The carbon footprint of a laptop is mostly in the manufacturing. Servers are different, and ARM chips are starting to change the game. — Apple is one of the few companies publishing the carbon footprint of their products. These reports go all the way back to 2009 and they publish reports for new products as soon as they are released. They’re based on the ISO 14040 and 14044 international standards for lifecycle assessment, include…

How often do you follow references in scientific writing only to struggle to find the source of a claim or number? Why are pinpoints not used in scientific citation? — My law undergraduate degree taught referencing of legal authorities using the Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA). Originally created in 2000 for use at Oxford, OSCOLA is now the standard in most UK law schools, and used by many international organisations.

Progress in renewable energy has pushed IT carbon footprints down, revealing how much more work is needed in manufacturing. — Climate change is the biggest and most important long-term challenge we face. Everything about tackling this problem is focused on carbon dioxide ( equivalent) emissions and how we reach net zero, or ideally net negative. The underlying story in the Dispatches documentary episode I was recently interviewed for was that…

It is obvious that Zoom is better for the environment than flying but what about vs driving an EV or public transport? The problem is we can’t be sure. — I was recently invited to discuss the topic of IT energy and the lack of transparency in an episode of the documentary series, Dispatches, which was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK at 8pm on 16 November 2020 ( available online here). …

More rigorous transparency regulations for negative externalities to force companies to measure, and reduce. — The common theme across my recent writing on IT energy is the lack of transparency and data for accurately assessing environmental impact. …

Public cloud price wars have ended, and a new battle over who is the greenest has begun. — Earlier in the decade, public cloud was a pricing battleground. AWS, Google and Azure announced regular price decreases. Prices for compute and storage were the usual targets, but innovative pricing mechanisms such as Google’s sustained use discounts were another attempt to compete. Instead of focusing on pricing-led growth through price…

5G networks have larger antennas, larger bandwidths, and higher base station density. How can the industry expect x20 more energy efficiency by 2030? — 5G is the next generation of mobile communication technology which started rolling out in 2019 and is planned to replace 4G over the coming decade. You may have heard about the idiotic conspiracy theories about 5G and burning cell towers (BBC, 2020), but prior to CVOID the hype focused on…

How to measure the problem, the uncertainty around the current situation, and the limited number of growth buyers — Recently I have spoken to several people asking about startups in data center energy, the area of focus of my MSc research at Imperial College London. The most common question is: “Where are the interesting opportunities?”, followed by “What interesting startups have you seen tackling this?”

How do we keep crucial references around? — Science is built on the work on others. This means researching numbers, methods, and principles from previous articles, all which must be correctly referenced. Without referencing, you risk making claims which cannot be substantiated, or worse, being accused of plagiarism. Academic course submissions are routinely run through analysis software to…