm quite happy taking into account the situation because this situation with the sustainability team, I think, made people reflect on...

If we need in technology groups for working towards sustainability

Gaël Duez (39:28)
Thanks a lot. Nora, about the guidelines, are they still maintained somewhere? Did you migrate the working group on climate action tech or any other thought of a welcoming Slack community where you can keep on working or everything has been paused for the moment?

Nora (39:46)
Everything has been posted for a moment, but some people have asked us like, where are you going to work now on this? I don't have an answer for that because I didn't decide the thing, but we are still open to work on this. So if anybody listen to this says, okay, I'm into this and I want to collaborate, we can create something, but there is nothing at this moment.

Gaël Duez (39:48)
Okay.

Hmm. So it's a hard stop. OK.

Nahuai (40:17)
same for me. My

main idea is to keep contributing to the W3C group as far as I can. We are also in a very, very nice project from the GreenWeb Foundation that maybe later Nora can touch on it. And I will also continue to talk about sustainability in my podcast and in WordPress events. And as a plugin and theme maker, I have it.

embedded in my workflow and I try to also explain it as one of the key features of the plugin or the theme. So I will continue to be interested and talking about it but as Anora said there is since we don't have an official channel and way of working right now we just paused and let's see where it goes but for now it's paused.

Gaël Duez (41:06)
And actually, before talking about this GreenWeb Foundation project, which I believe is very closely related to what you've tried to achieve at WordPress. That's true Nahuai I should have mentioned that we are colleagues because you've also got your own podcast. And can you maybe just pitch us for one minute? Because I reckon that they are very valuable resources for anyone working with WordPress tool to become more sustainable. Am I right?

Nahuai (41:32)
Yeah, yeah, I was lucky enough to be selected by the GreenWeb Foundation the fellowship they have. So as a project, I created a podcast. It's a limited series podcast. So it's just eight episodes and it's about WordPress and sustainability. And I was also lucky enough to have very nice and interesting people like Nora, Csaba Thjis, the team reps, but also Tim Frick, Tom Greenwood.

people from the data sustainability and also for WordPress sphere. So I think if you're interested in the topic, could be a nice resource.

Gaël Duez (42:05)
Got it. And so because the GreenWide Foundation seems to be everywhere with the usual suspects that many of them were and surely will be again in the future, guests or speakers in Green IO or events. Maybe, Nora, to close on a more positive note this podcast, because

Nahuai (42:10)
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (42:26)
just as a side note, I was expecting a bit more of a happy ending, that you've already some sort of bounce back and found an agreement that Matt realized that, okay, maybe I shouldn't close or that abruptly, or you've been welcomed by the performance team or you created already some something else. So it's really a bit of a runes at the moment and I feel...

I'm kind of terribly sorry for all the hard work that you put you and hundreds of people, if I just count the numbers on the Slack channel. So yeah, it's a very disturbing thought that so much hard work that aim to go in the right direction with the pro and the con of every project, obviously, is, yeah, cancelled, I would say. But anyway, so to finish on a more optimistic note, Nora, you wanted also to talk about the

project that you are heavily involved within the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's all about carbon aware computing or am I misunderstanding something here?

Nora (43:31)
yeah, I'm super happy being part of this advisory group because we are working on making grid aware websites. We are trying to find a way to help developers to build websites without compromising user experience.

So that's it. We are working on this and I hope this project achieves their objectives.

Gaël Duez (43:56)
So it's a grid aware computing and not a carbon aware computing. I should have known and sorry, but that's interesting to put it from a user rather than a purely technical perspective. I really like it. Okay. That was quite a long episode for you talking about things that are still obviously quite emotional. So I would like to thank you again a lot for joining and taking the time to

Nora (44:00)
Yeah.

Gaël Duez (44:21)
pose and reflect on what happened and also share other projects and other potential resources for WordPress developer and designers. Is there any final positive piece of news that you'd like to share about sustainability at large or digital sustainability more specifically?

Nahuai (44:43)
I would say a general one. Even if the team is closed, I still feel like the people care about the sustainability. for the moment is enough for me to keep going and being somehow rewarded

And they usually are willing to change something. So yeah, let's keep that as a positive note if we can.

Gaël Duez (45:07)
No, but the buzz is-

Nora (45:07)
Yeah, you can

shoot down the team but you cannot make people disappear.

Gaël Duez (45:12)
Yeah.

Csaba (45:13)
hmm, hmm, hmm.

Gaël Duez (45:17)
Excellent. I guess that, there is no bad publicity as the marketers love to say. So I guess this buzz will at least help some of us to reach out new people or to highlight how strategic is sustainably within the digital sector. So thanks a lot for joining. I hope this episode will contribute a bit to this.

noble task. once again, I'm sorry about what happened. And I feel very honored that you've chosen the Green Eye Podcast to share a bit more in details the story of the WordPress sustainability Team version one. And I hope that we will hear soon about version two.

Nahuai (45:59)
Thank you for having us, Gael.

Csaba (46:00)
Thank for having us, yes.

Nora (45:59)
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (46:02)
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but I trust you to succeed.

Sharing the episode on social media or directly with anyone working with WordPress could also be a good idea, don't you think? Yes, I know you've heard this call to action a lot, but please do remember that being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. Now, in your next episode, we will welcome the CTO of BackMarket, Dawn Becker,

To tell us more about some radical choices she made in the green ops field. And yes, it involves her cloud provider.

One last thing, GreenIo is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter. The last one has a great paper from Frédéric Bordage, who founded the greenit.fr community 20 years ago. And check also the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for all five planned conferences this year in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris.

So if you want to share your experience in green software, sustainable design, green ops, responsible AI, you name it, please fill in the form. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to build with you fellow responsible technologists a greener digital world,

   🗺️ Colonialism and Digitalization

   🪨 Geopolitical Importance of Critical Minerals

   💧 Water Footprint of Digitalization

   ⚒️ Water Usage and Mining in Chile

   🔎 The Digital Divide: A Growing Gap

   🇺🇳 The Role of the UN in Digital Sustainability

   And much more!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

 📣 The CFP for the 2025 Green IO Conferences is now live. Apply here to share your experience on Responsible AI, GreenOps, Sustainable Design, Green Software, ... 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (00:00)

our digital world is literally liquids. It is the water that makes virtuality possible. That digital light is as blue as the fresh water that make it possible.

Gaël Duez (00:19)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. This episode is the first of 2025. And being released on January 30th, I can still wish you a happy new year, full of positive impacts. I hope you will find many occasions in 2025 for using technology responsibly, in order to maintain our world livable and our societies just inclusive and at peace. 

Full disclosure, I am sorry if I couldn't release this first episode of the year sooner, but January was a bit rough both on professional and personal level. Fortunately, everything is getting back on track, including your bi-monthly podcast. And something that is still on track is accessibility and transparent information remaining in the DNA of Green.io, so all the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website, greenio.tech.

Gaël Duez (01:53)

it's a 252 pages report with the foreword of Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, talking about digitalization and sustainability. And for once, it's not another report from the UN stating, let's digitize everything to boost sustainability. Quite the contrary, the report highlights the growing environmental impact of the digital economy and underscores the urgent need for environmentally sustainable and inclusive digitalization strategies. Quite a change. To discuss their insights and their implications, I am delighted to have with me two of its contributors. Pablo Jose Gámez-Certrozimo, based in the Netherlands, and Paz Pena Ochoa based in Chile. So yes, another 3 time zones Paz has dedicated more than 15 years to studying the intersection between technologies, social justice and gender. She has spent the last 5 years researching the socio-environmental impacts of digital technologies in Latin America, creating in 2021 the Latin American Institute of Terraforming. And in 2023, she published a summary of that research in the book Technologies for a Burning Planet, which is in Spanish, but I won't try to say it in Spanish, but you will have the link as usual in the show notes. And by the way, this book also made a great contribution to the branch magazine of Climate Action Tech. Pablo is an external researcher for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, as well as a coach and a scientific journalist. His research includes the publication of Depreda... I shouldn't say it in Spanish as well, but I'm going to try. His research includes the publication of Depredadores Digitales 2021, which is a global investigation that sheds light on the complex digital carbon water and waste footprints of digitalizations.

