green-coding.io

Simulating yearly CO2 emissions for a run across every grid zone

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

The Green Metrics Tool now has a Yearly Run Simulation view that projects any run's measured energy against the average yearly carbon intensity of every Electricity Maps grid zone, for 2021 – 2025.
Pick a year, energy metric, phase and number of runs — get a sortable table of estimated emissions per zone, plus renewable and carbon-free energy share.
Pin zones side-by-side to compare regions and years at a glance, instead of relying on a single, falsely precise CO2 number.

webNRG⚡️ Released

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Websites also do have carbon emissions. Like any other digital product that our society creates.

You might know already of other tools like Website Carbon Calculator, CO2.js, Cardamon or Firefox Profiler

We have thought it would be great to integrate both functionalities, measuring emissions based on network transfer AND emissions based on an actually measured device energy consumption, into an easily accessible, highly configurable and free and open source solution.

First-Class Playwright Support

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce a new feature in the Green Metrics Tool: first-class Playwright support.

Playwright is a widely used framework for end-to-end browser automation and testing. Many teams rely on it to ensure their web applications work as expected. Until now, running Playwright scripts with the Green Metrics Tool meant using the Docker Playwright container and manually mounting scripts. With this update, Playwright is now a native usage scenario type, making it far easier to measure the environmental impact of real browser interactions.

How to Measure and Act on Network Carbon Emissions in Green Software

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We have gotten pretty good at measuring the emissions from things like computing, storage and memory usage, because the hardware is right in front of us. But when it comes to network traffic, things get murky.

We Got the Blue Angel for Software

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Green Metrics Tool has been certified with the Blue Angel for Software Label

Big news: Our Green Metrics Tool just now also physically received the Blue Angel ecolabel for software after getting certified in 2024! That makes us one of just three software products in Germany to get this recognition — alongside Nextcloud Server and KDE’s Okular.

Why measuring AI matters

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why measuring AI matters

TL;DR

Avoid high energy costs and emissions by comparing models before rolling them out at scale.
Learn how to benchmark AI models for energy use using simple tools like Ollama and the Green Metrics Tool.
Follow a real-world case study where smarter model selection led to resource savings.
Get a ready-to-use setup for measuring inference performance on your own GPU or with our hosted cluster.

First release of PowerLetrics

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Measuring the resource consumption of software is quite a complex topic. When we started working on the Green Metrics Tool we couldn’t imagine the ride this would take us on. From studying the Linux Kernel to building out own cluster. While this is needed to get accurate readings this is often too much work for a quick check what is going on. So we started to think about what such a tool needed to do. While I was developing our power logging solution for macOS, the PowerHog I really came to like the simplicity of the macOS powermetrics program. You can just fire it up and get per process energy metrics. You could pipe it into sed/awk and get fairly good data really easily. Even Windows has something similar. So does no tool like this exists under Linux?

Green Metrics Tool receives 'Blauer Engel' Certification for Resource and Energy Efficiency (DE UZ-215)

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Please find the english version below

Wir freuen uns, dass unser Green Metrics Tool nun mit dem renommierten Blauer Engel für Ressourcen- und Energieeffiziente Softwareprodukte ausgezeichnet wurde.

Diese Zertifizierung unterstreicht unser Engagement für Nachhaltigkeit und Innovation in der Softwareentwicklung.

When does it make sense to replace old hardware from a CO2 impact perspective

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A friend recently sent me a news headline in which a company is promoting that they will use their servers 15 years. While this initially sounds like a great idea, once you think about it, for a little while, you realize modern servers are far more energy efficient than old ones. This got me thinking, when is the point where the energy efficiency of the modern server outweighs the embodied carbon of the new machine. The more I thought about this the more I went down the rabbit hole. What if, the servers are powered with solar. How do I account for this? What are the servers doing? If the server is doing a lot of vector calculations a new one with a H100 card might make sense. How are they cooled? A modern server will surely produce less heat for the same operation. So it really depends on so many factors in the specific case that a general statement is hard to make. But I still wanted to get some sort of feeling. So I broke it down to the following inputs for the new and old machine:

Releasing Green-Coding.AI

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Artificial Intelligence is on the rise and it is using huge amounts of resources. [1] [2] [3]

People are still debating on how much, but it is clear that it is quite a lot. While the training of LLMs is a prevalent discussion the inference stage is hardly discussed. This is the process of getting a model to answer a prompt. Every query that is put to a model also takes up quite a considerable amount of resources.

