>*Greenpixie said they have the data (AHA!!) And their data is verified (ISO-14064 & aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol)."<p>What does this say about accuracy, and I guess ultimately the impact of the emissions?<p>Whenever I have tried to find a meaningful measurement of environmental impact of power use I have gotten into a quagmire of statistics taking past each other, with arbitrary mixing of units and definitions.
(Like energy/power/electricity being defined differently but used interchangeably. Similarly water usage being blended regardless of whether it is potable or from an area of scarcity)<p>The end result has to be what harm is caused, because harmless use of something at any magnitude is still harmless.<p>How do you figure out what that level is with any degree of accuracy. It's a difficult problem, but it seems that easier answers are not likely to be useful if they are not accurate.
This reminds of me calorie tracking: you cannot perfectly capture the number of calories or macronutrients, but measuring does seem to help people loose weight. There are probably many loop holes where eating large amounts of certain food, with a certain margin of error, can leads to wildly incorrect estimates.<p>I wonder how much this analogy applies to carbon tracking? Does using a wide variety of foods help make the tracking more accurate because no single bad estimate becomes overrepresented? Can a similar approach be taken via a wide variety of cloud technologies being used?
Yea, I actually saw something similar in the early days of Infracost, when we didn't track that many price points. The % change and the directionality was really helpful for engineers. Then we iterated on the prices, added more coverage etc, and the accuracy increased to a point where people trust the output of Infracost more than the AWS pricing calculator. That was a cool learning moment for me.
><i>This reminds of me calorie tracking: you cannot perfectly capture the number of calories or macronutrients, but measuring does seem to help people loose weight.</i><p>This probably would explain the success of many fad diets if it were the increased awareness of the eating having an effect beyond the decision making about what to eat.
Totally - something I've been thinking a lot about...
I got pulled into these diets at one point in my life - I remember doing atkins, then went full vegas for a while, then went only meat lol<p>The diets were meh. But the cool thing was that I learnt so much about food in general! I honestly didn't know much about food growing up. I feel like I still don't know that much, but I know the basics, and i'm not afraid of digging into some of the details.
That's a great question - it is a hard thing to build for sure. We started talking to the CTO office of Google about it, and exactly as you say, it gets into the details. The folks at Greenpixie have been doing a lot of research on this, so when we spoke to a few of their big customers (Like Mastercard), they told us about the process they went through to evaluate the data, and trusted it from their ESG initiatives too.<p>Let me ask one of the Greenpixie folks to jump in here, maybe they can explain how they do it!
Lerc - they are in the UK, so some of them are offline, but I text their CEO :)<p>Check this out: <a href="https://greenpixie.com/gpx-data" rel="nofollow">https://greenpixie.com/gpx-data</a>
Thoughts?