Tag Archives: Emissions

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we’re joining the SBTi)

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original http://blog.cloudflare.com/switching-cloudflare-cut-your-network-carbon-emissions-sbti/

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어, Deutsch, Español and Français.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)

Since our founding, Cloudflare has helped customers save on costs, increase security, and boost performance and reliability by migrating legacy hardware functions to the cloud. More recently, our customers have been asking about whether this transition can also improve the environmental impact of their operations.

We are excited to share an independent report published this week that found that switching enterprise network services from on premises devices to Cloudflare services can cut related carbon emissions up to 96%, depending on your current network footprint. The majority of these gains come from consolidating services, which improves carbon efficiency by increasing the utilization of servers that are providing multiple network functions.

And we are not stopping there. Cloudflare is also proud to announce that we have applied to set carbon reduction targets through the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in order to help continue to cut emissions across our operations, facilities, and supply chain.

As we wrap up the hottest summer on record, it's clear that we all have a part to play in understanding and reducing our carbon footprint. Partnering with Cloudflare on your network transformation journey is an easy way to get started. Come join us today!

Traditional vs. cloud-based networking and security

Historically, corporate networks relied on dedicated circuits and specialized hardware to connect and secure their infrastructure. Companies built or rented space in data centers that were physically located within or close to major office locations, and hosted business applications on servers in these data centers. Employees in offices connected to these applications through the local area network (LAN) or over private wide area network (WAN) links from branch locations. A stack of security hardware in each data center, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, DDoS mitigation appliances, VPN concentrators, and more enforced security for all traffic flowing in and out.

This architecture model broke down when applications shifted to the cloud and users left the office, requiring a new approach to connecting and securing corporate networks. Cloudflare’s model, which aligns with the SASE framework, shifts network and security functions from on premises hardware to our distributed global network.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)
Traditional vs. cloud-based networking and security architecture

This approach improves performance by enforcing policy close to where users are, increases security with Zero Trust principles, and saves costs by delivering functions more efficiently. We are now excited to report that it materially reduces the total power consumption of the services required to connect and secure your organization, which reduces carbon emissions.

Reduced carbon emissions through cloud migration and consolidation

An independent study published this week by Analysys Mason outlines how shifting networking and security functions to the cloud, and particularly consolidating services in a unified platform, directly improves the sustainability of organizations’ network, security, and IT operations. You can read the full study here, but here are a few key points.

The study compared a typical hardware stack deployed in an enterprise data center or IT closet, and its associated energy consumption, to the energy consumption of comparable functions delivered by Cloudflare’s global network. The stack used for comparison included network firewall and WAF, DDoS mitigation, load balancing, WAN optimization, and SD-WAN. Researchers analyzed the average power consumption for devices with differing capacity and found that higher-capacity devices only consume incrementally more energy:

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)
Power consumption across representative networking and security hardware devices with varying traffic capacity

The study noted that specialized hardware is more efficient per watt of electricity consumed at performing specific functions — in other words, a device optimized for intrusion detection will perform intrusion detection functions using less power per request processed than a generic server designed to host multiple different workloads. This can be seen in the bar labeled “impact of cloud processing efficiency” in the graph below.

However, these gains are only relevant when a specialized hardware device is consistently utilized close to its capacity, which most appliances in corporate environments are not. Network, security, and IT teams intentionally provision devices with higher capacity than they will need the majority of the time in order to be able to gracefully handle spikes or peaks.

For example, a security engineer might have traditionally specced a DDoS protection appliance that can handle up to 10 Gbps of traffic in case an attack of that size came in, but the vast majority of the time, the appliance is processing far less traffic (maybe only tens or hundreds of Mbps). This means that it is actually much more efficient for those functions to run on a generic device that is also running other kinds of processes and therefore can operate at a higher baseline utilization, using the same power to get more work done. These benefits are shown in the “utilization gains from cloud” bar in the following graph.

There are also some marginal efficiency gains from other aspects of cloud architecture, such as improved power usage effectiveness (PUE) and carbon intensity of data centers optimized for cloud workloads vs. traditional enterprise infrastructure. These are represented on the right of the graph below.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)
The analysis shows that processing efficiency in the cloud is lower than specialized on-premises equipment; however, utilization gains through shared cloud services combined with expected PUE and carbon intensity yield potentially 86% emissions savings for large enterprises.  

