7 ms·

Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the green part will be mostly expect

by belval 3y ago

Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the green part will be mostly expected by the time they actually ramp up. Competition is always good though. > Studies by 451 Research have shown that AWS’ infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy efficient than the average in Europe. 451 Research also found that AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers, and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy—a target we’re on path to meet by 2025. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/ https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/ EDIT: - GCP, 100% renewable by 2030 https://cloud.google.com/sustainability - Azure, 100% renewable by 2025 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability - Oracle, 100% renewable in Europe already https://www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/

api 3y ago
For real or are they purchasing dodgy “offsets?”
- Bang2Bay 3y ago
  offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.
  - vladf 3y ago
    Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for. Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest. But then, secretly, or through some shell company machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in the world goes down.
    - belval 3y ago
      Doesn't have to be that complicated to be dodgy. A bunch of carbon offset works on optimistic to downright stupid metrics for carbon capture. For example they buy a plot of land and then raze it, then they will plant 10k saplings and take that figure at face value even if most of those won't take and actually become trees. Then they will estimate the CO2 captured by averaging it over the entire life of the tree (say 30 years) and count year 1 as if it captured 1/30 of the CO2 even though the carbon capture potential of tree is not constant throughout its life. Beyond that they will double count the carbon credits of the plot of land by selling them twice. Finally after all the above, they will sell the plots after ~5 years to buy some other plots and it will be razed anyway. No one actually checks that the carbon capture forest will be there in 10 years, let alone 30.
    - xyzzyz 3y ago
      I know that you are just trying to make a point, but just to be clear: no paper maker in US is importing Amazon trees to make paper out of them. That would be exceedingly idiotic from profit-making perspective.
- belval 3y ago
  Probably a bit of both, but their competition in this article is unproven and unbuilt data centers. Ultimately DCs don't exist in a vaccum, if the energy in Europe makes it possible to be 100% renewables without dodgy offsets then everyone will be, not just evroc. If it's not possible then nothing in the articles gives me the impression that they have a secret sauce that would make their 100% renewables "true 100%".
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  This is made perfectly obvious by "running on 100% renewables". You can see more details on https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable-energy https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable... It's when there are mentions of "net zero" that carbon credits are purchased (which Amazon does too, but not for what we're talking about).
  - apendleton 3y ago
    They're still pretty squirrelly about the specifics of their commitment, though. In particular, it's not clear if it's hourly accounting (but the fact that they don't say so suggests to me that it isn't), and there doesn't seem to be any discussion of additionality. In other words: it might be that exactly the same amount of renewable generation, and exactly the same amount of fossil-fuel generation, are going to occur with this pledge as would have without, and this is just shuffling some numbers between columns in a spreadsheet.
- conradev 3y ago
  It’s a lot of renewables: > The top 25 corporate solar users in 2022 include: > Meta > Amazon > Apple > Walmart > Microsoft https://www.seia.org/news/solarmeansbusiness2022 https://www.seia.org/news/solarmeansbusiness2022 Just as one data point
- troyvit 3y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted, the efficacy of carbon offsets is debatable: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/greenwashing-or-net-zero-necessity-climate-scientists-on-carbon-offsetting-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/greenwas... https://earth.org/is-carbon-offset-a-form-of-greenwashing/ https://earth.org/is-carbon-offset-a-form-of-greenwashing/ And there are plenty of dodgy players out there that large organizations use: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed... And there are plenty of government programs that just don't work: https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting... I'm sitting here asking myself how much Amazon cares about that, but also wondering how the "unknown Swedish startup" will approach being green.
IceWreck 3y ago
Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just being European does not give them a selling point over others.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    Not just the dumpsters, the datacenters too!
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Was looking for this comment. On the bright side, it's easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency when you're running everything in the cloud, and OVH's massive data center fire had me double check all of our backup and disaster recovery processes (on a different provider) to ensure they were geographically distributed.
  - mike_d 3y ago
    Which in itself is a massive selling feature. Deploying a simple app on AWS is about as straight forward as deploying Active Directory in the early 2000s. It is so bad Amazon even launched the Lightsail product line to address the problem. AWS now is basically "you don't know how to run a database, or a KV store, or a network, etc. so here it all is as an API with a markup." Some companies still have talent that knows how to run things efficiently and just need CPU, RAM, and storage.