Welcome Paz, welcome Pablo. It's great to have you on the show today.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (04:15)

Thank you for having us in your program.

Paz Peña (04:18)

Yeah, thank you very much for having us.

Gaël Duez (04:20)

My pleasure, both of you.

So Paz, is it the first UN-backed report ever to address the environmental impact of digitalization?

Paz Peña (04:30)

Yes, it is.

Gaël Duez (04:32)

So that's a kind of a game changer, isn't it?

Paz Peña (04:34)

Yes, I will say absolutely. As you said before, is a report that I will say one of the first reports by the UN saying that digitalization is not all good. Even more saying that the social environmental impacts of digitization are huge, but not only huge, are differential depending on where you are in the world.

And this is very important because what it's saying is that the social environmental impacts of digitization, which are growing through the time, is being paid by the poorest of the world. The developing countries, the poorest countries. And again, the benefits of digitization.

are being enjoyed almost only for the developed world, which brings us a very classical and difficult concept, which is the colonial relationships that are again being deployed in digitization, which is something really difficult to address in the UN, but it's so necessary in these times where sustainable or sustainability is being discussed as a justice issue. And that actually brings us to discuss how digitization can be a justice issue in terms of sustainability.

Gaël Duez (06:09)

And just to understand like the concept of colonialism or neo colonialism was brought to light in the UN report or is it more like an underlying evolution in the state of mind of UN representatives starting to incorporate this concept also in a main report as this one?

Paz Peña (06:30)

Yeah, they will not name colonialism as it is. I don't know, Pablo, if you saw that concept as it is, because it's a very political, difficult concept for a UN fora, However, yeah, exactly. However you can see powerful concepts as, you know, unjusties, you know, different effects between the world, etc. You can see actually what they are saying is about colonialism, but of course they are not named as it is, because probably it's a very difficult concept to address in the UN.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (07:01)

It is in between lines, I will say it. And to add what Paz already said, this report is the result of a process of a critical thinking process that took almost 18 months from 2023 to 2024. And it is also the result of the work of several scientific researchers from all over the world that were here for the first time, let's call it the first time at Geneva, to address the externalities regarding the digital ecosystem we are dealing with and not only that, that we are seeing intensifying in a way that we have never seen before. This is really important to address and this is the timely that explains the importance of this critical report. It is a scientific report based on an ethical approach.

If you go deeply in this report, it says developing countries are suffering disproportionately from digitalization's negative environmental externalities of effects, as well as missing out on economic development opportunities to digital divides.

It used the term unequal ecological exchange between developed and developing countries regarding digitalization. And this is also an complementary part of what Bas already said and your question. It is in between colonialism or neocolonialism.

Gaël Duez (09:20)

just before we deep dive into the importance of this report and maybe what's in this report, two short questions. The first one you mentioned that it was a scientific work. Was it mostly based on primary data or is it more an aggregation of other scientific studies that were used to build the end results?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (09:44)

It took and it used several primary and secondary resources. it is the most comprehensive integral report until now. It looks back from 1996 from the first ever report on digital sustainability until now. It addressed the problematic behind the methodologies that every single report used to say this and to say that. And there is no continuity at all because there is no universal understanding of methodology on how to deal with what we call the digital ecosystem. What is the digital ecosystem? That's your e-bike right now is part of the digital ecosystem or your Tesla car because they are already computers. They are already intelligent. They are already smart. We use also the primary data United Nations has with several agencies all around the world. And what you read, And this is really important to say also is a really comprehensive report. It is right in a common language that you and me can understand.

Gaël Duez (11:22)

So if I understand both of you right and if you indulge me to sum up a bit what you've said, this is the first of its kind tackling this issue. It has a broad ambition of tackling quite difficult topics, even if some of them are not named, but at least they are addressed.

And it's also one of the most comprehensive based on several studies, quite a lot of researchers being involved. So I think it's a fair statement to say that pretty much everyone working in the digital economy should have a look at it. Am I right?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (12:04)

it is for everyone, for you and me, for the common ones, for all the ones involved in a digital transformation society. It is not only for politicians, it's not only for ICT. No, it is for the common people, for you and me.

Gaël Duez (12:27)

So I think we've teased enough about this report. Maybe Paz, if you allow me to ask you these questions. On the impact side, and we will talk a bit later on this very important social justice concept that you've raised, but on the impact size, what are the main findings? Maybe what are the one or two numbers that you believe everyone should be aware when it comes to the environmental impact of digitalization?

Paz Peña (12:56)

Sure, so first I will say that one of the greatest thing about this report is that Big Tech is not present there in terms of giving their reports as evidence. It's a very independent report, which is not so common even in the UN. I will say ANTAT is one of the few UN agencies that is still very independent in terms of funding, et cetera. And you can find here that this is a proof that big tech, these big companies are not present there. Actually, we were with Pablo doing the peer review in a couple of meetings with people of, UNCTAD's people, they were all independent researchers, which was very, very rich because the discussion was very, very honest. That is the first thing that is important to say because what you're gonna see in this report, it's scientific evidence, it's not big tech evidence, And the second thing that is really interesting is when you see actually the evidence of environmental impacts of sustainability is not a conversation only focused on CO2 emissions, which is a very important thing because of the use of energy and increase of the use of energy of digitization, but it's very...focus on the necessities of the global north, which is of course very important because the global north doesn't have energy matrix that is clean yet. But that is not actually a very big issue for the global south. For example, Latin America is the continent that has today the most clean energy matrix in the world.

So the use of energy of digitization, it's important, of course, but it's not really the main issue here in the global south in terms of the environmental effects of digitization. 

So one of the things that for me, it's more interesting about the report is that actually has complete evidence there about carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same critical minerals, especially in the global South. So...

Minerals are a geopolitical factor that is actually activating policies around the global south from the global north to actually have access to these minerals. And then here you can actually start the discussion about how these geopolitical necessity of the global north of accessing to these critical minerals is actually affecting developing countries in terms of how this is feeding illegal mining for example or unsustainable practices in mining because that is where the money is today.

Gaël Duez (16:07)

I'd like to ask you one last question to get things a bit more concrete here, because you mentioned several times how the report is important, but most of the listeners, will not have read the report. So let me ask you this question to give you the opportunity to provide a bit of numbers or facts that are mind blowing enough for people to remember and to understand what you are highlighting. So, Paz, you've mentioned that actually digitalizations and the transition towards low carbon economy, they tend to compete for the same resources, especially minerals.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (16:54)

By 2050, we will need more than 150 billion tons of minerals annually. And that will include 50 new lithium mines, 60 new nickel mines, and the production of rare earth metals must be increased at last 12 folds. If you look...into e-waste this year or just published a couple of days ago by 2022 the world generated 62 billion kilograms of e-waste.

It is extremely important to say the complexity we are dealing with when we try to define once again what is a digital device, what is a digital infrastructure, and what is not. Because if you look once again the example of an e-bike or a Tesla car.

then we have to consider them as part of this digital ecosystem, but at the same time as part of the transitional electrification that we are dealing with. The way IoT devices are being created is a moving target that makes really difficult the definition right now of what is a digital device, what is not a digital device. But the main point here is how transitional minerals, that's the word we use in the report to refer to critical minerals, how the amounts of transitional minerals we are going to need. We are talking about open-bit mining. We are talking about the renaissance of the mining industry. We are talking about that we are completely dependent on all elements of the periodic and to obtain them you are not going to find them in Europe. You have to go to Global South to get them.