Researchers compared multiple examples of enterprise IT environments, from small to large traffic volume and complexity, and found that these factors contribute to overall carbon emissions reduction of 78-96% depending on the network analyzed.

One of the most encouraging parts of this study was that it did not include Cloudflare's renewable energy or offset purchases in its findings. A number of studies have concluded that migrating various applications and compute functions from on premises hardware to the cloud can significantly cut carbon emissions. But, those studies also relied in part on carbon accounting benefits like renewable energy or carbon offsets to demonstrate those savings.

Cloudflare also powers its operations with 100% renewable energy and purchases high-quality offsets to account for its annual emissions footprint. Meaning, the emissions savings of potentially switching to Cloudflare are likely even higher than those reported.

Overall, consolidating and migrating to Cloudflare’s services and retiring legacy hardware can substantially reduce energy consumption and emissions. And while you are at it, make sure to consider sustainable end-of-life practices for those retired devices — we will even help you recycle them!

Cloudflare is joining the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)

We're incredibly proud that Cloudflare is helping move the Internet toward a zero emissions future. But, we know that we can do more.

Cloudflare is thrilled to announce that we have submitted our application to join SBTi and set science-based carbon reduction targets across our facilities, operations, and supply chain.

SBTi is one of the world's most ambitious corporate climate action commitments. It requires companies to achieve verifiable emissions reductions across their operations and supply chain without the use of carbon offsets. Companies' short- and long-term reduction goals must be consistent with the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Once approved, Cloudflare will work over the next 24 months with SBTi to develop and validate our short and long term reduction targets. Stay tuned to our blog and our Impact page for updates as we go.

Cloudflare's commitment to SBTi reduction targets builds on our ongoing commitments to 100% renewable energy, to offset or remove historic carbon emissions associated with powering our network by 2025, and reforestation efforts.

As we have said before, Cloudflare's original goal was not to reduce the Internet's environmental impact. But, that has changed.

Come join Cloudflare today and help us work towards a zero emissions Internet.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/independent-report-shows-moving-to-cloudflare-cuts-your-carbon-footprint/

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

This post is also available in 简体中文, Français and Español.

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

In July 2021, Cloudflare described that although we did not start out with the goal to reduce the Internet’s environmental impact, that has changed. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and clearly a better Internet must be sustainable.

As we continue to hunt for efficiencies in every component of our network hardware, every piece of software we write, and every Internet protocol we support, we also want to understand in terms of Internet architecture how moving network security, performance, and reliability functions like those offered by Cloudflare from on-premise solutions to the cloud affects sustainability.

To that end, earlier this year we commissioned a study from the consulting firm Analysys Mason to evaluate the relative carbon efficiency of network functions like firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, content servers, and others that are provided through Cloudflare against similar on-premise solutions.

Although the full report will not be available until next year, we are pleased to share that according to initial findings:

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) “generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low-medium traffic demand.”

Needless to say, we are excited about the possibilities of these early findings, and look forward to the full report which early indications suggest will show more ways in which moving to Cloudflare will help reduce your infrastructure’s carbon footprint. However, like most things at Cloudflare, we see this as only the beginning.

Fixing the Internet’s energy/emissions problem

The Internet has a number of environmental impacts that need to be addressed, including raw material extraction, water consumption by data centers, and recycling and e-waste, among many others. But, none of those are more urgent than energy and emissions.

According to the United Nations, energy generation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for approximately 35% of global emissions. If you think about all the power needed to run servers, routers, switches, data centers, and Internet exchanges around the world, it’s not surprising that the Boston Consulting Group found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet.

Conceptually, reducing emissions from energy consumption is relatively straightforward — transition to zero emissions energy sources, and use energy more efficiently in order to speed that transition.  However, practically, applying those concepts to a geographically distributed, disparate networks and systems like the global Internet is infinitely more difficult.

To date, much has been written about improving efficiency or individual pieces of network hardware (like Cloudflare’s deployment of more efficient Arm CPUs) and the power usage efficiency or “PUE” of hyperscale data centers. However, we think there are significant efficiency gains to be made throughout all layers of the network stack, as well as the basic architecture of the Internet itself. We think this study is the first step in investigating those underexplored areas.

