Measure, report, and reduce carbon emissions across your IT infrastructure — internally and for your customers.
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Understand and report your global IT infrastructure's Scope 2 emissions and drive more sustainable decision-making.
Enable your customer to measure and report the Scope 3 footprint from using your IT infrastructure and help them achieve their sustainability goals.
Shift compute jobs to a different location or time to reduce the carbon footprint of IT operations.
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Cisco uses Electricity Maps' API in the Cisco Nexus Dashboard to:
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Google uses Electricity Maps’ historical and real-time flow-traced carbon-intensity data for:
Yes, you can. Electricity Maps API and its carbon intensity signal are compatible with the SCI methodology established by the Green Software Foundation, ensuring precise and standard-compliant SCI calculations. We are also a proud partner of the Green Software Foundation, supporting sustainability in software together.
Both optimizing based on renewable energy and carbon emissions have their advantages, and the best approach depends on your specific goals.
Optimizing based on hourly flow-traced carbon intensity provides a more precise measure of the emissions associated with electricity consumption. This approach considers all electricity on the grid, including local production and exchanges with neighboring grids, offering the most accurate representation of the carbon footprint. It effectively reflects the real-time environmental impact of your electricity use, making it a strong choice for reducing your overall carbon footprint.
On the other hand, optimizing based on renewable energy is beneficial because it aligns electricity consumption with the availability of renewable resources like wind and solar. Focusing on renewable energy is intuitive and more easily understandable for your customers, which can enhance their engagement with emission insights, e.g. in a dashboard. The signal can also help address the intermittency of renewables and support grid stability by making consumption patterns more predictable.
Marginal emissions signals are not recommended for Green IT use cases due to several limitations.
First, they are unsuitable for Scope 2 accounting (learn why in this blog), such as reporting Scope 2 emissions from your IT infrastructure. They are non-compliant with major regulations, including the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) and the GHG Protocol Scope 2 guidance.
As marginal signals are based on counterfactual assumptions, they are not verifiable and no quality guarantees can be made, increasing reputational and operational risk. Using marginal signals for optimization purposes, such as IT load shifting, may result in increased emissions for Scope 2 reporting, which relies on flow-traced average carbon intensity. This could mean that attempting to optimize based on marginal signals might inadvertently lead to higher reported emissions. Additionally, data insights based on marginal signals can cause confusion for customers due to their inherent complexity and contradictions with user intuitions and other data sources.
You can read more about the limitations of using marginal signals in practice here.
Explore our API or talk to our team to get answers to your questions.
Explore our free app to understand electricity grids and their CO2 emissions around the world.