Gaël Duez (19:19)

And my question, Pablo, regarding this is really, what is the share of digital? mean, if I understand you right, what you're saying is pretty much everything is digital now. Am I right?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (19:29)

electrify and digital. We are living an electrification era and at the same time we are dealing with an internet intelligent era that is taking for its own almost everything, almost every device we use daily.

Gaël Duez (19:52)

Because in the research field, there are several, I would say, debates still going on on how you define what is the ICT sector and what is not the ICT sector. And what is the share of greenhouse gases emitted by the ICT sector? And usually it's believed between 2 and 4%, depending on the studies, et cetera, et cetera. And your point is...

It's slightly irrelevant because the digital economy is fueling the entire economy I mean, you follow Malmöder, for instance, he has a very strong stance on what should be in the digital economy or counted as ICT and what should not like the TV debate, et cetera, et cetera. Your point is

And that's maybe the point in this report as well. That doesn't really matter that strongly to draw a very clear boundary because electrification is everywhere, digitalization is everywhere, and that fueled the trend in this massive increase in mineral resources that you've just described a bit earlier. Am I correct to rephrase you that way?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (21:06)

you are completely correct.

Gaël Duez (21:08)

Okay, thanks. I got it.

Pablo, you were mentioning having a holistic view on everything and I guess both of you, you stressed quite a lot the abiotic resources, mostly metals and minerals. But there are also other impacts that are touched upon in this report.

We cannot list all of them, but can I briefly ask you to share maybe one or two figures or one or two facts that you believe are also very important when it comes to environmental impacts? And as far as I know, Pablo, you're quite keen on studying the water usage of the digital sector. Maybe you've got some things to tell us about.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (21:55)

Sure. we can understand this better if we say that the more virtual we become, the more fresh and potable water we need for that. And that means that our digital world is literally liquids. We surf the internet, navigating and diving into its waters. And I want to be here clear enough, Kyle. It is the water that makes virtuality possible. That digital light is as blue as the fresh water that make it possible.

Now I'm talking here about data center industry. Here I'm talking now about the semiconductor industry. I'm talking here about the open pit mining industry.

I'm talking here about the production of our gadgets,

Gaël Duez (23:04)

I there are quite a lot of examples about this, maybe Paz being based in Chile. I think this is one of the countries where the tension between the mining industries and the population regarding water usage has been one of the fiercest. So do you want to comment on what Pablo just said?

Paz Peña (23:26)

Yes, absolutely. in all Latin America, one of the biggest climate effects today is drought. And you can see that in different states. But in the case of Chile, Chile is suffering a historical drought for over 30 years where water is scarce, even for human consumption. And you can see that many of the territorial fights for different communities is actually the access of fresh water. And this is something that is present in mining activities, but also which are related to the digitization, for example, in terms of the lithium mining in the north of Chile, which is one of the biggest worldwide resources of lithium to digitization and green energies. And the fight there from indigenous communities is actually how this mining is affecting the access of fresh water for indigenous community there, which is basically

having a very concrete impact in terms of the environment. Natural, different animals, for example, are being displaced from that place because of this scarcity of water. But also these indigenous communities are being displaced of their territories because of this, which is again something that we must discuss as a society why indigenous communities that haven't actually contributed to the ecological crisis and climate crisis that we are facing as a world, why they are paying the price of having green energies and digitization. This is one thing. But also, Gael...

For example, here in Santiago, public policies are being deployed to be some sort of data center hub in Latin America. So there's a lot of data centers being built here in Santiago from like Big Tech, Alphabet, Microsoft, et cetera.

And it's very interesting because many of the territorial fights that you can see here in Santiago are regarding the access of fresh water. It's about fighting the building of this huge infrastructure, digital infrastructure for example, in this year, actually at the beginning of this year, in February, I think, a court of law rescinded part of the authorization of the construction of this data center built by Google because there wasn't enough proof of the effects on the access of water for communities, how that will be affected by this huge infrastructure. And actually a couple of weeks ago, Alphabet desisted from insisting on the original design of this data center. And this, it means that they will modify and start all over again. But this is important, Gael, because it shows that people, organized people can actually fight this kind of infrastructure that is designed without seeing actually the environmental effects of its deployment, especially in terms of freshwater in this context of drought, but also in the context of the ecological and climate crisis.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (27:15)

Absolutely right.

Gaël Duez (27:16)

And Paz, what is the current trend in I've heard about some water quotas also for the mining industry. I've heard also that the mining industry was now building massive water pipeline to bring seawater into the mountains, has obviously a huge environmental and ecological and energy toll, but also to mitigate the water crisis. is it just one piece of news completely out of context that doesn't really describe properly what is at stake in the current train or actually is Chile getting more and more concerned about this water consumption issues and has started to regulate or to mitigate or to slow down the rising water consumption by both the mining industry and now because you've put that under the spotlight as well, the data center industry.

Paz Peña (28:19)

That's a very interesting question, Gael, because in Latin America, and especially, for example, in countries as Chile, we call ourselves a mineral country. We basically provide minerals to the world. So copper, for example, is a very important mineral for the Chilean economy. And now lithium, it is being really important because of this, because of green energies and because of digitization. So all our public policies are based on that extraction in terms of get money and pay everything that we need as an estate. So it's a very historical discussion are the environmental costs of mining in Chile because of this. But I will say in the last 15 years, the discussion around the access of fresh water is increasing, especially in the public opinion, because of the ecological and climate crisis that we're facing. we are now understanding that we are not going back to our earlier climate condition. Now we are living with drought for all our life. So this is a discussion that is increasing. It's a very difficult discussion to have because it depends on the economy, know, mineral economy which is why it's so important actually this kind of reports because it shows you actually who is paying the costs of green energies but also digitization in terms actually of access of fresh water.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (30:14)

I mean, without the natural resources of global south, it's no possibility to talk about digital transition or green energies. Another really interesting example, not only talking about the mineral countries in Latin America or the ones that are dealing with data centers, it is now the semiconductor industry that is taking over the region. And do not forget that this industry consumes over 264 billions gallons of water per year. And that is more than Hong Kong. And this industry needs a lot of ultra-pure water and you can find it in places as Costa Rica, for example, chosen from the Biden administration to hold Intel expansion in the region. And this is, again, one of the new debates that are taking over in the region.

is this the economical progress we want to go in and with and that will cost this precious element we need to survive. put it in another way, data needs at this moment more water daily than you and me to exist.

Gaël Duez (31:47)

So we've covered quite a lot of the environmental impacts. We could also talk about the energy consumption. We could also talk about a bit more in details, greenhouse gasses. We could also talk about the share of electricity consumption used by the digital economy. But actually both of you at the very beginning of the interview, brought under the spotlight some very key and differentiator aspects with this report around social justice and some geopolitical significance of this report. And maybe I'd like to give you the floor now to talk a bit more about what I've understood to be some sort of a digital revolution paradox which is that those contributing the most in terms of resources, including human resources, I mean workers, are not the one benefiting more of it, of this digital revolution. I know that this is one of your specialties. Could you tell us a bit more? how you analyze this discrepancy.