How is the study being conducted?

Because the final report is still being written, we’ll have more information about its methodology upon publication. But, here is what we know so far.

To estimate the relative carbon savings of moving enterprise network functions, like those offered by Cloudflare, to the cloud, the Analysys Mason team is evaluating a wide range of enterprise network functions. These include firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, and content servers. For each function they are modeling a variety of scenarios, including usage, different sizes and types of organizations, and different operating conditions.

Information relating to the power and capacity of each on-premise appliance is being sourced from public data sheets from relevant vendors. Information on Cloudflare’s energy consumption is being compiled from internal datasets of total power usage of Cloudflare servers, and the allocation of CPU resources and traffic between different products.

Final report — coming soon!

According to the Analysys Mason team, we should expect the final report sometime in early 2023. Until then, we do want to mention again that the initial WAF results described above may be subject to change as the project continues, and assumptions and methodology are refined. Regardless, we think these are exciting developments and look forward to sharing the full report soon!

Sign up for Cloudflare today!

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

Historical emissions offsets (and Scope 3 sneak preview)

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/historical-emissions-offsets-and-scope-3-sneak-preview/

Historical emissions offsets (and Scope 3 sneak preview)

Historical emissions offsets (and Scope 3 sneak preview)

In July 2021, Cloudflare committed to removing or offsetting the historical emissions associated with powering our network by 2025. Earlier this year, after a comprehensive analysis of our records, we determined that our network has emitted approximately 31,284 metric tons (MTs) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) since our founding.

Today, we are excited to announce our first step toward offsetting our historical emissions by investing in 6,060 MTs’ worth of reforestation carbon offsets as part of the Pacajai Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) Project in the State of Para, Brazil.

Generally, REDD+ projects attempt to create financial value for carbon stored in forests by using market approaches to compensate landowners for not clearing or degrading forests. From 2007 to 2016, approximately 13% of global carbon emissions from anthropogenic sources were the result of land use change, including deforestation and forest degradation. REDD+ projects are considered a low-cost policy mechanism to reduce emissions and promote co-benefits of reducing deforestation, including biodiversity conservation, sustainable management of forests, and conservation of existing carbon stocks. REDD projects were first recognized as part of the 11th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2005, and REDD+ was further developed into a broad policy initiative and incorporated in Article 5 of the Paris Agreement.

The Pacajai Project is a Verra verified REDD+ project designed to stop deforestation and preserve local ecosystems. Specifically, to implement sustainable forest management and support socioeconomic development of riverine communities in Para, which is located in Northern Brazil near the Amazon River. The goal of the project is to train village families in land use stewardship to protect the rainforest, as well as agroforestry techniques that will help farmers transition to crops with smaller footprints to reduce the need to burn and clear large sections of adjacent forest.

If you follow sustainability initiatives at Cloudflare, including on this blog, you may know that we have also committed to purchasing renewable energy to account for our annual energy consumption. So how do all of these commitments and projects fit together? What is the difference between renewable energy (credits) and carbon offsets? Why did we choose offsets for our historical emissions? Great questions; here is a quick recap.

Cloudflare sustainability commitments

Last year, Cloudflare announced two sustainability commitments. First we committed to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy. Meaning, each year we will purchase the same amount of zero emissions energy (wind, solar, etc.) as we consume in all of our data centers and facilities around the world. Matching our energy consumption annually with renewable energy purchases ensures that under carbon accounting standards like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG), Cloudflare’s annual net emissions (or “market-based emissions”) from purchased electricity will be zero. This is important because it accounts for about 99.9% of Cloudflare’s 2021 emissions.

Renewable energy purchases help make sure Cloudflare accounts for its emissions from purchased electricity moving forward; however, it does not address emissions we generated prior to our first renewable energy purchase in 2018 (what we are calling “historical emissions”).

To that end, our second commitment was to “remove or offset all of our historical emissions resulting from powering our network by 2025.” For this initiative, we purposefully chose to use carbon removals or offsets, like the Pacajai REDD+ Project, rather than more renewable energy purchases (also called renewable energy credits, renewable energy certificates, or RECs).

