the state of the sustainable web

@mrchrisadams

Sustainable UX 2019

(this deck looks shonky cos it was an experiment)

I tried importing a reveal.js export from this notebook. It might be more readable there

there is now very detailed guidance you can follow on doing sustainable tech

it's comprehensive, very complete

one measure is increasingly the most effective thing you can do

Platform

Energy you use powering servers you control, to build and run the digital products you make

Packets

Energy used to get data from your servers to your users

Process

Energy use built into the way your organisation is set up to deliver digital products to your users

Platform

Energy you use powering servers you control, to build and run the digital products you make.

Provisioning

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☁️

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The power of wireless cloud 2013 (CEET - http://www.ceet.unimelb.edu.au/publications)

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Data centre use isn't growing as fast we first thought

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https://www.iea.org/digital/#section-5

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Provider

How sites are powered right now is not transparent

Once you ask, the answer is often complicated:

REGOs, RECs, PPAs, Sleeving, Contracts for difference, etc

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This so much easier now than it was

Amazon, Google, and M$ all use green power or clean power, through mix of direct and financial instruments.

Green Web Foundation Directory has a larger list of smaller providers, often directly powered from renewables.

Packets

Energy used to get data from your servers to your users

Hard to measure

Different at times of day

Different countries

Different networks

Different boundaries

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Looking at the best guidance I can find

ICT Sector Guidance

built on the GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard

Assuming that the reduction in energy efficiency can be fitted to an exponentially decreasing curve (i.e. because it is more and more difficult to achieve the same reductions), then the data points can be extrapolated to give energy intensity factors for 2015 of 0.15 for fixed line networks, and 6.5 for mobile networks, with both factors measured in kWh/GB (kilowatt-hours per gigabyte). - GHG Protocol Guidance for ICT

45x difference between wired and wireless

Coroama and Hilty review 10 studies that have attempted to estimate the average energy intensity of the internet where estimates varied from 0.0064 kWh/GB to 136 kWh/GB, a difference factor of more than 20,000. - GHG Protocol Guidance for ICT

20000x between highest and lowest

What this means for calculations

Did I drive across from here to the airport?

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Or did I drive to the moon 🌝 ?

Distance to the moon = 384,000km

19.4 * 20000 = 38,888

these energy intensity factors (which include end- user devices) can be excluded, this then leaves a difference of 300 times between the highest and the lowest factors. - GHG Protocol Guidance for ICT

300x between highest and lowest

Did fly from London to Madrid?

Distance from London to Madrid = 1264 kilometers

Or did I fly from London to the moon ? 🌝

Distance to the moon 384,000km

1264 * 300 = 379,200

Worked Example - USA Today

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5MB page, and multiply it 3.77 million times to represent the page views.

About 18,400 gigabytes of data per day.

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0.06 kWh/GB for 2015

we were able to determine that the electricity intensity of data transmission (core and fixed-line access networks) has decreased by half approximately every 2 years since 2000 (for developed countries

0.03 kWh/GB for 2017

248.5kg of CO2 per day, or a little under 7.5 tonnes per month

 Is that a lot?

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Will it stay like that?

What if energy gets cleaner?

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UK emissions

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US grid is getting cleaner too

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You can more here on the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) website.

The US emissions have really fallen in the last few years, largely down to phasing out coal. Here in the EU, in Jan 2019 half the coal fired power stations are losing money now, gas and renewables are increasingly cheaper than coal.

It's increasingly difficult to make an environmental argument against sending stuff over the wire

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There's another reason why where I thought packets was a key area to focus on, that's less of an environmental issue.

It's just too hard to sell, and as new countries come online and use the internet more, they use it in different ways. Look at these data plans with India. A two gigabyte 4G plan, costs 190 Rupees, which is between 2 and 3 euros or dollars.

It's going to be very hard to tell people to not use connectivity for environmental reasons, and they should be caring about data when to them, it's seems so plentiful.

Where is all that usage coming from?

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It's also worth looking at what it's being used for. The web as we know it, makes up less and less of the bandwidth we use - this chart is based on Sandvine's 2018 Internet Phenomenons report, and shows the same direction of travel the last few years..

You should still care about what you send over wire.

Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance, by Tammy Evert

perf-tooling.today

Do it because it makes products better, and it's the right thing to do. I'd hazard that it'll be very difficult to argue for environmental reasons if you're challenged for actual numbers when someone doesn't want to do something, for the reasons I've outlined above.

Process

Energy use built into the way your organisation is set up to deliver digital products to your users.

B-corp have tools to self assess now BIA

Also, ICTfootprint.eu have their own free self assessment tool for IT too

Wholegrain digital also shared their own spreadsheet for working out their numbers, for anyone to use.

Wholegrain digital

Conferences

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Where else?

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Why the focus on energy and fossil fuels?

Looking outside of the web industry

I'm hoping there's a detectable theme in this talk, around getting off fossil fuels.

This comes from the One Earth Climate Model, a combination of work between University of Technology Sydney (UTS), two institutes at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and the University of Melbourne’s Climate & Energy College, and funded by er, the Leonardo Di Caprio Foundation. The press release came out today.

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Keeping it in the ground

of course energy comes from renewables now, it's the 21st century!

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What about travel?

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This slide is from the fantastic Electric Dreams report from Fellow Travellers, it shows for the UK, what impact electric (as in potentially zero carbon) aviation could have on emissions.

What you see is that for short distances it's possible to do electric planes, but put simply, we bump up against physics - liquid fuels store so much more energy for their weight than batteries do, so past a given range, you can't use them.

The good news is that if you have access to cheap renewable energy, you can create synthetic fuel by using well known, if energy intensive sources to do so. The economics are not great right now, so flying will likely be expensive, but not impossible, but they are improving. There's more shockingly nerdy detail in this piece here.

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So what should I do?

Above all else, focus on green power - it needs to be the norm, and right now it's not.

"Every new service we use will run on renewable power"

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Why?

terrible forcasting

We need some kind of easy to understand rallying call

#makethewebgreen ?

Help make the web green with me

We're opening up green web foundation code and data, more info on how sites are powered, etc.

Find the org on github

Join the mailing list

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The prototype fund's new funding found explicitly is focussed on climate change. Here is your change. Apply!

What they offer:

47.5k, and 6 months to work on open source projects focussed on climate change

Apply by 31st March.

This is what is funding me to work on open sourcing Green Web Foundation stuff ✨

Need to be allowed to work and live in Germany

Thanks!

  • Chris adams
  • email: chris@productscience.net
  • twitter: @mrchrisadams
  • slack: climateAction.tech
  • Green Web Foundation Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/gg6vOj
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