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Using this as a basis for per project carbon pricing - possible?

mrchrisadams opened this issue · comments

commented

Hi there,

I came across this project via the blog post below, and I wanted to ask about this section here:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/ise/2023/11/09/saving-co2-using-location-and-time-shifting-in-azure/

We built the open-source Carbon Economy SDK (CE-SDK) to solve this problem. It uses the CA-SDK to get the must optimal time and location for execution and then the CE-SDK uses the Azure retail pricing API to calculate the cost of moving the workload to another Azure region. The CE-SDK does not move the workload or calculate the cost of moving, but it can be used to make a decision on where and when to execute the workload.

The CE-SDK uses a normalized weight to prioritize any lower carbon emissions over any additional cost.

That way the business stakeholder can decide how much they are willing to pay for a lower carbon footprint.

I'm doing some work to help people understand how to use internal carbon pricing as as way to manage carbon on software projects by doing similar to what you're doing, but perhaps the other way around - by basically saying:

on this project, we have a working carbon price of XX per tonne

And use this to pre-authorise engineers to "buy" carbon reductions the way that Boeing pre-authorise engineers to "buy" weight savings as outlined in the deck below - see slide 14 -18 in particular:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13iiOUaRiFte5-CSaWIo11ylLr0d27Ba7PzHsXfSYwo0/edit#slide=id.p

If you wanted to allow the setting of an internal carbon price like this on a project, what changes would you need to make internally to the carbon-economy-sdk to support this?

I realise this might not make a whole lot of sense straight away, so I'm happy to answer any further clarifying questions if it helps.

commented

Hi,
This SDK is used to evaluate the cost of the same resource in two different clouds and figure out it is worth moving the workload.

Depending on the unit you are using for carbon price, you could reuse some of it. If it is the cost of executing the cloud yes. Otherwise no.
Be aware that carbon offsets are faulty. The current way they work is considered green washing by many

commented

Ah, I see the misunderstanding.

I'm not talking about "buying" like you'd buy offsets - I agree that doesn't make sense.

I'm talking about "buying" in terms of allocating budget to cover the cost of staff time for reengineering something, or resources in a greener region that otherwise would not be considered.

So it might be a question like:

at a project carbon price of X, which regions now make sense to use to achieve lower carbon emissions that were not when we had a carbon price of Y?

I figured that if is basically how people might use a carbon price outside of tech, to make an economic case for using say... green hydrogen vs regular grey hydrogen, the approach might work for other somewhat fungible commodities, like compute hours.