    - iLoveOncall 3y ago
      It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it. The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.
boulos 3y ago
Disclosure: I used to work on GCE. "Renewable" is a broad set of terms. Importantly from your first link on GCP it says: > Google is carbon neutral for our operations today, but aiming higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all of our data centers by 2030. Carbon-free, 24x7, is a stronger commitment than carbon-neutral which would include using renewable power offsets. Amazon's methodology is at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-methodology.pdf https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-meth... which makes this clear as well.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  My understanding is that Google is also shifting workloads based on carbon intensity using ElectricityMap's data feed. https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/announcing-our-partnership-with-google https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/announcing-our-partners... https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows/ https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center... https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
  - foota 3y ago
    That's interesting, who needs massive high voltage lines when your demand is fungible.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    Not for gcp though but for google internal workloads. Energy is one of the biggest dc expenses so makes sense they’d optimize to lower costs
- RetroHippyNimby 3y ago
  This is important context. There's a big difference between "we bought solar elsewhere but still burn fossil fuels for our datacenters" and "we never use fossil fuels to power our data centers".
- looofooo 3y ago
  How does this work? Will it be forbidden to drive there for work or delivery by gasoline cars?
zekrioca 3y ago
Most of these pledges are based on offsetting, I.e., planting some tree somewhere and claiming the provider’s emissions are somehow gone or captured by the trees they planted. Uhul!
brabel 3y ago
All companies have these pledges, but they are mostly marketing. These companies know they don't really need to reach those targets, and unless we see massive investment from them to achieve this goal, it just won't happen. "In an evaluation of some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the investor engagement group Climate Action 100+ found no company has fully disclosed how it plans to reach net-zero." "Some of the boldest pledges rely on carbon removal technologies that don’t even exist yet, or at least not at the scale required. Many more are heavily reliant on carbon offsets, which allow companies to invest in “nature-based” programs like tree planting or forest protection to counteract their own emissions. Offset projects, however, have been plagued by allegations of flawed accounting, greenwash and sometimes even of actively fueling climate change." Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-crisis-green-light https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-... That is, they say they'll do something, but they don't even know how, or at least won't tell for some reason... meaning that there's no way to check if they're doing the necessary work or mostly fugding with the numbers (some high profile cases where companied just patently fabricated numbers regarding their progress have already been revealed in the news). I believe there's zero indication that companies are serious... emissions in 2023 are set to be the highest ever recorded (and this is not because of higher emissions in developing countries, the developed world is still leading the shameless business-as-usual route)... that's in the middle of a global economical crisis... imagine if the economy had been doing really well! Until actual emissions start to fall dramatically, don't believe in these companies empty promises.
forty 3y ago
What does running 100% on renewable mean? Do they have a separate electricity grid with dedicated production? Or does it just mean they just use the same mixed electricity as everyone else and pay a small premium to have their electricity colored green, but then whoever was using that electrity before is now using non green one and everything is the same as before as far as CO2 emissions are concerned?
- orra 3y ago
  Yup, the latter is what is usually meant. The price of "green" tariffs in the UK skyrocketed identically to traditional tariffs, when energy prices doubled or tripled in the last few years.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
We sorely need some disruption. I rent cloud VPSes at Hetzner that cost me $27/month for 10000 Geekbench. The most efficient in house option are small nettop computers with 13700H processors that get you 13000 geekbench for $500, 50 watts of power and less than 1 liter of real estate. That same computing power would cost me north of $1000/month at AWS or Azure, and about $300 at smaller cloud providers. Which means big cloud companies got too comfortable and overcharge massively.
- torginus 3y ago
  I never understood the value proposition of Xeon, Epyc-s and other 'enterprise-grade' hardware, considering the strong push towards horizontal scaling, failover reliablity, microservices, etc. Are they more reliable, are they bigger? They are certainly are more pricey. I have ratty-ass computers running at home with weeks worth of uptime. More is not really needed, ironically my home stuff usually has much longer uptimes than the prod infrastructure that I work on, that has constant restarts due to upgrades, configuration, etc.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    One thing is ECC. They don't want random errors in production. Another is number of threads. They can sell 112 "vcores" off one Xeon to 112 customers for web serving.

by belval 3y ago

api 3y ago

For real or are they purchasing dodgy “offsets?”