Renewable energy vs. offsets and removals

Renewable energy certificates (RECs) and carbon offsets are both used by organizations to help mitigate their emissions footprint, but they are fundamentally different instruments.

Renewable energy certificates are created by renewable energy generators, like wind and solar farms, and represent a unit (e.g. 1 megawatt-hour) of low or zero emissions energy delivered to a local power grid. Individuals, organizations, and governments are able to purchase those units of energy, and legally claim their environmental benefits, even if the actual power they consume is from the standard electrical grid.

Historical emissions offsets (and Scope 3 sneak preview)
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Offsets and RECs: What’s the Difference?

A carbon offset, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), is “a unit of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) that is reduced, avoided, or sequestered.” Offsets can include a wide variety of projects, including reforestation, procurement of more efficient cookstoves in developing nations, avoidance of methane from municipal solid waste sites, and purchasing electric and hybrid vehicles for public transportation.

Carbon removals are a type of carbon offsets that involve actual removal of an amount of carbon from the atmosphere. According to WRI, carbon removal projects include “natural strategies like tree restoration and agricultural soil management; high-tech strategies like direct air capture and enhanced mineralization; and hybrid strategies like enhanced root crops, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and ocean-based carbon removal.”

As the climate crisis accelerates, carbon removals are an increasingly important part of global net zero efforts. For example, a recent analysis by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that even with rapid investment in emissions reductions (like increasing renewable energy supply), the United States must remove 2 gigatons of CO2 per year by midcentury to reach net zero.

Historical emissions offsets (and Scope 3 sneak preview)
Source: World Resources Institute, Carbon Removal

RECs, offsets, and removals are all important tools for individuals, organizations, and governments to help lower their emissions footprint, and each has a specific purpose. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency puts it, “think of offsets and RECs as two tools in your sustainability tool box — like a hammer and a saw.” For example, RECs can only be used to account for emissions from an organization’s purchased electricity (Scope 2 emissions). Whereas offsets can be used to account for emissions from combustion engines and other direct emissions (Scope 1), purchased electricity (Scope 2), or carbon emitted by others, including supply chain and logistics emissions (Scope 3). In addition, some sustainability initiatives, like the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) Net-Zero Standard, require the use of removals rather than other types of offsets.

Why did Cloudflare choose offsets or removals to account for its historical emissions?

We decided on a combination of offsets and removals for two reasons. The first reason is technical and relates to RECs and vintage years. Every REC produced by a renewable generator must include the date and time it was delivered to the local electrical grid. So, for example, RECs associated with renewable energy generation by a wind facility during the 2022 calendar year are considered 2022 vintage. Most green energy or renewable energy standards require organizations to purchase RECs from the same vintage year as the energy they are seeking to offset. Therefore, finding RECs to account for energy used by our network in 2012 or 2013 would be difficult, if not impossible, and purchasing current year RECs would be inconsistent with most standards.

The second reason we chose offsets and removals is that it gives us more flexibility to support different types of projects. As mentioned above, offset projects can be incredibly diverse and can be purchased all over the world. This gives Cloudflare the opportunity to support a variety of carbon reduction, avoidance, and sequestration projects that also contribute to other sustainable development goals like decent work and economic growth, gender equality and reduced inequalities, and life on land and below water.

How did we calculate historical emissions?

Once we decided how we planned to offset our historical emissions, we needed to determine how much to offset. Earlier this year our Infrastructure team led a comprehensive review of all historical asset records to create an annual picture of what hardware we deployed, the number of servers, the energy consumption of each model and configuration, and total energy consumption.

We also cross-checked our hardware deployment records with a review of all of our blog posts and other public statements documenting our network growth over the years. It was actually a pretty interesting exercise. Not only to see the cover art from some of our early blogs (our New Jersey data center announcement is a favorite), but more importantly to relive the amazing growth of our network, step by step, from three data centers in 2010 to more than 275 cities in over 100 countries! Pretty cool.

Finally, we converted those annual energy totals to emissions using a global average emissions factor from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Energy (kWh) x Emissions Factor (gCO2e/kWh) = Carbon Emissions (gCO2e)

In total, we estimated that based on total power consumption, our network produced 31,284 MTs of CO2e prior to our first renewable energy purchase in 2018. We are proud to invest in offsets to mitigate the first 6,060 MTs this year; only 25,224 MTs to go.

