While the world has grown more aware about our impact on the climate, most of the world is now confined at home, using the internet more than ever before. Some researchers estimate data centers already make up 1% of our global electricity consumption, growing at a breathtaking pace every year.

On Earth Day, one of the world’s biggest data center operators, Google, revealed that they have partnered with Tomorrow to reduce their climate impact. 

Ana Radovanovic, Technical Lead for Carbon-Intelligent Computing at Google, explains that they use Tomorrow’s technology to “predict how the average hourly carbon intensity of the local electrical grid will change over the course of a day” which is used to “align compute tasks with times of low-carbon electricity supply”. She concludes that “early results demonstrate carbon-aware load shifting works. Results from our pilot suggest that by shifting compute jobs we can increase the amount of lower-carbon energy we consume. ” 

Reducing costs and carbon emissions by using electricity at the right time

Tomorrow is the company behind electricityMap, a service that shows in real-time how green electricity is around the world. Google uses electricityMap to optimize their energy consumption. It is also the largest database of past, current and future data about how green the electricity is. This allows Tomorrow’s partners to shift their energy usage to more optimal times for environmental and financial reasons. In previous research, Tomorrow has shown that using that data from electricityMap to charge electric cars or heat pools can reduce the carbon footprint of electricity consumption by up to 25%.

Olivier Corradi, CEO and founder of Tomorrow says: “As we move to a world where wind and solar energy are becoming a bigger part of our energy mix and carbon pricing is becoming a reality, organisations are realising that using electricity at the right time and the right place allows them to reduce both their costs and their carbon footprint”.

Built with the community

There is a large community of contributors behind electricityMap. Today, electricityMap is the most followed project on climate change in the world on Github, a platform where people can collaborate on software projects. On the electricityMap project, contributors help by adding new sources of information, improving the accessibility of the website or even translating the platform. 

Martin Collignon, COO of Tomorrow says: “Our partnership with Google couldn’t have been possible without the contributions of our open-source community. We send a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has put countless hours into adding more and more countries on the map and make electricityMap a vital tool helping governments, organisations and individuals become more climate-friendly.”

Tomorrow also help individuals track their carbon footprint

Beyond electricityMap, Tomorrow is working on more climate tools such as the North app (https://www.north-app.com), an app that helps individuals track their personal carbon footprint by connecting to the services they already use (like FitBit, but for carbon footprint).