Why adopt Green IT, and how? - panel report

Why adopt Green IT, and how? - panel report Build • James Martin • 11/02/24 • 5 min read

Last week, we welcomed four green IT experts to Scaleway - global experts, as France is a pioneer in this field! - to establish how best to move forward on this essential subject. Essential, because digital represents 4% of global emissions (2.5% in France), and according to ADEME and ARCEP , without corrective action by 2050, this proportion will triple.

Hence our invitation to Thomas De Latour , Eco-conception Engineer at ADEME , the French national agency for energy transition; Lise Breteau , Environment & Tech Lawyer, GreenIT.fr , the association that literally defined green IT with its first reference framework, released in 2012; Killian Vermersch , CEO and Cofounder of Golem.ai , experts in frugal AI, since their symbolic AI-based solutions emit 1,000 times less than GPT-3; and Bastien Wirtz , DevOps Engineer at Scaleway , who conducts research on eco-design, and in particular on static websites.

Like our white paper and webinar on the subject, the panel started from the premise that there can be no green IT strategy without acting on the three pillars of data centers, hardware and software. So a holistic approach is key.

But why is green IT such a hot topic right now? A check-in on the regulatory issues was a good place to start.

Regulation: Deadline 01.01.25

In France, as in Europe, January 1, 2025 will see the implementation of two new laws of vital importance for green IT. Firstly, the REEN law , which aims to reduce the environmental footprint of digital technology - and is the first law of its kind in the world - will oblige all French localities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to formalize their responsible digital strategy by early 2025.

The same deadline will apply to CSRD , a European directive that will require all companies with more than 250 employees to provide detailed non-financial reporting, including on scope 3 emissions, which are the most difficult to measure .

"So it's a subject that's going to grow, because of the compliance requirements," explained Breteau. "In addition, there will be obligations on manufacturers and distributors of electronic equipment, or the eco-design of digital services. These are subjects that are increasingly coming to the legislators' table ."

For De Latour, this evolution can also be seen within ADEME: "less than a year ago, we only had one person working on the subject of digital sobriety. Today, there are twelve of us . It's our job to provide both the public and private sectors with the tools they need to measure our impact and respond appropriately to existing legislation and standards, which are set to become even simpler."

On the private sector side, Golem.ai can also feel the tide turning. " Five years ago, in calls for tender, the ["sustainability"] criterion was there. Now, and increasingly so, it has become a dealbreaker ," says Vermersch.

According to Scaleway's Wirtz, things are starting to change on the developer side too. "Quite a few developers have an approach that is compatible with eco-design. When you look at the eco-design guidelines for websites, it's really just about doing things right. We can analyze what each function in a code is going to consume in CPU," with tools like SonarQube , which lets you test the efficiency of your code, and whose green IT plugin, ecoCode, lets you go even further in terms of energy analysis.

That said, measurement indices at all levels remain one of the main stumbling blocks to be resolved. " Do we all have the same analysis grids? And what do we measure? This is an absolutely essential issue," asserted Breteau . GreenIT.fr recommends the PEF method, or Product Environmental Footprint . This grid, developed by the European Commission, proposes sixteen measurement criteria for digital impact, "including water, including resource depletion", she added. "Impact is not just CO2. 50% of the digital footprint is linked to the extraction of non-renewable resources."

Data centers: How to optimize your cloud impact

If data centers are a major contributor to the impact of digital technology - they account for 1% of the 4% of emissions mentioned above - cloud customers have every power to limit this impact (provided they choose a [responsible provider like Scaleway] ( https://www.scaleway.com/en/environmental-leadership/ ), of course!) And for those who do, the benefits can be both economic and ecological. Such is the case with Golem.ai.

Firstly, as Vermersch explained, by using frugal technologies themselves. As Golem.ai mainly uses symbolic AI , which is far less resource-hungry than generative AI, "per month, we pay our cloud bill at around €10,000. Which is close to nothing. Often, an AI start-up that needs to train models will be at €50,000 in its early days, and that bill will quickly go up ."

Secondly, as we explained elsewhere , Golem.ai managed to halve the number of cloud machines needed to process millions of emails a month thanks to auto-scaling of its Kubernetes infrastructure , essentially by turning off unnecessary clusters. "We've halved our costs, while tripling our business volume at the same time. So apart from software optimizations, we've divided our resource consumption by five or six, roughly ," explained Vermersch.

And let's not forget the other advantage of the public cloud in terms of sustainability: pooling cloud resources means that Golem.ai will be able to access new clusters or servers quickly in the event of load peaks, because the company uses the same hardware as two to ten other companies... and so its use of auto-scaling will free up resources for other Scaleway customers.

Hardware: Repairability and slow tech

With hardware accounting for the majority of digital impact, extending the life of devices remains one of the most effective ways of reducing emissions. That's why ADEME has developed the Repairability Index , another French innovation, to help consumers make better choices before they buy. The index clearly indicates " what the designer of the product has planned so that you can keep it for as long as possible " said De Latour. "Even though it's something we've implemented nationally, the big manufacturers have started to rethink their design [globally]. It's an incentive for eco-design."

It's for similar reasons that GreenIT.fr advocates for slow tech, or low…