9.4 Green computing and the sustainability pillar
You can reduce the energy a workload uses, and say by how much rather than that you tried.
Before:01. Cloud Foundations
The energy a workload uses is measurable and reducible, and this topic treats sustainability as engineering rather than sentiment: where the energy actually goes, why utilisation is the dominant factor, and consolidation as the single biggest lever. Region choice matters because grids differ in carbon intensity, and batch work can be scheduled carbon-aware at almost no cost. It sits in the cost module because the same waste shows up on both ledgers. The standard it sets is saying by how much, not that you tried — and reading provider sustainability reports with the scepticism marketing has earned.
Work through these
Where the energy goes: PUE, cooling, and utilisation as the dominant factor
Most of the energy in a data centre goes to the machines and their cooling, and the biggest determinant of waste is how idle those machines are. That makes utilisation the number to watch.
Why consolidation and higher utilisation is the single biggest lever
Consolidating workloads onto fewer, busier machines saves more energy than any other single action available to a tenant. It is also the same thing that saves money, which makes the argument easier.
Region choice and carbon intensity; carbon-aware scheduling of batch work
Regions differ in how their electricity is generated, and work that can wait can be scheduled for cleaner hours or cleaner places. Batch processing is the natural candidate.
Provider sustainability reporting, and reading it sceptically
Providers publish sustainability figures, and reading them carefully means checking what is measured, what is excluded, and what is offset rather than avoided. Scepticism here is not cynicism.
Sign in to keep your progress.
Free resources
We haven't checked most of these for screen reader use yet.
These videos are on YouTube. Opening the link takes you to YouTube's page. Pressing "Watch here" loads YouTube's player into this page — nothing loads from YouTube until you do. Either way the video comes from Google and uses much more mobile data than a page of text. Something wrong with a link here?
Links last checked 29 Aug 2026.
Stuck here?
Ask a mentor. A real person answers, and they can see exactly which topic you're on. Usually within a couple of working days.
Checking your session…
Topics shown in module order.