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What we talk about when we talk about the sustainable web, Part 1

Ryan Sholin

• 4 min read
What we talk about when we talk about the sustainable web, Part 1

The first thing you need to know is that estimates of the internet's share of global carbon emissions vary, but not by much. Most estimates put the necessary mix of data centers, network infrastructure, and end-user devices in the 2-4% range. That's the same percentage of emissions attributed to global aviation.

If that wasn't clear enough, let me put it another way:
The web is as responsible for climate change as air travel.

Here are the basics of the sustainable web:

Software that uses less electricity burns less carbon. 

Burning carbon accelerates climate change, and should be avoided.

A website is made of software, and that software is hosted on hardware that exists in the real world; the “cloud” is made of machines.

That hardware exists in a physical building called a data center, in a geographic location, powered by electricity that may come from different sources at different times. 

Unless your company has its own data centers, the data center in question is owned by some other company that might already be publishing reports on its use of electricity and other materials that factor into calculating carbon emissions.

By the way, when we talk about "carbon," we're using that as shorthand for carbon and a handful of other gases that are also accelerating climate change. It's simpler to say "carbon emissions," or to wrap it all up in the term "Greenhouse Gas emissions," aka GHG emissions.

Depending on what business you’re in, your company might have software hosted on hardware in one data center, or one hundred.

When we talk about data centers in the context of websites, we really mean origin data centers. That’s the place where your code and application are hosted, where the processing happens, where you are spending money on “compute.”

The other data centers at the “edge,” sometimes called “Points of Presence” (PoPs) are consuming a lot less electricity on your behalf, because they’re mostly just storing static versions of your website closer to where people are looking at your website.

That edge network of PoPs – also known as Content Delivery Network (CDN) is often provided by a different company from your origin data center provider. Sometimes it’s the same company, but a different product.

This is a good moment to define the term “hyperscalers.” When we talk about hyperscalers, we mean a large, familiar company that owns lots of data centers. The most obvious examples in North America and Europe include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. 

Hyperscalers are big enough to have lots of products, features, tools, configuration options, and software you can run on their servers, including – in some cases – ways to learn more about the electricity your software is consuming. More on that another day.

If your website isn’t hosted with a hyperscaler, you might find it a little more difficult to get information about electricity usage, or to find their sustainability reports including GHG emissions data.

Remember that mention of your software running on hardware in a data center in a building in a geographic location? All geographies are not equivalent when it comes to their local sources of electricity. Some continents, countries, states, or counties do indeed use more coal, gas, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, or nuclear power than others.

Understanding the sources of electricity powering your websites is not trivial – and it’s not even permanent. Power sources can change by the hour, based on the weather and other factors that affect supply and demand.

Where to begin?

As you can see, there are levels to this. But there are also levers to this.

Cleaning up your codebase to make your websites and the applications behind them more efficient and more performant (aka faster)? That should make them use less electricity, sure.

If your non-hyperscaler origin data centers aren’t already using near 100% renewable energy themselves (words like “using” and “100%” require some unpacking at a later date), you can move your applications to a different data center company, or to a different data center owned by the same company in a different location. 

If your hyperscaler origin data centers are in geographic regions that don’t use near 100% renewable energy, you can move your applications to different regions in the same hyperscaler network.

And if you can run more compute-intense processes at times when more renewable energy is available, you’ll be consuming electricity that burns less carbon.

Learn more:

It’s not hard to find sustainability workshops and accelerators to help people move into roles where they can help measure carbon emissions, produce emissions reports, and push companies to use that data to reduce emissions.

Those are great, and they will teach you more than the basics of how to start measuring, reporting, and reducing, but they won’t teach you much about specific domain areas like “how electricity powers the internet.” 

For that particular topic, here are some resources to get you started:

Need help?

And of course, if you’re ready to get some help figuring all this out, book a call with us at Overt Impact for a free consultation. Let’s go.

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