TL;DR Turn off your servers. Use the scream test. Address fears. Proceed to lightswitch ops.

One easy way to reduce your CO2 emissions (and save some money) is to turn off your servers! Probably not all of them and not forever but there are certainly machines that are not fully utilized. You certainly know about one or two servers standing around that no one has used in months, or machines that are used only during business hours.

When talking about climate change, the Unit of CO2 equivalent in tonnes appears everywhere. At least for me, it was difficult to have an intuition of what this unit means. Is a tonne much or not? Is saving a Kg of CO2 worth it?

Let me take you through some examples which should help you understand the implications of of such values. First I want to give you some common CO2 values for the annual emissions of a human being, driving a car and flying. In the second part I will then show you three examples from IT, the CO2 emissions of a server, a mobile phone and the CO2 emissions of a news website.

Green Software is a concept defined by the Green Software Foundation with the goal to reduce the emission of CO2 to combat climate change. There are other terms in the realm of sustainability, but in this post, I want to focus on green software. The green software foundation is a non profit under the linux foundation. It defines green software with the following diagram. The goal of green software, is to reduce the amount of carbon emitted, not the neutralization of carbon that has already been emitted. It puts the software in the focus, as it is the main driver of CO2 in our IT solutions.

I have always believed in “leading by example,” so when it came time to build the website for my blog, I wanted to make it as eco-friendly as possible. This was the perfect chance to try out some new tools and frameworks that keep sustainability in mind. My goal? To create a website that scores high on all those eco-impact tests and proves that going green online is totally doable.

Welcome to the Sustainable Tech website. On this page I would like to present you some of my findings and writings about sustainable tech. This includes subjects such as green-it, sustainability engineering, energy efficency, carbon awareness, the green software maturity matrix and many more.