Paz Peña (32:52)

Yeah, actually in the report you can see that UNCTAD is addressing that today digitalization is under a very concentrated market. That means that few companies actually are available to actually developed these very digital economies of the 21st century. And many of those companies are based in the US, others are in China, some of them very few are in Europe. And many of them are what we known as big tech companies. They have the power to have the infrastructure, the worldwide infrastructure to actually be able to address this need of digital economy in the world. So when we talk about digitization, for me it's really interesting to say, but who is behind that digitization? There are not many companies behind that. There are not many countries behind that.

you can count the companies that are available to actually address this task. And there are a few of them, probably 20, 25 in the world. So this is the first thing that I think we need to discuss. Who is actually enjoying the benefit, the economic benefits? Yes, they are, you 

know, developing countries, industrialized countries of digitization, But not all the people actually. The ones that are enjoying the benefits of digitization the most is, these companies, no? Why there's this need to make everything digital is because there's a big push in terms of lobby to do that because these companies know that is where the money come from. So this is the first thing I believe is important to understand and this report will help us to understand that. The UNCTAD is addressing that there's a concentration of market in digital economy and this is a huge problem. This is the first thing. And the second thing I will say is that, as you said, Gaël the biggest question that we need to address here is also who is bearing the costs of digitization.

And you can see this worldwide where there's a gap between developing countries with industrialized countries. And there's a gap there that we have been discussing in this podcast. But also we need to address that even in developed countries, there is also communities that are bearing the cost of digitization. communities that are actually being cut off the access of fresh water in, for example, Europe, etc. And also this is a question of justice, but it's not only a question of justice between developed and developing world, but also in our communities in all the world, which is something that is very important to understand.

Gaël Duez (36:20)

when you say, and let me be the devil advocates here. When you say, Big Tech is benefiting the most from digitalization. Does it overlook all the benefits that quite a lot of people get also from digitalization via new jobs, better services, more productivity, you name it. mean, there are countless of reports and you've mentioned at the beginning that quite a lot of them are also sponsored by the digital industry, a lot of them are biased. But I would say for the average North American or European or Japanese or Chinese citizen, believing that digitalization doesn't bring mostly valuable things would be quite hard to sell. question is, sure, Big Tech is reaping quite a lot of the benefit, at least in the global north, does overall the population also benefit from this digital revolution?

Paz Peña (37:28)

Yes, but that is something that you can actually discuss. how digitization is actually benefiting our economies because you can say also that you are lowering the work standards that we had before digitization, for example. You can see, and there's many reports on how digitization is influencing this trend of uberization of economy, there's no doubt that developed countries are having more benefits because they have a more digital economy.

But you have to understand that today in the current state of capitalism, for many theorists, digitization is actually lowering the standards of work, for example, without even discussing all the other implications of digitization in terms of

techno-capitalism today in terms of, for example, mental health through being connected all day to social media, cetera. So this is not so clear. It's not so clear that all is benefits. But also, I think it's important to say that in developing countries, many developing countries, even I'm from Chile, so Latin America is a region that I know. In many countries in Latin America, the digital economy is not well developed yet. So when we are going through this global discourse of saying, so to be sustainable enough, we need digitization, digitization of everything. That means concretely today that the gap between these countries that are not having a digital economy well developed, that means that those countries will increase the with industrialized countries, with Europe, with Japan, et cetera. So that gap, that inequality gap is something that is not being discussed very seriously in the world. And I think, again, this and that report help us to understand that kind of new gap that we are creating with this discourse of saying, OK, we need to digitalize everything. Yes, that's maybe something good for the developed countries, but you have to be aware that developing countries are still behind that. And this could actually widening that gap, which is very, very serious matter.

Gaël Duez (40:09)

how would you define social injustice actually when it comes to the digital economy and could you provide one or two examples of this imbalance that you've described previously?

Paz Peña (40:22)

Sure, so I think we can define that... ...unjustice in the context of digitization is that... ...most of the added value created in the digital economy is captured by developed and digital advanced developing countries. many of the social environmental costs of digitization are paid by developing countries. And this is especially important, for example, in terms of mineral extraction, where the global south is basically the most affected by the extraction of minerals that are needed by the digital economy.

And minerals are being extracted from the Global South, that means a lot of pollution, a lot of illegal mining, which means human rights violations of people, displacement of indigenous communities, scarcity of fresh water, et cetera. Many people, for example, say that there's no way that green mining is possible. All mining have a lot of social environmental costs. And that is something that is as important to examine. So the latest UNTAD report actually what does is to examine those social environmental impacts of digitization in developing countries, which means to not only review evidence, scientific evidence, but also have a call, an international call for countries not only developing countries, but also industrialized countries to understand the need of sustainable digitization

But also, Gael, I just want to add something that I believe is really important to understand. It's that what we're seeing today is a geopolitical discussion where digital economy is really important. today digitalization or the digital economy is being discussed together with the transformation of our energy matrix to a more greener one. These two things, green energies and digitizations, is being discussed as one thing, as something that is needed for a more sustainable world. who is the boss in digital economy and who is available and have the capacity to have most important share of green energies in the world. So this is where the discussion is happening today.

Gaël Duez (43:17)

And what about the UN with this geopolitical impact? I this is supposed to be the place where nations are talking to each other. And, know, when I've read the report, I've seen all the recommendations about what should be done. And it sounded a bit like a wishful thinking list. And I was discussing it with a Green IO listener, Benjamin Davy, and he was really questioning whether the UN should or even is able to actually shift a bit from a reporting stance. This is how things are going to a more pedagogical stance and even maybe a bit of name and shame if possible, So my question is, what can actually the United Nations do about it and what actually should we do about it also?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (44:16)

United Nations UNCTAD in this case has adopted digital sustainability as a priority under the understanding the principle of common but differentiated responsibility as high relevant.

It is time also to extend the calls for both actions to the entire life cycle of digitalization and to systematically track its social environmental footprint. Be aware of the socio-environmental footprint of the mechanics behind the digital economy and be aware that the problem or part of the problem can be solved with the circular design. But be aware that if we do not follow that way, we are going to deal with really complex problems in the near future. I think this is the main thing, or one of the main things of this UNTACD report.

Gaël Duez (45:31)

Paz what do you think about the potential for collaboration at UN level and what the UN should do about it?

Paz Peña (45:39)

The UN is going through a huge political crisis because of the war between Israel and Palestine and Lebanon. And also because the lack of concrete action in terms of the climate and ecological crisis we are facing through. But there's also a lot of critics regarding the UN forum and its role in the technological, digital internet governance, because mainly there's a lot of big tech influence in there, et cetera. So I think we need to be realistic and understand the political limits of the UN. There's a lot of fight inside. There's a lot of interest there. I mean, I'm very critical about that, but that doesn't mean that you can actually take these kind of reports and do your own political work as a community, as a territory, as a researcher, et cetera. I do like a lot of many of the conclusion of this report and that reports. really believe that circular as Pablo said, can be something important in terms of the designing of the digital economy. But I do also believe that circular economy is just a mitigation policy. It's not addressing the biggest problem of digital economy, which is basically this logic, this capitalist logic of extraction. This idea, as Pablo said, the idea that we have infinite resources for the economy, which is a completely crazy idea in terms of our reality, in terms of natural resources. And I don't think we can find in any report, including the UNCTAD report, a recommendation that is addressing the problem of capitalism today in digitization, which for me is the biggest problem. But that doesn't mean that these kind of reports that are designed with independent scientific science can help actually communities to understand their reality and actually start to have a more political reaction to it. So I will say, of course, I don't think the UN can do something more relevant in this issue, but I do believe that this kind of report can actually be very useful for communities around the world.

Gaël Duez (48:32)

So more awareness than actual actions because of the ongoing political crisis, according to you, Paz. I? Okay, got it. And my last question for both of you would be,

Paz Peña (48:40)

I will say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gaël Duez (48:46)

As someone working in this digital economy and many listeners of this show are actually workers of the digital economy.

What can we do? How should we react to such a report? And what would be your two cents on tackling the different large issues that are highlighted in this report?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (49:02)

We need to go back to our critical thinking.

And with the critical thinking, break the magical digital thinking we are dealing with.

