Other useful tools that can make the above estimates more meaningful are

[suchona.kani.z]

The power consumption of physical hardware is also not always linear with data transfer. Routers and switches, for example, have a fairly high base load of power consumption, which hardly changes when small amounts of data are transferred. Power consumption often only increases in stages when the amount of data exceeds certain thresholds.

There are countless other aspects - such as caching or the type of end device used - that mean that looking at the data volume alone is not enough. So anyone who only focuses on those tools has misguided incentives for optimization. Anyone who only opts for data transfer quickly gets lost in measures with little efficiency and ignores important aspects such as hosting, the power source, hardware usage time and optimization in the backend. Despite all the criticism, it must be said that these tools are currently the best that is freely available to most people. In the end, a byte not transferred is almost always an improvement.


thegreenwebfoundation.org to check where the website is hosted
aremythirdpartiesgreen.com for the analysis of the third-party services used
Is cloud computing the solution for digital sustainability?
The question regularly arises in discussions about digital sustainability uruguay consumer email list​ as to whether moving to the cloud might not be the solution, as many cloud providers advertise that they are CO2-neutral. However, if you take a closer look at the providers' sustainability reports, you will find that CO2 neutrality is a very flexible term. Although most providers have their reports checked by independent third parties, as long as there are no uniform standards for this check, the significance of these reports is usually more of a symbolic nature. Or simply advertising.

When a data center uses “green electricity,” this usually means that a higher electricity price is paid, which is used to promote the expansion of renewable energies. In this blog post , we show why CO2 is still emitted despite supposedly green electricity .

Amazon Web Services, for example, reports on a market-based basis in many regions, which means that the emissions caused are offset with purchased CO2 certificates or power purchase agreements (PPAs). Customers therefore usually see emissions of 0 g on their bills; what was actually emitted is not always made transparent to customers.