courtesy  : altenergy.com

What is Sustainable Software?

Sustainable software, for example, uses energy-efficient algorithms that perform computing operations quicker and more effectively than standard software (which can be real energy hogs – see my article How to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of AI?). IT experts have come up with 8 principles of Sustainable Software Engineering, in order to measure eco-friendliness and to spread best practices. As Assim Hussain, Green Cloud Advocacy Lead at Microsoft, notes, “A sustainable application takes responsibility for electricity it consumes and is architected to consume as little as possible.” It should also be flexible enough to run workloads when the carbon intensity is low (carbon intensity being a measure of how much carbon emissions are produced per kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed). Studies show that such a behavior can bring emission savings between 45% and 99%.

The Information and Communications Technology sector is expected to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint by 2040. However, there are no regulatory requirements limiting the energy consumption of software products. Hence the initiative of a team of researchers in Germany who created a potential certification scheme for sustainable software: the “blue angel label for resource- and energy efficient software”. Among the certification criteria, controllability (the ability to configure software according to individual needs), sufficiency (new software versions should not require more computing power except if absolutely necessary) and power awareness (managing the energy consumption of hardware as efficiently as possible) play a big role, but also the transparency and modularity of the software. For the European Digital SME Alliance, openness and interoperability are crucial factors in green technologies.

The software world is turning green

In the US, all tech giants heavily communicate about the rising share of renewable energy sources in their energy consumption, or their goal to be climate-neutral in the near term. In December 2020, Amazon became the world’s largest  corporate purchaser of renewable energy, with 187 solar and wind projects across the globe and projects to power all its operations with renewable energy by 2025. Google has been a carbon neutral company since 2007 and claims that its data centers use roughly half the energy of a typical data center. Being green is essential to please both investors and customers and has become part of central part of corporate strategy – as shows the listing of the top ten green software companies.

Not surprisingly, global initiatives to promote sustainable software are launched by the private sector. Recently, Microsoft has initiated the Green Software Foundation, together with the Linux Foundation. The goal is to build an ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and practices to reduce carbon emissions caused by software development. One of their activities will be to develop a certification scheme and training courses for green software developers. Another field of action concerns the development of standards for the software industry as a whole. The declared target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2020, in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement.