Abstract
Efficiency improvements over the past decade have meant that data center energy usage has decoupled from the growth in IT workloads. Much of this efficiency improvement has been attributed to innovations made by “hyperscale” public cloud vendors, where a large proportion of new IT workloads are now being deployed. However, the move to the cloud is making it more difficult to assess the environmental impact of workloads deployed there. Although the large cloud vendors are amongst the largest purchasers of renewable electricity, customers do not have access to the data they need to complete emissions assessments under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Data such as Power Usage Effectiveness, emissions factors and equipment embodied energy are not available from public cloud vendors. This paper demonstrates how the Greenhouse Gas Protocol method of assessment of IT emissions does not work for public cloud environments and suggests how this can be tackled by the cloud vendors themselves.
Highlights
Estimates of annual data center electricity usage vary from 200 terawatt hours (TWh) [43] to 500 TWh [11]
This paper develops a framework for understanding the boundaries of a public cloud computing environment, uses that framework to evaluate whether the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol is suitable for calculating emissions from cloud workloads
The GHG Protocol provides a methodology for assessing data center emissions but it assumes that the assessor has access to various data inputs
Summary
Estimates of annual data center electricity usage vary from 200 terawatt hours (TWh) [43] to 500 TWh [11]. Cloud vendor customers have no insight into the energy usage of the services they buy, and often do not even know how many physical servers their applications are running on. This approach allows an estimate of the overall data center GHG emissions to be calculated for a specific geography, but does not provide enough granularity for individual Cloud Vendor customers to calculate their specific GHG emissions, if deployed in different regions around the world.
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