Scope 3 emissions — sneak preview

Now that we have a firm understanding, reporting, and accounting for our current and past Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions — we think it is time to focus on Scope 3.

Cloudflare published its first company-wide emissions inventory in 2020. Since then, we have focused our reporting and mitigating on our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, as required under the GHG Protocol. However, although Scope 3 emissions reporting remains optional, we think it is an increasingly important part of all organizations’ responsibility to understand their total carbon footprint.

To that end, earlier this year we started a comprehensive internal assessment of all of our potential Scope 3 emissions sources. Like most things at Cloudflare we are starting with our network. Everything from embodied carbon in the hardware we buy, to shipping and logistics for moving our data center and server equipment around the world, to how we decommission and responsibly dispose of our assets.

Developing processes to quantify those emissions is one of our top objectives for 2023, and we plan to have more information to share soon. Stay tuned!

Helping build a green Internet

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/helping-build-a-green-internet/

Helping build a green Internet

Helping build a green Internet

When we started Cloudflare, we weren’t thinking about minimizing the environmental impact of the Internet. Frankly, I didn’t really think of the Internet as having much of an environmental impact. It was just this magical resource that gave access to information and services from anywhere.

But that was before I started racking servers in hyper-cooled data centers. Before Cloudflare started paying the bills to keep those servers powered up and cooled down. Before we became obsessed with maximizing the number of requests we could process per watt of power. And long before we started buying directly from renewable power suppliers to drive down the cost of electricity across our network.

Today, I have a very good understanding of how much power it takes to run the Internet. It therefore wasn’t surprising to read the Boston Consulting Group study which found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet. That’s the equivalent of the entire aviation industry.

Cloudflare: Accidentally Environmentally Friendly By Design

While we didn’t set out to reduce the environmental impact of the Internet, Cloudflare has always had efficiency at its core. It comes from our ongoing fight with an old nemesis: the speed of light.

Because we knew we couldn’t beat the speed of light, in order to make our network fast we needed to get close to where Internet users were. In order to do that, we needed to partner directly with ISPs around the world so they’d allow us to install our gear directly inside their networks. In order to do that, we needed to make our gear as low power as possible. And we needed to invent network technology to spread load around our network to deal with spikes of traffic — whether because of a cyber attack or a sale on an exclusive new sneaker line — and to efficiently use all available capacity.

Fighting for Efficiency

When back in December 2012, just two years after we launched, I traveled to Intel’s Oregon Research Center to talk to their senior engineering team about how we needed server chips with more cores per watt, I wasn’t thinking we needed it to save the environment. Instead, I was trying to figure out how we could build equipment that was power efficient enough that ISPs wouldn’t object to installing it. Unfortunately, Intel told me that I was worrying about the wrong thing. So that’s when we started looking for alternatives, including the very power-efficient Arm.

But, it turns out, our obsession with efficiency has made Cloudflare the environmental choice in cloud computing. A 2015 study by Anders S. G. Andrae and Tomas Edler estimated the average cost of processing a byte of information online. Even accounting for the efficiency gains across the industry, based on the study’s data our best estimates are that Cloudflare data processing is more than 19 times more efficient.

Serve Local

The imperfect analogy that I like is buying from the local farmers’ market versus the big box retailer. By serving requests locally, and not backhauling them around the world to massive data centers, Cloudflare is able to reduce the environmental impact of our customers on the Internet. In 2020, we estimate that our customers reduced their carbon output by 550,000 metric tons versus if they had not used our services. That’s the equivalent of eliminating 635 million miles driven by passenger cars last year.

Helping build a green Internet

We’re proud of that, but it’s still a tiny percentage of the overall impact the Internet still has on the environment. As we thought about Impact Week, we set out to make reducing the environmental impact of the Internet a top priority. Given today more than 1 in 6 websites uses Cloudflare, we’re in a position where changes we make can have a meaningful impact.

We Can Do More

Starting today, we’re announcing four major initiatives to reduce Cloudflare’s environmental impact and help the Internet as a whole be more environmentally friendly.

