Carbon-aware computing

Some workloads are energy intensive - but as Steve Cassidy finds out, there are greener and cheaper ways to operate

- Steve Cassidy

"Carbon-aware"? What does that mean then?

Just for once, it's a fairly clear and helpful term, referring to how green your computing activities are, in terms of what sort of power they're using. The underlying idea is to power everything from renewable energy sources, so far as possible.

How do we do that? Our electricity all comes out of the same sockets.

The easiest way is to schedule your workloads to run at "green" times, when the national grid is mostly powered by clean energy. Your power supplier can tell you when these times are; in the UK, they're usually in the dead of night. Although solar panels naturally aren't much use after sundown, wind generation can be most effective in the cool night air – and because overall demand is at its lowest in the small hours of the morning, there's a good chance that your power needs can be met entirely from renewable sources.

It hardly seems practical to do all of this when no-one's in the office!