In this episode of What That Means, Camille dives into the topic of carbon neutral computing with Director of Strategy and Business Development in the Server Group at Intel, John Miranda.

The conversation is a fascinating one, and covers things like:

• The three R’s of sustainable computing

• The unpredictability of supply and demand + the problems it poses for renewable energy

• Why you can’t store renewable energy

• What some companies are doing to try to reduce their energy footprints

• How a carbon-aware laptop might operate to use more green energy and less fossil fuel

• How time shifting can help with sustainability, while saving companies and consumers money

• Space shifting

...and a lot more. This is one fascinating convo you don’t want to miss. Have a listen!

Here are some key take-aways:

• In the future, our laptops and other devices in the home may be carbon-aware and able to assertively reduce fossil-fuel use and increase renewable energy use.

• One of the challenges in sustainable compute is that with renewable energy, there’s less consistency and predictability in terms of supply and demand.

• At scale, it’s too expensive to store renewable energy. But we can use time shifting and space shifting to ‘chase’ the sun and wind.

• The three R’s of sustainable compute: reduce, reuse, recycle.

Some interesting quotes from today’s episode:

• “Because at the end of the day, it’s not how much energy compute requires; it’s how much fossil energy does compute burn. ‘Cause that’s what’s creating the carbon footprint.”

• “As you make the grid substations more kind of intelligent, if you will, you can start forecasting weather conditions, and you can start empowering IoT devices, data centers, and so on and so forth, to understand what are the upcoming energy conditions — where they can then optimize their operations accordingly.”

• “It’s use it or lose it. If you can’t generate demand, the grid cannot accept energy.”

• “Imagine the idea that you can get paid to use power at certain times of the day. So now, if you can make your operations more agile and carbon-aware, it can translate into an OPEX savings.”