Understand that cyberspace has a growing footprint, multi-dimensional, that every time we use, we deal with our digital environment has a consequence.

Paz Peña (49:38)

I believe that digital workers are essential for change in digitization and in digital economies, are essential. And I actually have two concrete suggestions for workers in the digital industry. First, one of the most important is think about tech differently. try to experiment with new designs of tech that can be actually more sustainable, that cannot necessarily think in growth and growth and growth and maybe think in technology that can be used in territories with the participation of communities, et cetera. Let's try to think out of the box and believe in other tech is possible.

the second thing, if you're working in a big tech company and in the industry, it's so, so important for workers to fight for more transparency in terms of the social environmental impacts of that company in different territories. fight for transparency. You are key in this. Today what we are dealing with is that companies tend to be very obscure in how they report their environmental impacts. If we can fight for more transparency, it's something that is so key not only for scientific but also for territories, for people in their territories that can actually start a dialogue with companies. And I think workers are key for that. And for me, this is the second very concrete suggestion. Fight for transparency.

Gaël Duez (51:34)

fight for transparency. Quite a tagline for this episode.

What would be a positive piece of news that both of you would like to share regarding the ongoing trend in the digital economy?

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (51:47)

I see there is more attention to the importance of the circular design in our digital world. I also see more efforts, for example, at the… European Union level to address critical matters regarding not only the circular design, but also the power of Big Tech Corporates regarding artificial intelligence.

And what I'm also is a more critical thinking approach on the digital ecosystem we have, the nature of it, and the chances we have to correct.

Paz Peña (52:35)

I completely agree with Pablo. Five years ago, even three years ago, you didn't see many news in the outlets around the social environmental impacts, for example, of AI, of the digital economy. Today that is completely changed, I think.

There's also a lot of critical thinking or more critical thinking around digitization, but also that means there's a lot of territorial movements saying, know, these digital technologies have a very concrete material impact in our realities. That means that there are people, not necessarily

people that is related to tech, but people in their communities saying, you know, let's discuss about this. And this is something that you can see in the media outlets. And I think that is very, very positive because that means that people is alive actually, know, trying to change and to have a better world, a sustainable world, even in digital technologies.

Gaël Duez (53:49)

thanks a lot, both of you for highlighting the rise in awareness, at least in our industry. And let's hope that it will have some impact at some point, but awareness is always the first step. And this is a very reason of this podcast as well.

And yeah, it was really nice to have you both of you on the show, not talking the regular green software or responsible AI topics, but zooming out a bit and discussing massive geopolitical and social issues. So thanks a lot, both of you for this.

Paz Peña (54:12)

Thank you, Gael, for the invitation.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (54:20)

thank you very much for make this space possible. And this is also really positive to mention the attention that you are giving also to this issue. Thank you very much.

Paz Peña (54:30)

Yeah.

Thank you and so nice to see you, Pablo.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (54:39)

That's it. Bye!

Gaël Duez (54:44)

Thank you for listening to this Green.io episode. Sharing it on social media or directly with, well, pretty much everyone working in the digital sector or using digital services seems a good idea regarding what is at stake here. You know the drill, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode,

We were supposed to welcome the CTO of Backmarket, Dawn Baker, to tell us more about some radical choices she made in the GreenOps field. However, the brutal dismantling of the sustainability team at WordPress requires some coverage. And I will be honored to welcome in the next episode three of the initiators of this grassroots movement. Nahuai Badiola, Nora Ferreiros and Csaba Varszegi

There will provide us some context and clarification about what happened and more importantly what to do next when you are a responsible technologist using WordPress as your main CMS. course, the episode with Dawn Baker will be released just after. Don't worry. One last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for our five planned conferences this year. It will be in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris. So if you want to share your experience in green software, sustainable design, green art, responsible AI, you name it, please fill in the form.

I'm looking forward to meeting you there to build with you, fellow responsible technologists, a greener digital world.

This provocative statement from Tristan Nitot highlights the pivotal role of software engineers in our journey as an industry toward a sustainable and more frugal digital world. The majority of our old devices, from smartphones to desktop, still work. How come that we waste such a massive gathering of precious resources such as minerals, energy, water and even our human time which we use to manufacture and maintain them? What should we do to break the trend of electronic waste and the ever-increasing footprint of the IT sector on our physical world? 

Gael Duez sat down with Tristan Nitot to start answering these questions in this Green IO episode where we covered: 

   ⚖️ Why Wirth’s law matters more than Moore’s law

   🗑️ How the Auvergnat cultural aversion for waste accelerated the birth of the Eroom’s law

   🔎 How to find (sustainability) weakness in your software, 

   🐍 Why Python is not (always) guilty of being resource hungry and how to embrace a wise use of alternative libraries such as Polars,

   ✨The real ROII of using AI to optimize software.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 4th and 5th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP here. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Tristan Nitot (00:00)
basically if you manage to double the speed of your software every other year, then you don't need to change your hardware. Because every other year, you have like Moore's Law, you're liberating half of your computing power and resources. And so you have half of it which is available. And half of it means you can invent

new stuff. And I call it Erooms Law.

It's like more in reverse, because it's basically the same.

Gaël Duez (00:32)
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO

I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information

is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech.

Gaël Duez (01:19)
It was a late evening in December 2021 in my small Parisian flat. The wind was blowing and a bit of rain was making me feel very comfortable being at home. I was staring at my living room wall, which happened to also be my kitchen wall. I told you this is a Parisian flat. And on this wall were dozens of post-its with voting dotes and names on it, such as Take It Green,

Green Coding, Green Technologists, Eco IO, well, as

I was on the final stage of finding the names of this podcast. The final battle was between Green IO and Green Bytes. And here comes a surprise, the winner was Green Bytes. But Tristan Nitot had been broadcasting for years a successful podcast in French named

L'Octet Vert, the green octet. And I wanted his permission to use a similar title in English. And he told me, I'd rather not. Back in those days, he had plans to expand the podcast internationally. And after he told me this, we talked for an hour. And the amount of tips and support he provided me was mind blowing.

This call was one of the best investments I made while launching the Green IO adventure. So Green IO won and as far as I know from your feedback, that's a pretty cool name as well.

to have him on the show to celebrate this milestone. But we don't have Tristan today with us only for celebrations. We have him to discuss how we will run weather forecasts in 10 years from now on an Amstrad computer from the 80s. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here, but it illustrates well the concept that Tristan has been pushing relentlessly for a year now about his Eeroom's law and the fact that more law is dead.

This focus on sustainability in Tristan's life started 15 years ago in parallel of a successful career in Mozilla Europe,

which he co-founded, then Cozy Cloud as a CPO and Quant as its CEO. He now works at Octo Technology to work on digital sustainability and frugality, but Tristan is also well known for

being one of the strongest voices in Europe for open source software and privacy, a topic he even wrote a book about, surveillance. Welcome back on the show, Tristan. It's always a pleasure to have you here.

Tristan Nitot (04:09)
Bye.

It's a pleasure too and an honor.

Gaël Duez (04:14)
let's get started right now. And I've got a question for you, Tristan. From podcaster to podcaster, just between you and me and a few thousands listeners. Did you kill it? Did you kill Moore's law

Tristan Nitot (04:30)
No, it's not my fault. It happened. Well, I think they say that trees don't grow up to the sky. They have to end sometimes. And has experienced a fantastic run for more than 50 years. But it's pretty close to being

It may be a shock for many people because we've all been living with Moore's Law around us. And to the point it's a fact of life. And to the point we forget about it, it's just like Next year's computers are going to be faster, except that it's slowing And they keep improving stuff, but more Law basically is almost dead.

Gaël Duez (05:22)
and for the listeners not that familiar with the concept of more law, could you just describe it in one sentence?

