I’m trying to make a co2 balance sheet of our organisation. I can’t find good information on how to calculate server emissions in cloud providers (we are using mostly hetzner vps). I’m curious if somebody has some findings/benchmarks or some kind of formula to have an approximation.
Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
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Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#2Have you contacted Hetzner? They claim 0% emission impact https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#3Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#4There are various scopes to consider.
Scope 1: the fuels you burn on site to generate heat/cooling or electricity.
Scope 2: the electricity you import on site probably burns carbon so it has a carbon factor you can find that on your utilities website (most likely). Imported electricity in kWh x carbon factor tCO2e/(delivered)kWh = emissions in tCO2e - you may want to start here with the location, grid electricity and expected electricity use.
Scope 3: are the emissions made off site to make materials that are imported on site to make the business run.
There are no hard rules to do this analysis. Most of it is a linear approximation. Most people don’t publish analysis beyond scope 1/2.
It’s really important to list assumptions and sources. Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#5Are you looking for total carbon on carbon per hour?
Because the second can be estimated via electrical use. But the first involves the building of the machines etc.
https://engineering.teads.com/sustainability/carbon-footprin...
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
My guess is these will get within an order of magnitude.
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#6With AWS last I checked (which might have been 2 years ago) they advertised regions powered by renewable energy sources. You can see it better here: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/around-the-globe?ener...
But as to calculate exactly the amount of carbon footprint for your VPS, I think you are out of luck, because exact numbers are either opaque or required you take AWS at their word.
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#7ThoughtWorks made an app that does this: https://github.com/cloud-carbon-footprint/cloud-carbon-footp... but mainly works with aws, azure, and gcp
You might be interested in their methodology page https://cloudcarbonfootprint.org/docs/methodology/
Full disclosure: My company was one of the early testers of the app
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#8In the most recent episode of the Last Week in AWS podcast Corey Quinn just talked about this topic https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/how-google-cloud-and-aws-...
For AWS, there is also Customer Carbon Footprint tool available https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/03/aws-launc...
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#9Try https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/news.ycombinator.com/ and just substitute the desired domain name
Re: Ask HN: How can I calculate CO2 emission of servers/VPS?
#10With AWS last I checked (which might have been 2 years ago) they advertised regions powered by renewable energy sources. You can see it better here: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/around-the-globe?ener... But as to calculate exactly the amount of carbon footprint for your VPS, I think you are out of luck, because exact numbers are either opaque or required you take AWS at their word.
Re: AWS, I recall them sending an email on earth day with our total CO2 usage for our organization (and some marketing about how it is 100% offset).
If you use AWS you can see the stats on the billing / usage dashboard.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-customer-carbon-footpri...