Yesterday I attended Green IO conference in London for the second year running, this time bringing along one of my Ada Mode colleagues. I only managed to attend Day 2, (the main conference day) and not the preceding day’s workshops, but there was plenty to take away and be inspired by from the talks. I’m not one for taking a lot of notes at conferences, so you’ll have to excuse me for the lack of precise detail in my recollections, but I wanted to jot a few things down to capture the general vibe and running themes of the day.
Green IO started out as a podcast by Gaël Duez, later branching out into conferences all over the world, with the aim of bringing together “responsible technologists”. As you might guess from the name, the focus is ostensibly on ”green” technology, but I would hazard a guess that most (maybe all) members of this community care about social issues beyond environmentalism, and are pretty clued into how all of these issues are interconnected. To paraphrase Gaël in his opening address, this is a community that cares about people and the planet. This is the third year the conference has run in London, and it was heartening to reflect on how much the attendance has grown, this year moving to a much bigger room at the venue. I loved Gaël’s emphasis (echoing that of a few other people involved in the green tech movement) that we should ”start from where we are, not where we should be”, and that there is no perfect plan that guarantees we are all beyond reproach. An inclusive mindset it vital to bringing more people into the community and taking action.
Anne Currie kicked of the day with what must be a record for the longest talk title: Forget SkyNet, will the energy consumption of AI destroy humanity? What can developers learn from Sarah Connor?. It set the tone for what would notably become a running theme of the day: AI. It’s impossible to talk about sustainable technology these days without talking about AI, which is outpacing the rest of the sector in its increasing consumption of energy. Anne’s talk pinpointed the pivotal moment when this realignment became seemingly inevitable, throwing industry climate targets into disarray: the release of Chat-GPT 3.5. Anne argues that AI efficiency measures are not going to be enough to negate the energy demands of hyperscalers’ pursuit of ever-larger models, and that trying to talk consumers out of using a product there’s clearly demand for is not a recipe for success. Instead she proposes the main solution is to vastly accelerate the renewable energy transition.
As much as I respect Anne’s work and felt her talk made a lot of good points, it also felt to me like a fairly pessimistic way to start the day — although arguably realistic: it’s hard to see how without government intervention (which is clearly not likely to happen any time soon) we could get these huge AI companies to use less energy and make their models smaller. But it feels problematic to be ramping up renewable energy primarily for the purpose of a technology that has a seemingly infinite demand. How much will be enough? Where is the green energy for the industries that are far more vital, and far less wasteful? After all, renewable energy is not without its own footprint, although of course far less impactful than oil and gas. There is no infinite source of energy, and at some point we have to use less of it, or at least get a lot more creative.
That segues nicely onto a talk that really piqued my interest by by Charlie Beharrell and Mark Buss, titled Good for the Planet, good for the wallet: how AI can heat our water. Charlie introduced the topic with a quote stating that electricity demand from data centres is forecast to increase six-fold in the next 10 years. Current data centres are doubly inefficient: energy is lost as heat, and water is needed to cool them. Meanwhile it is increasingly expensive to heat our homes with oil and gas. What if there was a way to heat homes using the heat from data centres? There is no heat network – we can’t pipe the heat from data centres to people’s homes. But one company, Heata is piloting moving data processing there instead. A server attached to a hot water tank heats the water for use in the home, and data is easily moved around the network. I thought this was a really cool approach, and it’s well worth checking out their slides, as they explained a lot more about how using CarbonRunner different CI/CD jobs could be shifted around the network.
Following this, Dryden Williams from CarbonRunner gave a great talk about the tool: Sustainable CI/CD: shifting compute tasks where CO2 intensity is the lowest. It was eye-opening how shifting computing tasks in real-time to available servers with low carbon intensity could save huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Their tool is definitely one to check out.
There were a few talks and a panel discussion from members of Gov.uk’s various digital teams on their approaches to digital sustainability, including their AI Playbook, which sets out guidelines for responsible AI use. Far too few organisations have anything like these detailed guidelines. Tom Parry from DEFRA also talked about their efforts to reduce e-waste within the department, including by issuing refurbished devices, using smart lockers, which save a surprising amount of carbon compared to home delivery, and by embedding sustainability into the procurement process. It’s great to see how people working in the public sector, which of course impacts millions of people, are prioritising this.
It also brought to mind an earlier talk by Natalie Pullin: Our digital sustainability journey at HSBC. I’m a little cynical about talks by corporate representatives, which will generally show their companies in the best possible light. But Natalie’s talk did show that working and advocating for sustainability at a big corporation might well be the best way to make an impact. At a company like HSBC, which employs hundreds thousands of people and has some ambitious climate target, making greener choices can create huge savings.
In the afternoon, Ben Tongue and Claire Robinson discussed climate resilience using a major power failure due to a heatwave at Guys and St Thomas’s hospital in London as a case study in their talk Climate change is here - using a systems thinking approach to keep NHS resilient. We might not want to think about how we need to adapt to the effects of climate change, but it’s clear it will be unavoidable. We also don’t think enough about how interdependent many of our vital systems are, and what the knock-on effects of a failure in one part of the system will be. The duo showcased a tool for visualising the effects of environmental risks to interconnected systems.
Later in the day Hannah Smith from the Green Web Foundation put forward their innovative yet simple idea for making reporting on carbon emissions more visible and searchable (How carbon.txt enables transparency across Tech companies). I’ve often lamented how difficult it it to find accurate sustainability data from companies. While many of them are required to produce impact reports, these are often buried and near-impossible to find for anyone searching for up-to-date, accurate data. Deploying a carbon.txt file (similar to a robots.txt) file on any website would provide a way to look for machine-readable sustainability data for that organisation. I would love to see this widely adopted, particularly as greater transparency is the only way we can put pressure on companies to reduce their environmental impact.
Finally, the last talk of the day by Ian Brooks – Green IT is good but it's not enough! was a good reminder that we have to think beyond just the products we’re building and consider what we’re building them for. After all, it’s all very well having an incredibly green website, but if it’s for a highly polluting, extractive industry (like the fossil fuel industry) then we can’t really say it’s for a net good. It’s something I’ve tried to get across in my talks as well.
I didn’t quite get to summarising all the talks here, but hopefully you’ll attend Green IO next time and see what responsible technology is all about. More than anything, it’s a great community of people trying to make a difference, and left me feeling optimistic, despite everything.