Market based emission factors for cloud providers

[Shreyansh Jain]

Hi Team, 

Currently we are using CCF to fetch the energy and emission data for cloud providers (AWS), and looks like CCF is using the EPA’s eGRID2020 Data that provides NERC region specific emission factors annual for CO2e (the https://www.cloudcarbonfootprint.org/docs/methodology). However, in such a scenario we are not considering the scope 2 emission that is calculated on the market based method which factors in Amazon enabled renewable projects on the grids where the customer footprint is being estimated (refer to the link: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/ccft-estimation.html). How can we get the correct emission considering the renewable projects on the cloud provider DCs?

Also, is there a way CCF can account for the Scope 1 Emissions from the cloud provider DCs when they are using renewable sources?

Thanks,

Shreyansh Jain

[Shreyansh Jain]

Hi Team, 

Eagerly waiting for your views on this one. 

Please let me know if there's anything I can do to assist or any changes that I must be aware  of.

Thanks.

[Cloud Carbon Footprint]

Hi Shreyansh,

Thanks for your email! It seems that the linked AWS documentation you've provided is the methodology for their own carbon footprint tool. Due to CCF having its own methodology, there will naturally be differences in the way we estimate emissions. One of the biggest differences as you've pointed out is that AWS takes a market-based approach. CCF focuses on a location-based approach in its emissions estimates, where not accounting for purchased renewables is intentional as we wish to focus on reducing the carbon being emitted rather than accounting for offsets in the calculation of that value.

This comes down more to a difference in philosophy rather than correctness, especially since these are all estimates. For instance, Google Cloud's carbon footprint tool includes the use of location-based emissions in its reporting. As pointed out in our documentation, if there is a desire to include both options in CCF then we welcome contributions and recommendations around this effort. A lot of this will come down to cloud provider transparency and how to source the data, which is why we opted for open data sources such as EPA reports and Electricity Maps.

CCF's focus is on scope 3 reporting for customers. Inherently, this includes aspects of scope 1 (i.e. embodied emissions) and scope 2 (electricity usage) from the cloud provider's perspective, but ultimately is scope 3 from the customer's perspective since its relative to your resource usage. We still account for renewable energy percentages on the grid where your resources are running on through the use of our Electricity Map implementation. For those who have opted out of Electricity Maps data, we are looking into how to bring this into the default public sources that are used.

Hope this helps!

The CCF Team