We started researching this topic quite some time back and wanted to see how much resources this really is and how difference models compare to each other and if different types of queries also take different amounts of energy. Coming out of this research we want to present:

🇩🇪 Green Coding Studie

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Wir sind von der dena (Deutsche Energie Agentur) beauftragt worden, eine hoffentlich bahnbrechende Studie zum Thema Green Coding als Standard in der Softwareentwicklung für eine stromsparende Gestaltung der Digitalisierung zu erstellen.

How much energy is my server using?

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Something we often encounter when talking to clients is that they often have no idea of how much energy the various components in their pipeline use. We have developed multiple projects like Eco-CI that measures the energy usage of CI/CD pipelines or Power Hog which logs energy consumption on desktops. But to date is was not possible to see how much your servers use.

Scale your CPU according to the Grid intensity

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the age of digital revolution, our reliance on technology is ever-increasing, but so is our carbon footprint. Amidst this tech boom, a pressing question arises: how can we leverage technology to combat, rather than contribute to, climate change?

Getting high grade cpu utilization values on MacOS

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

CPU utilization is an interesting value to use if you ware interested in either energy usage or optimizing your code.

We have written a long case study on if it is useful in the first place. Long story short: not really. It used to be a good metrics before cpus would scale dynamically, you had on type of cpu and not multiple performance/ energy cores that each do their own thing and things were a lot simpler. But in modern computers the utilization is somehow interesting but not really much worth in terms of an exact metric.

PNG. A message from the past and how to kill it

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While reading this great article https://evanhahn.com/worlds-smallest-png/ about the smallest png image possible I started thinking about how old the png standard is and how many more newer formats are out there. PNG is 27 years old and JPG is 31. Still png with jpg still seems to be the standard when looking at software out there. For example the standard wordpress themes have pngs for their images. Also the wordpress photos page returns a lot pf JPG images. We have written about the savings of using avif in comparison to png in one of our case studies: AVIF VS. PNG

Benchmarking code optimisation

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Standard benchmarks play a pivotal role in the field of software engineering, serving as a foundational element for ensuring quality and efficiency. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks, in particular, have established a high standard across the database sector. These benchmarks are designed to simulate real-world database usage, offering a platform for comparing various database products in a manner that is fair, fundamental, and reproducible.

Carbon Aware Development - (SCLA part 2)

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While writing the “Software Life Cycle Assessment done in the wild” article I needed to develop a little server that could do three simple tasks. Because the article became too long I decided to separate the methodology how to develop with environmental impact in mind into a dedicated part. Feel free to head over to the SLCA article and read the first part to see why we are developing this server.

Software Life Cycle Assessment done in the wild - (SLCA part 1)

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I want to propose a simple way to do a Software Life Cycle Assessment for a piece of code. While explaining important concepts and tradeoffs that seem sensible for a little project. Of course things could be done differently and I am happy to discuss them in more detail as this is just a first draft of how things could be done. Please head to https://github.com/green-coding-solutions/SLCA-Code for all source code and discussions. Please also feel free to contribute to the code through pull requests. As Green Coding Solutions we have been working on this topic for some time and a more academic discussion can be found in our chapter in the Transparency for Software Climate Impact publication (Part of the Shaping Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society publication).

Energy and power usage data in the cloud

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Getting power usage data in cloud is a tough topic and one of the reasons projects such as Cloud Carbon Footprint exist. Typically cloud vendors, especially hyperscalers, do neither supply energy consumption data of the whole machine from PDUs or similar, nor do they provide access to CPU internal energy data like for instance RAPL.

Eco-CI: Now with Gitlab pipelines support

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are happy to announce a major update to our Eco-CI tool, a plugin designed to estimate and reduce the energy consumption of continuous integration pipelines. Previously available exclusively for GitHub Actions, we are excited to announce the integration of Eco-CI with GitLab pipelines. We hope this will encourage Gitlab developers to measure their carbon emissions and make informed decisions regarding sustainable software processes.

