With its efforts towards green energy, Alphabet Inc’s Google announced on Tuesday a new complementary feature that will provide its cloud users with custom carbon footprint reports elucidating the carbon emissions their cloud usage and open satellite imagery generates. Google will now warn customers when they are wasting energy on inactive cloud services.
Google Cloud in its annual customer conference, which is being held virtually this year due to the pandemic, disclosed the initiative. Google Cloud is planning to collaborate with Salesforce.com to let clients put their emissions data in the Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, a carbon accounting platform.
Flagship western cloud providers Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon Inc have been competing on sustainability offerings for years. Microsoft already provides a similar carbon footprint reporting tool to the one released by Google which shows the emissions associated with the electricity that was used to store and process a customer’s data. Amazon also has a similar initiative.
Google Earth Engine, the name under which the initiative would function, had been used by tens of thousands of researchers, governments and advocacy groups since 2009. But now Google is letting commercial businesses and other cloud customers also avail of this service, which includes many huge geospatial datasets such as Landsat and the software needed to analyse them.
The move comes in the suite of measures announced last week to help users of Google’s search and maps services reduce their carbon emissions, by suggesting flights or driving routes that will cause less pollution. The internet giant, which also pledged to stop funding climate change misinformation with digital ads, has set a goal to become carbon-free by 2030.
Google currently runs on 100 per cent renewable energy and became carbon-neutral in 2007. The company has declared its cloud to be the world’s cleanest, which delivers internet-based computing and storage to other organisations. Google has purchased renewable energy offsets for the last four years to match the energy use of its server farms.
Jenn Bennett, who leads Google Cloud’s data and technology strategy for sustainability in the Office of the CTO, said, “Customers can leverage this data for reporting as well as internal audits and carbon reduction efforts. Build in collaboration with customers like HSBC, L’Oréal and Atos, our carbon footprint reporting introduces a new level of transparency to support customers in meeting their climate goals.”
“Customers can monitor their cloud emissions over time by project, by product and by region, empowering IT teams and developers with metrics that help them reduce their carbon footprint. Digital infrastructure emissions are really just one part of their environmental footprint, but accounting for carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against the carbon reduction targets that they all have.”