Bang2Bay 3y ago
offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.
- vladf 3y ago
  Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for. Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest. But then, secretly, or through some shell company machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in the world goes down.
  - belval 3y ago
    Doesn't have to be that complicated to be dodgy. A bunch of carbon offset works on optimistic to downright stupid metrics for carbon capture. For example they buy a plot of land and then raze it, then they will plant 10k saplings and take that figure at face value even if most of those won't take and actually become trees. Then they will estimate the CO2 captured by averaging it over the entire life of the tree (say 30 years) and count year 1 as if it captured 1/30 of the CO2 even though the carbon capture potential of tree is not constant throughout its life. Beyond that they will double count the carbon credits of the plot of land by selling them twice. Finally after all the above, they will sell the plots after ~5 years to buy some other plots and it will be razed anyway. No one actually checks that the carbon capture forest will be there in 10 years, let alone 30.
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    I know that you are just trying to make a point, but just to be clear: no paper maker in US is importing Amazon trees to make paper out of them. That would be exceedingly idiotic from profit-making perspective.
belval 3y ago
Probably a bit of both, but their competition in this article is unproven and unbuilt data centers. Ultimately DCs don't exist in a vaccum, if the energy in Europe makes it possible to be 100% renewables without dodgy offsets then everyone will be, not just evroc. If it's not possible then nothing in the articles gives me the impression that they have a secret sauce that would make their 100% renewables "true 100%".
iLoveOncall 3y ago
This is made perfectly obvious by "running on 100% renewables". You can see more details on https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable-energy https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable... It's when there are mentions of "net zero" that carbon credits are purchased (which Amazon does too, but not for what we're talking about).
- apendleton 3y ago
  They're still pretty squirrelly about the specifics of their commitment, though. In particular, it's not clear if it's hourly accounting (but the fact that they don't say so suggests to me that it isn't), and there doesn't seem to be any discussion of additionality. In other words: it might be that exactly the same amount of renewable generation, and exactly the same amount of fossil-fuel generation, are going to occur with this pledge as would have without, and this is just shuffling some numbers between columns in a spreadsheet.
conradev 3y ago
It’s a lot of renewables: > The top 25 corporate solar users in 2022 include: > Meta > Amazon > Apple > Walmart > Microsoft https://www.seia.org/news/solarmeansbusiness2022 https://www.seia.org/news/solarmeansbusiness2022 Just as one data point
troyvit 3y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, the efficacy of carbon offsets is debatable: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/greenwashing-or-net-zero-necessity-climate-scientists-on-carbon-offsetting-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/greenwas... https://earth.org/is-carbon-offset-a-form-of-greenwashing/ https://earth.org/is-carbon-offset-a-form-of-greenwashing/ And there are plenty of dodgy players out there that large organizations use: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed... And there are plenty of government programs that just don't work: https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting... I'm sitting here asking myself how much Amazon cares about that, but also wondering how the "unknown Swedish startup" will approach being green.

IceWreck 3y ago

Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just being European does not give them a selling point over others.

iLoveOncall 3y ago
Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  Not just the dumpsters, the datacenters too!
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Was looking for this comment. On the bright side, it's easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency when you're running everything in the cloud, and OVH's massive data center fire had me double check all of our backup and disaster recovery processes (on a different provider) to ensure they were geographically distributed.
- mike_d 3y ago
  Which in itself is a massive selling feature. Deploying a simple app on AWS is about as straight forward as deploying Active Directory in the early 2000s. It is so bad Amazon even launched the Lightsail product line to address the problem. AWS now is basically "you don't know how to run a database, or a KV store, or a network, etc. so here it all is as an API with a markup." Some companies still have talent that knows how to run things efficiently and just need CPU, RAM, and storage.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it. The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.