Tristan Nitot (05:28)
Sure, of course. It was created by Gordon Moore, who was a co-founder of Intel. It pronounced in 1965 in the very early days of semiconductors. Moore realized that basically because they were making so quickly

progress about manufacturing microchips and semiconductors, they were able to double the number of transistors they could put into a semiconductor, basically a computer chip, memory, processor, and stuff. And if they could manage to double the number of transistors per chip every two years, like they've been doing,

And it would be fantastic. And so they decided it's not a physical law, is a programmatic decision of investing in research and development in order to double the number of choices store every other year so that microchip will double in computing power every two years. And they managed to basically pull it off.

for more than 40 years. But now, starting in the mid 2010s, it's really slowing down. they managed to put it off for 40 years, which is amazing.

Gaël Duez (06:51)
which is amazing for a non-physical law. As you stated, it's almost a research and investment program rather than a law, followed by humans at Intel and then everywhere around the world in the semiconductor

Tristan Nitot (06:59)
Yes.

Gaël Duez (07:06)
Now I'd like to ask you a question about whether it's really dead or not. Because someone would argue that with the current trend on GPU chips achieving an etching smaller and smaller, we're talking about two nanometers now, the computing power intensity of our chips is still going up. So dead or not dead, Mauslo, or just being rewritten somehow?

Tristan Nitot (07:32)
Yeah, that's a really good question. Basically, Moslo was interesting because you could make a microprocessor core go faster. And as we write a program, it's executed sequentially with loops on one single core. That was the model from the very start, and it lasted

for a very long time. And if you look at the improvements year over year of the speed of the power of a single core microprocessor, would see it increases very almost in a way. Well, it's a.

It's linear if you have a logarithmic scale. So it really doubles every other year. Actually, sometimes it goes faster than that, and sometimes a little slower, depending on the period of time. And then the curve is making a plateau around 2012 in terms of the speed of one single core. And basically,

If you could put it that way, you could add more transistors into a microprocessor, but at some point, it doesn't make it any faster. It's plateauing, and it's over.

So what they manage to do is they multiply the number of cores. And this is why you have several cores in a microprocessor. But it completely changes the model. And cores is a lot more complex than programming a single core, because you have to synchronize each core altogether. So the complexity is increasing really fast. It's mind blowing.

And so it's a lot harder to manage. So what we see now is with AI and neural networks, we can have a solution to basically split the computing neurons and each core being like a neuron.

But this model is very different from programming like an application or something. It really is about LLMs and AI and stuff like that. Well, you can use thousands of core and being efficient at using them. But the single core thing, it's really over. are slight improvements like Apple did it with the Apple Silicon because they started integrating everything all at once in a single piece of silicon, putting

the processor and the memory and also the GPU and stuff like that, all in the same box, like a tiny box. And so it's faster mostly because the connectioners are shorter and it's more efficient. And as you can see now, even Apple Silicon is plateauing.

Gaël Duez (10:26)
So dead or plateaued, but in any case, significantly slow in down. This is your main takeaway of what is going on at the hardware level of our IT industry, if I understood you right exactly.

Tristan Nitot (10:41)
Yes, yes.

Gaël Duez (10:42)
And in parallel of more law

there is a second law that you love to quote a lot and to put into perspective with more law, which is Weir's law. Can you elaborate a bit on it and why you like to put these two in parallel?

Tristan Nitot (10:57)
so basically there is this famous German Swiss computer scientist which name is Niklaus Wirth.

And so he's a very, he's almost a genius. He's got several prizes for his work. He has invented several innovative languages like Pascal. So he's a really top-notch computer scientist and researcher.

so Niklaus Wirth was actually pretty unhappy about the state of affairs in computing.

because what he saw is that the more someone has a powerful computer, the more lazy the person is when it comes to writing software. So his law is said, software is becoming slower, faster than hardware is accelerating. So the more power you have, more hardware power you have, the more you

misuse it and the lazier you become when writing

Gaël Duez (12:02)
I think it was coined in a different way in the 90s when it was stated like what Intel gives you, Microsoft takes it back.

Tristan Nitot (12:12)
Indeed, yes. It was a popular way to summarize the VEOT slow. And it's exactly that. What Intel gives you Microsoft takes back. And in the time where computing was Intel making the hardware and it was Microsoft delivering the software, you could see that, in fact, you get a new generation. And you see that Windows and Microsoft Office and

They get slower. They get more features, but they get slower. And Intel was super happy about that because it will enable them to sell new computers and new processors and everything. And they loved it. So it was nice.

Gaël Duez (12:54)
So now Gordon Moore is dead. Maybe his law is dead or at least platooning. are still pretty unhappy with the way we run our software. I people are still changing hardware mostly on software reason or on psychological obsolescence, but that's a completely different topic. And a few years ago,

came up with an idea about a new low, E room's low. And that's the reason you're on this show today.

could you tell us a bit more, how did you get this idea of Eroom's law?

Tristan Nitot (13:28)
I wish I could tell you that one day an apple fell on my head and I had this wonderful idea of Irrumsloh. Yeah, but it was a Mac, not an apple. It hurts quite a bit. Just kidding. And so, no, no, it was actually pretty painful. I knew about Morsloh and Wiertzloh.

Gaël Duez (13:33)
I've heard this story already.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Tristan Nitot (13:51)
for a long time and then it came back when I had a conversation with Frédéric Bordage, who is one of the godfather of green IT in France and he mentioned that in a training that I was participating to. And it was nice having my memory refreshed about it.

And so I used this. was trying to do giving talks here and there because I thought that we needed to do something about global warming.

biodiversity collapse and stuff. And I was trying to ways to introduce people to the issue that we should stop wasting competing power. to be honest, I wasn't very successful because basically my idea at the time was that people should give up on

new things all the time. And maybe we should cut down on the amount of computing resources we use. And nobody was ready to hear that. And I understand that. mean, being myself a computer scientist and being myself like in love with the progress and advancement, technical advancement of computing,

It's like everybody in the industry has this feeling that we are going to do more computing in the future and not less,

And so I wanted to explain to the people that computing is not free. Of course, it's getting cheaper and all of that. But it has an impact when it comes to digging mines in many places of the world and pollution and energy consumption and greenhouse gases and stuff.

And they were, I mean, they were not exciting conferences. People would get unhappy And suddenly I realized that there were people that could do optimization of software in amazing ways. And I mean, a friend of mine had written something in Python and realized it was

taking too long for his program to run and decided to optimize it. In just half an hour, he managed to optimize it by a factor of 60. He made his program run 60 times faster.

You could put it in a different way. Until then, he was wasting 60 times too much computing power to achieve the results he wanted to get from his computer. and I am from a region in France, which is a poor region, historically, which is Auvergne. And so people in

they want to save money. wasting resources is just unacceptable.

And it happens, but my friend is also from Auvergne. And he said exactly, he felt exactly the same way. Like, what? I've been wasting 60 times. So he felt ashamed about it. And so I kept researching about optimization.

And there was that one thing that I discussed when I was last here at Green IO Paris 2023 of one guy in the UK named Matt Parker, who made a fantastic video about his code being improved by a factor of 408 million. So he was basically wasting 400 million times

too many power to solve a problem, which actually was not a really interesting problem, by the way.

And he wrote a Python script And this Python script has been running for 32 days to find one solution. And he made a podcast about it.

and people starting making fun of him because really 32 days to solve such a basic problem was way too much. And somebody decided to rewrite another version and made it run in 15 minutes instead of 32 days. so Matt mentioned that in another podcast.

And so other people say, what? 15 minutes is way too slow. I can do better. And so they started first competing and then collaborating altogether to share the best tricks like, no, you don't want to use Python. You want to use Rust. Or no, you can use C. And no, you can use Assembler and all of that in order to go faster.