First, we’re committing to be carbon neutral by 2022. We already extensively use renewable energy to power our global network, but we’re going to expand that usage to cover 100% of our energy use. But we’re going a step further. We’re going to look back over the 11 years since Cloudflare launched and purchase offsets to zero out all of Cloudflare’s historical carbon output from powering our global network. It’s not enough that we have less impact than others, we want to make sure Cloudflare since our beginning has been a net positive for the planet.

Second, we are ramping up our deployment of a new class of hyper-efficient servers. Based on Arm technology, these servers can perform the same amount of work while using half the energy. We are hopeful that by prioritizing energy efficiency in the server market we can help catalyze more chip manufacturers to release more efficient designs.

Third, we’re releasing a new option for Cloudflare Workers and Pages, our computing platform and JAMStack offering, which allows developers to choose to run their workloads in the most energy efficient data centers. We believe we are the first major cloud computing vendor to offer developers a way to optimize for the environment. The Green Workers option won’t cost anymore. The tradeoff will be that workloads may incur a bit of additional network latency, but we believe for many developers that’s a tradeoff they’ll be willing to make.

New Standards and Partnerships to Eliminate Excessive Emissions

Finally, and maybe most ambitiously, we’re working with a number of the leading search and crawl companies to introduce an open standard to minimize the amount of load from excessive crawl as possible. Nearly half of all Internet traffic is automated. The majority of that is malicious, and Cloudflare is designed to stop that as efficiently as possible.

But more than 5% of all Internet traffic is generated by legitimate crawlers which index the web in order to power services we all rely on like search. The problem is, more than half of that legitimate crawl traffic is redundant — reindexing pages that haven’t changed. If we can eliminate redundant crawl, it’d be the equivalent of planting a new 30 million acres of forest. That’s a goal worth striving for.

When we started Cloudflare we weren’t thinking about how we could reduce the Internet’s environmental impact. But that’s changed. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is clearly a more environmentally friendly Internet.

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-committed-to-building-a-greener-internet/

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

As we announced this week, Cloudflare is helping to create a clean slate for the Internet. Our goal is simple: help build a better, greener Internet with no carbon emissions that is powered by renewable energy.

To help us get there, Cloudflare is making two announcements. The first is that we’re committed to powering our network with 100% renewable energy. This builds on work we started back in 2018, and we think is clearly the right thing to do. We also believe it will ultimately lead to more efficient, more sustainable, and potentially cheaper products for our customers.

The second is that by 2025 Cloudflare aims to remove all greenhouse gases emitted as the result of powering our network since our launch in 2010. As we continue to improve the way we track and mitigate our carbon footprint, we want to help the Internet begin with a fresh start.

Finally, as part of our effort to track and mitigate our emissions, we’re also releasing our first annual carbon emissions inventory report. The report will provide detail on exactly how we calculate our carbon emissions as well as our renewable energy purchases. Transparency is one of Cloudflare’s core values. It’s how we work to build trust with our customers in everything we do, and that includes our sustainability efforts.

Purchasing Renewable Energy

Understanding Cloudflare’s commitment to power its network with 100% renewable energy requires some additional background on renewable energy markets, as well as international emissions accounting standards.

Companies that commit to powering their operations with 100% renewable energy are required to match their total energy used with electricity produced from renewable sources. The international standards that govern these types of commitments such as the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and ISO 14064, are the same ones used by governments for quantifying their carbon emissions for global climate treaties like the Paris Climate Agreement. There are also additional industry best practices like RE100, which are voluntary guidelines established by companies working to support renewable energy development and eliminate carbon emissions.

Actually purchasing renewable energy consistent with those requirements can be done in several ways — through self-generation, like rooftop solar panels or wind turbines; through contracts with wind or solar farms via Power Purchase Agreements (PPA’s) or unbundled Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), or in some cases purchased through local utility companies like CleanPowerSF in San Francisco, CA.

The goal of providing so many options to purchase renewable energy is to leverage as much investment as possible in new renewable sources. As our colleague Jess Bailey described after our first renewable energy purchase in 2018, because of the way electricity flows through electrical grids, it’s impossible for the individual consumer to know whether they are using electricity from conventional or renewable sources. However, in order to allow customers of all sizes to invest in renewable energy generally, these standards and accounting systems allow individuals or organizations to track their investments and enjoy the benefits of supporting renewable energy, even if the actual power comes from the standard electrical grid.

