Track and report 24x7 Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) usage percentage as part of the footprint

[jbemmel]

As explained here 24x7 Carbon-Free Energy is a measure of the amount of time renewable energy is matched. Google reports this publicly, not sure about other providers.

This 24x7 CFE percentage for a give site can be reported to the application deployed at that site (0 if not available)

It is important to start tracking this attribute, because other factors like PUE have shown very little progress in recent years. Many sites remain stuck at a given (fixed) value from the first day of operation, while 24x7 CFE performance has much room for improvement (as can be seen on Google's map). Similarly, almost all providers declare using "100% renewable energy", leaving no room for meaningful differentiation (even though there is 0 correlation between the electricity used at a site versus the purchased GWs)

[4upz]

Hi @jbemmel thanks for opening this issue. For additional context, we do use CFE percentages for google that can be opted-in for use with CCF as referenced in the documentation section.

The reason this isn't available for cloud providers is because as you have pointed out, Google is the only one that reports this publicly and is where we are sourcing this data from.

However, they source these percentages and their carbon intensity values from Electricity Maps which we've recently added support for as documented here. I think there could be opportunity to include CFE % for all of the carbon intensity values we use for each cloud provider region by adding support for this via the Electricity Maps implementation. I'd be happy to create a task for this to look into it further

[jbemmel]

Great!

I am trying to nudge the EU to include reporting of CFE percentages in their upcoming requirements for data centers. To me, that would be a no regret thing to do - knowing your carbon footprint is nice, but knowing how to improve it is critical.

The world doesn't seem to know, on average. And that's a problem