Environment Variables The Week in Green Software: New Hosts!
This Week in Green Software, Chris Adams is joined by new co-hosts Kate Goldenring and Tzviya Siegman to explore the latest stories on their radars. They unpack Microsoft’s community-first AI infrastructure pledge, the rise of gas-powered data centers, and the hidden embodied emissions behind AI models and storage hardware. The conversation also dives into the energy cost of AI prompts, new research measuring real browser energy use, and emerging models like billing AI by the kilowatt-hour. Together, they examine how transparency, standards, and smarter engineering decisions can shape a more sustainable digital future.
Learn more about our people:
- Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
- Kate Goldenring: LinkedIn | Website
- Tzviya Siegman: LinkedIn | Website
Find out more about the GSF:
News:
- Building Community-First AI Infrastructure - Microsoft [05:00]
- Microsoft Pledged to Save Water in the A.I. Era - The New York Times [08:29]
- Building Community-First AI Infrastructure - Microsoft On the Issues
- Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development - Global Energy Monitor [13:56]
- The Robles v. Domino’s Settlement (And Why It Matters) [21:56]
- From FLOPs to Footprints: The Resource Cost of Artificial Intelligence [23:53]
- The Cost of Politeness in AI [29:54]
- Green Coding Solutions: webNRG Released [36:50]
- Energy-Aware Hosted Inference | Neuralwatt Portal [42:35]
Resources:
- Environment Variables Ep 62: Greening Serverless w/ Kate Goldenring [11:24]
- Environment Variables Ep 104: OCP, Wooden Datacentres and Cleaning up Datacentre Diesel w/ Karl Rabe [12:16]
- GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud: Real Time Energy and Carbon Standards for Cloud Providers [14:56]
- Web Sustainability Guidelines | W3C [20:14]
- WCAG 2 Overview | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C [21:00]
- Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification | GSF [23:22]
- Ecoinvent [27:06]
- Solar power in Finland - Energy [44:38]
- On using solar & batteries to provide 90% of the world population with 90% of their electricity demand for below 90 €/MWh | Chris Adams
- Solar and batteries can power the world
- How Did This State Become the Data Center Capital of the World?
- Subsidizing the Cloud: U.S. State Incentives to Data Centers
- Scope True - Reality-Based Corporate Carbon Accounting For the Decarbonization
- webNRG
- GitHub - webNRG
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