According to IEA, in 2020 alone, global renewable energy capacity increased 45 percent, which was the largest annual increase since 1997. In addition, close to 50 percent of corporate renewable energy investment over the last five years has been by Internet Communications Technology (ICT) companies alone.

Cloudflare’s Renewable Energy

Cloudflare’s new commitment to power its network with renewable energy means that we will continue to match 100 percent of our global energy usage by purchasing energy from renewable sources. Although Cloudflare made its first renewable energy purchase in 2018, and matched its total global operations in both 2019 and 2020, we thought it was important to make a public, forward-looking commitment so that all of our stakeholders, including customers, investors, employees, and suppliers have confidence that we will continue to build our network on renewable energy moving forward.

To determine how much renewable energy to buy, we separate our total electrical usage into two types: network and facilities. For our network, we pull data from all of our servers and networking equipment located all over the world twice a year. For our facilities (or offices), per the GHG Protocol, we record our actual energy usage wherever we have access to utility bills. For offices located in larger buildings with multiple tenants, we use energy usage intensity (EUI) estimates calculated by the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

We also purchase renewable energy in two ways. The vast majority of our purchases are RECs, which we purchase through our partner 3Degrees to help make sure we are aligned with relevant standards like the GHG Protocol. In 2020, to match the usage of our network, Cloudflare purchased RECs, I-RECs, REGOs, and other energy attribute certificates from the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, South Africa, and Turkey among others. Although Cloudflare has employed a regional purchasing strategy in the past, we also expect to be fully aligned with all RE100 criteria, including its market boundary criteria, by the end of 2021.

Removing our historic emissions

Cloudflare’s goal is to remove or offset all of our historical emissions resulting from powering our network by 2025. To meet that target, Cloudflare must first determine exactly how much carbon was emitted as the result of operating our network from 2010 to 2019, and then invest in carbon offsets or removals to match those emissions.

Determining carbon emissions from purchased electricity is a relatively straightforward calculation. In fact, it’s basically just a unit conversion:

Energy (KWH) x Emissions Factor (gC02e/KWH) = Carbon emissions (gC02e)

The key to accurate results is the emissions factors. Emissions factors are essentially measurements of the amount of GHGs emitted from a specific power supplier (e.g. power plant X in San Francisco) per unit of energy created. For our purposes, GHGs are those defined in the 1992 Kyoto Protocol (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride). To help ease reporting, the six GHGs are often expressed as a single unit “carbon-dioxide equivalent” or “CO2e”, based on each gas’ Global Warming Potential (GWP). Emission factors from individual power sources are often combined and averaged to create grid average emissions factors for cities, regions, or countries. Per the GHG Protocol, Cloudflare uses emissions factors from the U.S. EPA, U.K. DEFRA, and IEA.

For our annual inventory report, which we are also releasing today, Cloudflare calculates carbon emissions scores for every single data center in our network. Cloudflare multiplies the actual energy used by the equipment by the applicable grid average emissions factors in each of the more than 100 countries where we have equipment.

For our historical calculations, we have data on our actual carbon emissions dating back to 2018, which was our first renewable energy purchase. Prior to 2018, we are combing through all of our purchasing, shipping, energy usage, and colocation agreements to reconstruct how much energy we consumed and when. It’s actually a pretty cool exercise to go back and watch our network grow. Although we do not have a final calculation to share yet, rest assured we will keep everyone posted, particularly as we get to the fun part of starting to work with organizations and companies working on carbon removal efforts.

Where we are going next

Although we’re proud of the steps we’re taking as a company with renewable energy and carbon emissions, we’re just getting started.

Cloudflare is also exploring new products and ideas that can help leverage the power of one of the world’s largest networks to drive better climate outcomes for our customers and for the Internet. To see a really cool example, check out our colleagues blog post from earlier today, on Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers, which is helping Cloudflare’s intelligent edge route some additional workloads to renewable energy facilities, or our Carbon Impact Reports, which are helping our customers optimize their carbon footprint.