How is green energy defined?

[mrchrisadams]

hi there,

I just discovered this project today, via the NGI Search newsletter, and I noticed the green_energy property on various regions.

It wasn't obvious to me where this is defined, and I'm interested in learning more.

I'm happy to contribute what I learn to any docs, as we maintain a database that collates similar info, and I'm working with others on various conventions for collecting and disclosing this information, like this project with the Green Software Foundation:

https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud/

I'd be happy to collaborate.

[daroczig]

Hi @mrchrisadams,

Thanks for this great question!

Here you can find the related table definition: https://sparecores.github.io/sc-crawler/reference/sc_crawler/tables/#sc_crawler.tables.Region

So green_energy stands for If the Region is 100% powered by renewable energy. .. which is not super detailed, I agree. The current process is going through the vendor docs, and trying to find evidence for each region how it's powered. Some examples:

• Hetzner: all datacenters are powered by green energy as per their homepage https://github.com/SpareCores/sc-crawler/blob/main/src/sc_crawler/vendors/hcloud.py#L78
• GCP: looking up the "Carbon data across Google Cloud regions" docs, which reports 90% for many regions, but as we defined 100% as the threshold, this is not recorded in our DB https://github.com/SpareCores/sc-crawler/blob/main/src/sc_crawler/vendors/gcp.py#L444
• Azure: looking up the sustainability fact sheets (if available) https://github.com/SpareCores/sc-crawler/blob/main/src/sc_crawler/vendors/azure.py#L446
• AWS: we looked up some of their sustainability pages which doesn't seem to exist anymore after a quick check ... will have to review our collected data https://github.com/SpareCores/sc-crawler/blob/main/src/sc_crawler/vendors/aws.py#L401

We would definitely appreciate any help with the related data 🙇

[mrchrisadams]

Sweet! I reckon this is something me and the team I work with might be able to help with.

My organisation works with hosting providers to help collate information about how they source power, and we offer a checking service that lets people check a domain is running on infras powered by infra using green energy.

You can see an example check below, and below that is a directory we maintain of providers who have shared evidence with us.

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/green-web-check/?url=google.com
https://app.greenweb.org/directory/

A while ago we start listing the kinds of services they offer, in 2025 we'd like to start listing the regions too. So, if you're looking for a provider of managed hosting running on green energy in a specific part of the world you can do that.

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/tools/directory/services-offered/

I've invested a fairly significant amount of time into understanding how the green energy claim thing works, and some of these blog posts should give an idea of our engagement in industry and standards bodies:

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/why-we-joined-the-real-time-cloud-carbon-footprint-working-group-in-the-green-software-foundation/
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/our-response-to-the-ghg-protocol-scope-2-survey/
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/introducing-our-grid-aware-websites-project/
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/how-energy-grids-work/

We're also working on a convention for linking to public disclosures of this information, as we know new laws are being passed which require it in parts of the world like Europe. We're calling this convention carbon.txt, and the NGI Search programme is funding us to build tooling for a) validating these disclosures and b) making the data discoverable. There's an issue below listing the kinds of datapoints we're intending to parse, and make available for others to use (including Sparecores, if it's useful 😄 )

https://carbontxt.org/
thegreenwebfoundation/carbon-txt-validator#44

If you're free in December after your NGI Search demo, I'd be up for a short chat, because I think some of the numbers we pull from the disclosures would support richer data about green energy in sparecores.

We detail how we define green energy below, and well be doing more work in Q1 of 2025 on it from what I can see, it's currently compatible with your definition, and I'm happy to make PR to make the definition clearer in the sparecores app if you can point me to where in the codebase I'd need to make changes.

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/what-we-accept-as-evidence-of-green-power/

Anyway, there are a few other places I can see what we're doing being complementary.

If you're up for a short intro call to say hi, and discuss this would you use the link below? I wan't sure what the best way to get in touch was from your profile, and I'm not sure what time zone you're usually in.

https://cal.com/mrchrisadams

[daroczig]

Sorry for the delay, this week is busy with the Open Source Experience going on. I've just scheduled some time for next Friday, as I will have to step out after the NGI Search call on Thursday. Looking forward to speaking with you, and thanks a ton for all the above information ‍♂️🙇