boulos 3y ago

Disclosure: I used to work on GCE. "Renewable" is a broad set of terms. Importantly from your first link on GCP it says: > Google is carbon neutral for our operations today, but aiming higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all of our data centers by 2030. Carbon-free, 24x7, is a stronger commitment than carbon-neutral which would include using renewable power offsets. Amazon's methodology is at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-methodology.pdf https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-meth... which makes this clear as well.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
My understanding is that Google is also shifting workloads based on carbon intensity using ElectricityMap's data feed. https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/announcing-our-partnership-with-google https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/announcing-our-partners... https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows/ https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center... https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- foota 3y ago
  That's interesting, who needs massive high voltage lines when your demand is fungible.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Not for gcp though but for google internal workloads. Energy is one of the biggest dc expenses so makes sense they’d optimize to lower costs
RetroHippyNimby 3y ago
This is important context. There's a big difference between "we bought solar elsewhere but still burn fossil fuels for our datacenters" and "we never use fossil fuels to power our data centers".
looofooo 3y ago
How does this work? Will it be forbidden to drive there for work or delivery by gasoline cars?

zekrioca 3y ago

Most of these pledges are based on offsetting, I.e., planting some tree somewhere and claiming the provider’s emissions are somehow gone or captured by the trees they planted. Uhul!

brabel 3y ago

All companies have these pledges, but they are mostly marketing. These companies know they don't really need to reach those targets, and unless we see massive investment from them to achieve this goal, it just won't happen. "In an evaluation of some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the investor engagement group Climate Action 100+ found no company has fully disclosed how it plans to reach net-zero." "Some of the boldest pledges rely on carbon removal technologies that don’t even exist yet, or at least not at the scale required. Many more are heavily reliant on carbon offsets, which allow companies to invest in “nature-based” programs like tree planting or forest protection to counteract their own emissions. Offset projects, however, have been plagued by allegations of flawed accounting, greenwash and sometimes even of actively fueling climate change." Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-crisis-green-light https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-... That is, they say they'll do something, but they don't even know how, or at least won't tell for some reason... meaning that there's no way to check if they're doing the necessary work or mostly fugding with the numbers (some high profile cases where companied just patently fabricated numbers regarding their progress have already been revealed in the news). I believe there's zero indication that companies are serious... emissions in 2023 are set to be the highest ever recorded (and this is not because of higher emissions in developing countries, the developed world is still leading the shameless business-as-usual route)... that's in the middle of a global economical crisis... imagine if the economy had been doing really well! Until actual emissions start to fall dramatically, don't believe in these companies empty promises.

forty 3y ago

What does running 100% on renewable mean? Do they have a separate electricity grid with dedicated production? Or does it just mean they just use the same mixed electricity as everyone else and pay a small premium to have their electricity colored green, but then whoever was using that electrity before is now using non green one and everything is the same as before as far as CO2 emissions are concerned?

orra 3y ago
Yup, the latter is what is usually meant. The price of "green" tariffs in the UK skyrocketed identically to traditional tariffs, when energy prices doubled or tripled in the last few years.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

We sorely need some disruption. I rent cloud VPSes at Hetzner that cost me $27/month for 10000 Geekbench. The most efficient in house option are small nettop computers with 13700H processors that get you 13000 geekbench for $500, 50 watts of power and less than 1 liter of real estate. That same computing power would cost me north of $1000/month at AWS or Azure, and about $300 at smaller cloud providers. Which means big cloud companies got too comfortable and overcharge massively.

torginus 3y ago
I never understood the value proposition of Xeon, Epyc-s and other 'enterprise-grade' hardware, considering the strong push towards horizontal scaling, failover reliablity, microservices, etc. Are they more reliable, are they bigger? They are certainly are more pricey. I have ratty-ass computers running at home with weeks worth of uptime. More is not really needed, ironically my home stuff usually has much longer uptimes than the prod infrastructure that I work on, that has constant restarts due to upgrades, configuration, etc.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  One thing is ECC. They don't want random errors in production. Another is number of threads. They can sell 112 "vcores" off one Xeon to 112 customers for web serving.