And one of the latest version, which is not the fastest version, now runs in 6.8 milliseconds instead of 32 days. And so that's more than 400 million times faster.

So basically, overall, what it made me realize is that in most cases, when someone writes software,

We don't really care about quality and the need of resources. And sometimes it's OK. Maybe we could rewrite it. We could redo the work. We could rewrite it and gain maybe 20 % performance. And we don't have to do that. mean, doing the work twice in order to gain 20%, it's not worth the thing. But if you can.

manage to make it 100 times faster, then it makes sense. And basically, the issue is finding where in your code base you behaved like Matt Parker and where you have written a terrible piece of code

So we need to spot that and fix it.

basically if you manage to double the speed of your software every other year, then you don't need to change your hardware. Because every other year, you have like Moore's Law, you're liberating half of your computing power and resources. And so you have half of it which is available. And half of it means you can invent

new stuff. And I call it Erooms Law. It's like more in reverse, because it's basically the same.

Same thing is more law, except that you don't need to change the so does it make a big difference? It does. Why does it? Because actually,

the manufacturing of the hardware

is the thing that has the biggest impact by far because basically it's just not electricity, electricity which can be green electricity by the way. No, this is basically diesel caterpillars being used in some foreign country whether it's South Africa or South America.

Gaël Duez (20:48)
layer.

Tristan Nitot (20:49)
and digging mines pushing earth and soil in huge amounts, and literally tons and tons of these, And then taking all of this and putting on a chip sent to China, which is going to go through, well,

all the oceans for months and stuff like that. And then in China, it's making the chips and the hardware and the steel that goes around it. So basically, when you see your smartphone arrive in front of you, before you switch it on, of the footprint and most of the damage has been done. And so the biggest thing it can do

as a person is make your hardware last longer. And with Eroom's law, we can make it last longer because we will remove the need to change the hardware because we are optimizing software.

Gaël Duez (21:38)
And that's.

that's absolutely true because what you've described is super well described in the digital collage workshop, all this visual with big mine and all of this. you really see that, especially for end user devices, like between 70 and 90 % of the oncological footprint happens before you start using it, as you rightfully said. And

What is very interesting most of the time when people are starting to get aware of it, they get past the psychological obsolescence, like the need to get the latest and shiniest iPhone, laptop, earplugs, whatever. they start willingly to keep their hardware longer and longer. But the problem most of the time they say it's like, comes with a cost that more and more and more softwares will not be available or will not run properly. So it's kind of a

double side push, I would say that crunch any good willing, environmentally aware IT users, which is like, okay, so I've got this big marketing push that, hey, you need the latest stuff, you're not in, you're not cool, you're not whatever, or you're not even a productive enough worker. On one side and on the other side, actually, you've got this

hardware slash software push And I think we're focusing a lot on the marketing push,

But with your E-Rooms low, we open the Pandora box of this other push, is Obsolescence and

the very strong link between software and hardware and how actually is driving most of the hardware obsolescence. So thanks for this clarification. And I Emmanuel talks that was at BraceCamp actually. And that was very interesting because he was using a

Tristan Nitot (23:35)
Hmm

Gaël Duez (23:37)
very largely used software as an example, which was COVID Tracker, if I remember well, and how all the architectural choices that were enabled the applications to be super small and super efficient to run, despite serving millions of calls per hours at the peak of the pandemic. And this leads to my next question, which is,

If I get the concept right, as you described it and why it is important, as a software engineer trying to lower the environmental footprint of my code, starting with the fact that my code should be made in such a way that it could be used on hardware older and older and older, how can I leverage this concept? How can I make it concrete?

Tristan Nitot (24:29)
Well, it's something I'm working on at Octo, but I certainly hope that other companies are going to embrace to with or without Octo.

And they will implement a methodology that I'm trying to write with the community, which is basically

how you find weaknesses in your software. And by weaknesses, I mean the pieces of code that are terribly under-optimized, how you spot them because you have millions of lines of code in your information systems. How do you know where they are? Maybe you already know.

Maybe your Cloud Monthly bill is helping you spot them. Maybe you have a FinOps efforts underway that could help spotting them. then put up a task force with probably senior.

Gaël Duez (25:23)
Spot the culprits.

Tristan Nitot (25:39)
developers that will come and audit the code and spot where the issues are. You will be using tools like profilers that will inspect the code and say, this place is basically taking 98 % of the time and the CPU power and the memory. It's being used right there.

If you use a profiler, you would see flame graphs. You see the heat, if you will, where basically the power is consumed within the code. And so it's there where you want to intervene and send the task force and fix the issue. And so we're working on creating a methodology to spot the places and fix

the issues where they are, in order to basically implement these rooms law at information systems.

Gaël Duez (26:37)
And what are the top three takeaways that you've found so far? Is it more in the architecture Is it more on the way we code? Is it more the language we choose for different tasks? What are the main takeaways that you've found while working with your colleagues so far?

Tristan Nitot (26:56)
There are basically several buckets. For some reason, people think, yeah, you're using Python. So the language is the problem. And it is true that Python is not super fast compared to C++ or C or Brust. It's true. But basically, it's how you use it. Python is amazing.

in having a whole ecosystem of libraries that do a lot of things. for example, I've heard

of libraries in Python called Panda that can be replaced by another library which is written in Rust. So basically you spend most of your time running Rust without even knowing it because you're programming it from Python. so if you use Polars, which is written in Rust, it's a lot faster than Pandas, which is written in Python. So these are the kind of things you can change. So it's a matter of language. It's a matter of libraries. It can be also a matter of

storage where you basically have a database it's an old issue that we all know is basically you try it on a small subset of data and it works and that's fine. But if you end up deploying it and two years after you have three million rows in your database, the problem is completely different by nature.

And maybe you need an index that was not noticeable in the first place because the dataset was small. But now you have millions of rows and without the index, you're wasting a lot of time. Maybe just having an index is going to fix your problem. Maybe it's going to be more complicated than that. So storage is also a problem. But it's something you find in

data science where you manipulate very significant volumes of data. A lot of times you import some JSON or CSV and it's slow, but now you have fantastic libraries that enable you to do this kind of thing but a lot faster and things like that. can be also architecture.

You could have very powerful machines that, on the way they have been set together, they keep waiting for each other all the time. So it's basically very inefficient. And then you need to have a systemic approach to find out what the issue is and that kind of thing. it's hard to say, because IT is fantastic in its diversity. But we can spot that they are.

some families or buckets of problems that we find.

Gaël Duez (29:42)
okay Tristan now I would love you to indulge me to play a bit the devil advocate and I have two questions for the first one is about AI and what you've described spotting the inefficiency in the code rewriting the code etc we've seen a lot of production recently

explaining that with AI and being more precise with machine learning techniques, we will be able to rewrite code in a more efficient way, sports, anti-patterns, et cetera, et cetera. the methodology you've mentioned, the buckets,

you've described. Isn't it ultimately a job of a very well and efficient AI to rewrite all the code of the word and to make us save millions of tons of CO2 and also money?

Tristan Nitot (30:35)
It's a really good question. First, I need to say that I've chatted recently with a young lady called Justine Bono, who happens to be French, and has a company named We Do Low, L-O-W, like low energy or low consumption, I don't know. She is co-founder of a startup

that does software optimization, automatic software optimization, especially in the embedded world. So stuff that you find on cars and stuff like that. Not really on general purpose computers, on PCs and stuff. And basically, her approach has nothing to do with AI. And she is already really good at doing stuff, like

automated ways to improve your code by 40 with no AI involved. So yes, there are promises there. Now, I must admit, I am very impressed and for several years about what AI is able to do.

it's amazing. it's amazing. But let's be honest. Resource-wise, it's crazy. It's consuming an amount of resources. It's like,

thousands or million times more complicated than running a normal piece of software. It's amazing, but I think the cost is even more amazing. And it's something we don't see. Like earlier on, you mentioned digital collage, where they talk about the mines and stuff like that.

