The energy grid is fascinating. We have figured out how to perfectly balance supply and demand of electricity, an increasingly challenging problem as production from renewables increases. As we start working toward widespread adoption of the GARM sustainability standards across the industry, I thought it would be helpful to do a tutorial on how the grid works and what it means for media sustainability measurement. I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to ask questions in the comments!
Ben Ng
2w
Very insightful! Thanks for sharing. Another power intensive activity I can think of is offline model trainings which could have a flexible schedule. I can see opportunities to run those activitives during low grid usage period. Given behaviors are usually influenced by incentives and reward mechanisms, do you know if the large players are incentified to focus on energy sustainability?
Thanks for sharing, Brian O'Kelley! It's great to see how our app sheds light on the energy grid and helps people around the world to make more carbon-aware decisions! If you want to dive deeper into the difference between average and marginal emissions data and how they can be used for decision-making, check out this blog post: https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/marginal-vs-average-real-time-decision-making
Very insightful, thanks for sharing. So it could be worthwile as an adtech company for instance to thoroughly assess and understand the energy grid of the entire region and not only the country or state where their servers are located, right? This will help minimize the effect of marginal emissions during peaks in electricity demand, whether it happen on the local grid or in the surrounding areas where energy is exported or imported. It could be interesting to provide an energy grid mapping where the average of long-term energy grid interconnections are highlights. It will help to make informed decisions when it comes to choose the most sustainable location for the servers (despite other contrains around performance such as response time etc).
Love the Electricity Maps app too, it's been on my home screen for many years! It's my #1 guide on at which time to e.g. load my EV and run the (dish)washer (rule of thumb for Germany though: during midday in the summer, during midnight in the winter).
This is very interesting, Brian! I really liked your post. Thank you for sharing! I wanted to invite you to our live AI Workshop, "Mastering LLMOps for Business Success," this month. If you have time, it would be great to have you! Here is more info: https://www.linkedin.com/events/unlockingthepowerofmodernai-mas7213653465472909313/about/
Extremely insightful, thank you for sharing and helping to understand the complexity!
Steve Falk
2w
In Canada, we have vertical slices of power grid across the provinces and I think only one shares with another province. Quebec has and his building so much hydropower that is selling it to the US rather than another province. These are curious jurisdictional issues in Canada. it is so interesting scratching the service on this stuff. Thanks for making us think about it Brian
I liked the marginal emssions framework that the net delta for NY lightswitch is actually fossil even though it is a blend. And that is true for feeder grids like Quebec.
Fondateur DK, 🌳Diminuons l'Impact Environnemental de la Communication
2wA little light on the electrical mix. As complex as the global electricity mix is, it's interconnected from end to end. It moves very slowly. Building wind turbines, solar panels or new nuclear power plants takes a very long time. The carbon intensity of a country's or a region's electricity therefore moves very slowly. There's absolutely no point in having daily (or even hourly...) carbon intensity data. Fluctuations are a function of the time of day, and therefore of network demand, but also of the weather. Overall for the media, if the aim is to reduce the carbon impact of the media industry as a whole, the only players who have any control over the electricity mix are the electricity producers. On a numbers game, we can tell a media player that from 12pm to 3pm, he emits less CO2e because it's sunny. But given that, on the whole, the other inventories are used by other players, this doesn't change the overall result. We call this green washing :) To reduce the media industry's overall CO2e emissions, everyone needs to find ways of using less energy! When has no impact.