Trying to figure carbon footprint of a electricity use, webhosting and servers.
Unfortunately the people I directly host sites with don’t really provide any useful info to work out the carbon foot print of the hosting. Possibly that is a bad sign if your concerned about this sort of thing.
Most the of the things I found online trying to estimate carbon footprint of these things seemed complicatedly unlikely. So in the spirit of most of this can be estimation unless you have a logging meter on the electrical supply I’m going with another method.
Given that mostly with shared hosting its just servers eating electricity.
Hosting cost / price per kWh in host country × by CO2 equivalent per kWh in country.
Web Hosting
So my hosting in America is $187 USD, given an estimate of the average kWh costing is 15 pence and CO2e g/kWh is 384.
I get about 372 kg CO2e
My hosting in Amsterdam is about 582 kg
So altogether is 954 kg
For comparison because of the relative carbon intensity of each countries grids
If I hosted those in the UK it would be 205kg and 485kg
in France (nuclear) it would be 43kg and 101kg
in Iceland it would be 27kg and 64kg
Swapping American hosting for Amsterdam hosting is about 163 kg so – saving about 209 kg
AWS
Mainly use them for storage $2575.97
2551 kg (eek!)
Twillio
About £719 is twillio really hosting or is just expensive mobile calls and texts … hmm.
1854 kg
I don’t use this personally like the AWS its an expense I pass on to the customer. Perhaps I should look for another provider, I only use their simpler stuff.
Using German grid 31.5 kg
Equipment
The equipment on my desk, computer, monitor, devices etc. Actually used a electricity monitor for this, about 23 kg
Lighting
2 kg
Tea
Boiling Kettle takes 3:42 (222 seconds) @ 3kw 5 × a day 365 days = 405150 secs
comes out about 71 kg
Heating
I think about 168 kg from gas boiler.
So ish…
| Thing | CO2e kg | Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Web Hosting | 954 | -209 |
| AWS | 2551 | |
| Twillio | 1854 | |
| 31.5 | ||
| Equipment | 23 | |
| Lighting | 2 | |
| Tea | 71 | |
| Heating | 168 | |
| TOTAL | 3103.5 | 2894.5 |
Its a start anyway and made me think about it. Writing this prompted me to move the American based web hosting to Amsterdam which has less carbon intensive grid.
