About
The mission of Cloud Sustainability Watch™ is to reduce the environmental impact of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data centers. The world’s online computing significantly contributes to global power consumption, water usage, and greenhouse gas emissions while disrupting communities.
The group’s mission is to advocate for and enable technology professionals to improve business results and reduce climate damage by adopting sustainable computing practices and technologies.
Our Thought Leadership Community
Our Board
Speaking Appearances
Susannah Hill is a thought leader in mitigating the environmental impact of cloud computing, GenAI, and data centers. She inspires audiences to take action. Recent appearances include hosting a panel at San Francisco Climate Week, “Your Organization’s Online Computing Is an Environmental Problem” and keynote talks on the same topic at corporate events. Watch for Susannah’s upcoming appearance at WCS Talks later this year.
Our Community
Please join our LinkedIn group for the latest information and discussion.
Our Sustainability
The average web page drives ~0.45g of carbon dioxide as well as fresh water consumption and air pollution from data centers, data transmissions networks, users’ devices, and electrical power plants that burn fossil fuels.
Our website is exceedingly low impact and we are continuously improving to adhere to the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (and Susannah volunteers time as an invited expert to the W3C Sustainability Interest Group‘s updates the Guidelines). Here are details about why this is true.
Our Green Website Design
Sustainability characteristics of the Cloud Sustainability Watch website include:
- Few images and no video, with all files and images compressed via webp to require minimal data transfer
- Dark backgrounds for much of the site, to reduce the power usage of visitors’ laptops and phones so they use less power to display content
- No excess code that makes unnecessarily large page sizes and no excess font files
- Slow loading files so they transfer over the network only when they are needed
- Very low carbon and zero-water hosting services (see our hosting company information below)
Our Web Designers, erjjio studios
Our expert green web design and development partner is erjjio, a London-based B Corp digital agency that specializes in the creation of low-carbon websites. They are indispensable for making our website simple, appealing, and environmentally sound. Here is more about them:
- erjjio studios designs, develops, maintains, and hosts green websites
- They offer green web hosting in the UK for nonclients and clients alike via a London data center we like. (Link)
- They offer a website certification system for green websites
- Their Impact Report is detailed and public
- You can test the carbon emissions record of any website using erjjio’s Website Health Check service.
Our Hosting Partner, Viridio
Viridio hosts our website. They are a B Corp public benefit corporation with a globally-leading sustainable data center in Southern California. This company is the best in the US because:
- Unlike all but a handful of data centers around the world, Viridio directly consumes its green power from their own solar array and from a nearby solar power facility that is on the same power grid (aka grid-tied). (Link) The total power produced exceeds their power consumption over the course of a year.
- Of course the facility runs at night and in the rain, so we like that the grid in its Southern California location is one of the lowest carbon electricity supplies in the US and much better than the world average. (Link)
- Its power efficiency is excellent, especially for a facility of its smaller size, with a PUE (industry metric for power efficiency) of 1.10 and comparable to the best data centers. They use a large number of software and hardware techniques for reduced power consumption. (Link)
- Even more important among hosting companies is the fact that Viridio doesn’t use water to cool its facilities. That is an especially good thing because Southern California is a water-stressed region. They use a closed-loop non-water cooling system and are installing a geo-sourced heat pump. (Link)
- A few other things we love about this data center: it uses propane instead of diesel for backup power (as people who breathe air, we are happy about that), the building’s insulation is recycled material, they use gravel instead of pavement to reduce heat absorption, and the building is painted white to reflect heat from the sun. (Link)
- The company publishes their Environmental Mission as well as detailed sustainability information.