How Carbon Neutral is your company?

We all know that software is the backbone of virtually all the intelligent solutions, but how carbon neutral is that?

We have practices in place, following COVID that we believe makes us more carbon neutral, such as working from home, virtual meetings, reduced international travel and more virtual events than ever before. A study by the University of California, Berkley found that a one-hour video conference between 2 people using desktop computers can generate up to 270 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), equivalent to a diesel car driving 1 mile (BEIS/Defra 2019). This can be further reduced by turning off cameras.  Of course, emissions will increase with more participants or longer meeting durations and can be further impacted by the energy source used to power the devices and internet connection, so although emissions similar to 1 mile of a diesel car travelling for a one-hour meeting doesn’t sound much, once you multiply that out to every organisation across the globe, the numbers start to add up quite scarily.

As a company how, often do you build and deploy for testing? The traditional model has always been a build whenever a significant piece of work has been completed, thus creating a new build, this uses power, power creates carbon.

During deployment organisations should make use of  real-time power monitoring, power consumption through techniques such as dynamic code analysis.

There is always the question of the applications itself, how do we ensure our software is carbon friendly,  Intel offers developers tools and resources for managing energy consumption. They have developed the Software Development Assistant, this gives engineers the ability to take energy measurements from the system as it executes thus informing us the amount of energy used.

With all of this said, the IT industry is still one of the friendliest carbon industries around, but there are still processes and procedures that can be changed to further help reduce our carbon footprint.