It's something we don't see and we never talk and you don't see minds in Apple advertising about the new iPhone, right? Because that's not something they want to see. You want to see a pristine white box with an all new shining hardware. That's what they want to see. It's they want to create desire. And so they are not going to show you kids going down in mines. But it does exist still. It's just they don't show it to you.

And exactly the same with AI. It's fantastic what it can do, but it's orders of magnitude more energy consuming than regular computing. And so it's something we need not to forget. I sense, I understand the enthusiasm.

around AI because it's amazing what it can do. But there is a price associated to it and nobody really wants us to know about it. So let's not fall for that.

Gaël Duez (33:12)
So if I follow you here, what you would say is, yes, it's a potential answer to use AI to optimize code, but let's make sure that the cost and especially the environmental cost of using this kind of tool, worse, it's investments

Am I understanding you right here? Yeah.

Tristan Nitot (33:31)
Yes, yes. I think first, I need to see whether AI is going to deliver on its promises of being able to optimize software. Because for now, it's just a promise. And maybe it's not going to be true. We never know. That's one thing. Second thing, we need to sure that we use AI for things that are worth it.

and was the cost and the impact. And third, I'm not sure this is the tendency to use it. Right now, I see AI for helping you

see AI for helping students do their work. if you ask me, because the point is not making them write. It's making them learn. And they learn by writing. But if a machine does the writing for you, you don't learn. It's like bringing a lift to the gym to lift

Gaël Duez (34:24)
You don't know.

Tristan Nitot (34:28)
the weights instead of you. Okay, well, the weights are lifted by the form, but well, you're not making any muscle in the process.

Gaël Duez (34:32)
you

really love this one. I think I'm gonna keep it for my students.

Tristan Nitot (34:41)
So right now, I see this is how AI is used. There is this cartoon that I really like where someone says, you know, I have written this bullet point, and I'm using AI to expand it into a long email. I can't pretend I wrote. But I'm lazy. I don't want to write the whole email. And on the receiving end,

And the person says, there is this long email. I don't have time to read, so I'm going to use AI to sum it up into a bullet point. And that's a well, it's exaggerated, but not so much. think this is really how AI is used these days. And so it's consuming a lot of resources for basically adding no value, other than I pretend I wrote a long email and I pretend I read a long email. If you could only write just a bullet point and set it like that.

it would be a lot more efficient, there would be less noise into the signal anyway, and more efficient in every way. So we should question whether to use AI properly or not.

Gaël Duez (35:40)
That's a fair answer to my first question. But I'm still with my devil's advocate hat on. And that will be actually my last question before closing the podcast. How much of this eRooms law is actually new? just like good old fashioned software optimization with a sustainable angle? Or what is the catch here? Am I misunderstanding something?

Tristan Nitot (36:04)
I think really boils down to a Wirtz law. Basically, the more power we have, the lazier we become as an industry. And if you think about it, even 20 or 30 years ago, which is basically midway from now and the invention of microcomputing,

People knew that they had to optimize. They knew how the computer was working precisely. they knew because they've been hitting the wall of hardware, like the limits of the hardware, you don't have infinite memory. You don't have infinite storage. You don't have infinite computing power. So,

they would be careful and they would learn what to do in order to optimize when they hit a limit of the computer. of course, it took time and energy, but it forced them to become smarter and do smarter things. And it was cool. Now basically, if you don't have enough computing power, basically you fire up another pod. The cloud is going to take care of you. It will scale infinitely.

except that your wallet is not a scale indefinitely. But it's going to cost you a lot, but you don't realize that. And so you don't learn from this. Researching about optimization made me realize one thing is we only optimize under constraint. If there is no constraint, we don't optimize.

And I think we do have two constraints that are with us. The first one is more slow slowing down. It won't keep up forever. That's one thing. And the second thing is basically climate change and biodiversity collapse. We have the moral obligation to do something. I mean, these two things.

climate change and biodiversity collapse are the biggest challenges for mankind.

Basically, Irun's law is saying there are these two new constraints. There is a solution. You can keep building new innovative stuff. But in order to do that, you need to optimize, which is something that we basically have given up because we didn't feel any constraints with computing.

Gaël Duez (38:35)
Okay, so it's not good old fashioned optimization because it comes with a twist about what are the metrics, what are the goals that you're actually chasing and it's not only about financial optimization but also about having an impact and positive impact regarding all this crisis that you've mentioned and also the physical limits that we are about to

got it. Two constraints that are re-incorporated in optimizations to make it much more urgent and top priority. Thanks a lot Tristan for answering all my questions. I've got maybe

Two last ones just to close the podcast. You've mentioned tons of references. All of these references and resources will be put in the show notes as usual and as I mentioned in the introduction. However, is there one final resource or content that you'd like to share with us?

Tristan Nitot (39:30)
listen to Green.io. There are a lot of things. Go to Green.io Paris or the Green.io conference that is taking place near where you live. It's really exciting. And you're going to meet some

new people. So do yourself a favor and listen to more of this information and meet the community. They're very nice people and they're addressing a challenge that deserves to be addressed.

Gaël Duez (40:00)
Well, thanks lot, Tristan. I'm going to hire you as a salesman. But I'm going to mention also that people should keep on listening Octave or Fugazia because it's resources in French, but they're also highly valuable. But thanks a lot for mentioning Green IO in such a positive way. And my last question will be...

Tristan Nitot (40:02)
You

Thank you.

Gaël Duez (40:20)
Actually, you've already started a bit by saying something positive about the momentum and the resources we can find, but is it a positive piece of news that you'd like to share about digital sustainability or maybe sustainability at large to close the podcast?

Tristan Nitot (40:36)
I think every organization is understanding more and more that they need to do something. In Europe, there is the CSRD, Corporate Social Responsibility Directive, that is basically forcing organizations to publish every year a report on how they are improving their corporate social responsibility,

is good because it's not only individuals that need to do something. Of course, individuals need to decide to change, but organizations will change too. So I think everybody will get on board and it will become obvious that we will

be applying the changes that we need to apply.

Gaël Duez (41:24)
Thanks a lot for sharing this positive thoughts and mentioning that sometimes regulation does have an interesting impact, positive impact. actually, we're going to see each other in a matter of days on Green Eye of Paris stage to celebrate the podcast birthday and also to have dozens of amazing speakers and panelists to talk about.

green IT and digital sustainability under different angles, from different perspectives, which is how actually we make the world better and how scientific progress is made. So hope to see a lot of you there and we will see you Tristan. So thanks a lot for joining again and thanks for joining the show. It's always a pleasure to have you there.

Tristan Nitot (42:01)
Yes, with pleasure.

Thank you.

Here it is “I listen to the Green IO podcast and others as well, I read newsletters and articles from CAT, GWF, Boavizta, Greenit.fr, GSF, etc. But I’m isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?”

This episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a SaaS company, Xero, with more than 4M users of its accounting software across a dozen countries. 

This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024

And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at a Xero’s internal technology conference despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago.   

In this episode, Annie Freeman shares great insights with host Gaël Duez on: 

   💪 How two motivated engineers can start a movement in a 4K employees company,
   🔎 Tracking the cultural change signals,
   🔄 Bringing carbon awareness in existing process rather than creating new ones,
   🎓🛠️ Making Community of Practices & tooling working hands in hands, 
   📊 How Data management primes over UI when deciding to build a carbon dashboard,
   🎙️ Why listening to Green IO actually helps (not Gaël saying 😉).