Highlights
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2024-03-14 15:32 There is the idea of time shifting software, and there’s the idea of location shifting software.
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2024-03-14 15:39 Microsoft has done the same for your Windows updates, so your computer will wait until the electricity is greener in your location, and if it knows that it’s currently greener, then it will say, update my computer now instead of doing it when the electricity is dirty.
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2024-03-14 15:41 And then if they were to do, say, a backup, and they could run that backup from a server in any of 50 countries, they would choose a country that had the greenest energy at that particular time.
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2024-03-14 15:55 But the emissions, the total emissions of the train are the same regardless of when I run my compute, I will always run it in that maximum 40% green period.
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2024-03-14 18:34 Imagine that the wind blows really hard in Scotland at 03:00 a.m. That’s more energy than the grid can use. So they throw it away.
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2024-03-14 18:39 So you coming along and making a sudden change doesn’t actually make a difference to what those grid operators are doing, because it’s unpredictable. They don’t know it’s going to happen, and it doesn’t materially make an impact.
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2024-03-14 18:43 And what we found, Hannah and I, as we started looking at it, is that there are lots of scenarios where running carbon wear patterns at scale could not only not help, but it could actually create harm.
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2024-03-14 18:47 Because what I understood, actually quite fun fact, is something that we discussed, just the latest episode on open source software, about all the connect which we are building, at least in Europe, but in many other parts in the world, to connect the grids together and to avoid curtailments, to avoid wasting the most precious thing that we’ve got today, which is low carbon electricity.
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2024-03-14 19:25 But when nobody says it, then the potential for greenwashing and perverse effect is huge, especially since this is one of the few areas where the big corporations and the really sincere green advocates like ourselves currently are on the same page.
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2024-03-14 19:27 And so what we said was one of those examples, as I mentioned, is using curtailed energy, but not just curtailed energy in its simplistic form, but coming back to something Ishmael was talking about earlier, it’s using curtailed energy in stable grids in places which can actually absorb this additional demand coming in.
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2024-03-14 19:30 So there’s work to be done here, this field, and as I mentioned already, there’s real potential in this field to work on those things. And this is what we wanted to propose as the next version of Carbon Aware, which we labeled as grid aware.
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2024-03-14 19:33 That’s the metric you really want to influence. So more than when is this compute job or this computing job running in the grid?
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2024-03-14 19:34 In other words, run your jobs when the demand is lowest, not when the grid is greenest. They will very often be the same, but not always.