Google cloud customers can now track their carbon emissions

Google LLC has been quite vocal about its sustainability efforts over the past few years and it’s known to operate some of the greenest cloud data centers around, matching 100% of its energy use with renewable energy purchases, for example.

Now, not content with simply limiting its own carbon emissions, Google is also striving to help its cloud customers do the same with the launch of new tools that not only allow companies to see their carbon footprint but also recommend ways to reduce it.

Announced today at Google’s Cloud Next ‘21 event, Carbon Footprint is a tool within the Google Cloud Platform Cloud Console that’s being made available to every customer free of charge. It’s a simple tool Google’s cloud customers can use to measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity that powers their cloud operations.

Given growing requirements for Environmental Social and Governance or ESG reporting, Google said, companies have access to the energy-related emissions data needed for internal carbon inventories and external carbon disclosures.

The Carbon Footprint tool is quite flexible. Companies can use it to monitor their cloud emissions over time, by project, product or region, so they can see which cloud technologies and services are having the biggest environmental impact and where. The metrics also integrate with Salesforce.com Inc.’s Sustainability Cloud, giving companies an easy way to account for their carbon emissions beyond their cloud use alone.

“As we face unprecedented climate challenges, companies across the globe need to embed sustainability into the core of their business in order to meet growing customer and stakeholder expectations, and reduce their environmental impact,” said Ari Alexander, general manager of Salesforce Sustainability Cloud. “Together, Google Cloud and Salesforce Sustainability Cloud can help our joint customers accelerate customers’ path to Net Zero, leveraging data-driven insights and visualizations to track and reduce their carbon emissions to drive sustainable change.”

Arming customers with the information on their carbon emissions is a positive step, but Google is going much further than that. In addition, it’s providing tools to help its cloud customers reduce those emissions through a variety of means.

One way Google is doing that is by recommending its customers use cleaner cloud regions, where possible. The company recently debuted l59ow-carbon region icons to highlight those that provide a cleaner option, and its data suggests that new users are twice as likely to choose a clean cloud region over others.

Google is also making some changes to the Active Assist Recommender tools in the Cloud Console, adding a new sustainability impact category. Using the Unattended Project Recommender application programming interface, customers will be able to estimate the gross carbon emissions they can save by removing any idle cloud resources.

The API relies on machine learning to identify projects that are likely to have been abandoned, based on API and networking activity, billing and use of cloud services. When it finds a project it assumes to be abandoned, it will provide recommendations on how to remediate them.

By deleting these projects, Google said in a blog post, companies can reduce costs, mitigate security risks and reduce their carbon emissions. In August, it added, Active Assist found that more than 600,000 kgCo2e was associated with projects that it recommended for cleanup or reclamation.

Google is also expanding availability of Google Earth Engine, which is a tool that combines a multipetabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities. Google Earth Engine is now available in preview on Google Cloud, meaning enterprises will be able to use it in support of various business goals.

With Earth Engine, companies can track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface that result from extreme weather events and human-caused activities. Enterprises will be able to integrate Google Earth Engine with BigQuery, various machine learning services and even Google Maps to dig into Google’s satellite imagery. The insights they dig up can potentially help companies to save money on operational costs mitigate, better manage risk and become more resilient to climate change threats, Google said.

Image: Google