NOP Linux

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog article is not updated anymore. Please find the newest way to configure NOP Linux in our documentation.

At Green Coding Solutions (GCS), one goal is to enable reproducible runs on our cluster. An important step towards accurate measurements was the creation of NOP Linux, our custom Linux distro that disables as many background processes as possible to avoid interruptions during measurements. Another crucial step was ensuring the reliable operation of the PowerSpy2, so we could measure the entire power consumption.

Green Metrics Tool v0.15 & Eco-CI Upgrade

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The long awaited feature to make comparisons with the Green Metrics Tool is finally live 🔥

Our measurement workflow now includes phases (Baseline, Idle, Installation, Boot, Runtime, Remove) which makes our tool compatible with the requirements specified by the Blue Angel for Software.

Green Coding on Mac

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Green Coding on Mac

When we started with the Green Metrics Tool (GMT) we set out to develop tooling to enable developers, decision makers and the wider public to measure and see the impact software is having on the environment.

Eco CI Energy Estimation Action

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 19:00:00 +0000

You do not know about our Eco-CI project yet? Than read up here about it: Eco-CI project

As we mentioned in a previous blog article, we’ve been thinking of ways to make CI pipelines more energy efficient. One idea we had was to give developers a tool which allows them to measure the energy used by their CI runs.

Containers on macOS for the Green Metrics Tool

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Many of our developers work on macOS exclusively. In order to create a nicer development experience, we are currently undergoing some work to port our Green Metrics Tool to macOS.

Eco CI project - Github Action for Greener CI pipelines

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 19:00:00 +0000

You do not know about our Eco-CI project yet? Than read up here about it: Eco-CI project

One question we’ve been tinkering around with here at Green Coding Solutions is how can we make CI pipelines around the world a little bit greener.

TDP and ACP for energy estimation in processors

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the green software community we see very often that people use the TDP of the processor as a metric to estimate how much energy the CPU will consume for a specific workload.

SPECPower model with XGBoost open sourced

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A detailed blog article is yet to come, but for everyone who follows our blog only and not our repositories we wanted to highlight that we open sourced the new XGBoost variant of the SPECPower estimation model for cloud workloads on github called Cloud Energy.

USABILITY STUDY OF THE CO2 EMISSIONS MEASUREMENT TOOL FROM GREEN CODING

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We recently had a team of aspiring UX researches at Green Coding Solutions that made a research project on how the Green Metrics Tool can be used.

This is a guest article with their results

Power measurement on macOS

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last week we have been on the SDIA event for sustainble software and held a workshop on measuring the energy digital products.

We presented approchaes where you measure the energy either with tool like Scaphandre or the Green Metrics Tool as well as approaches for restricted environments like the cloud. Here the SDIA DEF Model and our Cloud Energy ML Model where presented.

Estimating Cloud Energy Consumption with a Linear Model - Part 1

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This arcticle is part of a multi-part series. Be sure to check out / stay tuned for the other parts!

A big goal for us here is at how to measure the energy/carbon use of cloud services.

Reproducing the Blauer Engel für Software measurements for Okular

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the past we have joined the Workshop around the Blauer Engel (with the Öko Institut e.V. as the host this year) and also some of the regular meetings from the KDE Eco Team.

Trying out Firefox 104 energy measurements

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In an earlier version of the article the calculation statement contained a message about us being confused why the conversion factor is 277000000. Thanks to Silas Duddeck from the Goethe University in Frankfurt who pointed out that the factor should be 1J = 2,777778⋅10-7kWh = (1/3600000)kWh => 277777777

Updating the DC measurements

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In my last blog post I have written about how we finally completed the DC measurement reporter for our Green Metrics Tool.

In the last days we have looked at reducing the variance of the ATX powerlanes and finding out if swapping out the resistors for more stable current measurement resistors can improve the measurement.

DC energy measurements for software

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We finally got our DC measurement setup ready … sadly around one month later than expected.

If you wanna see first results go here:

If you wann get the details of our journey, why we are integrating it into our tool, some tech specs and the future outlook on when we have the AC measurement ready, then read on :)

CO2 Formulas and Case Studies

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Starting this month we will be releasing articles in a regular fashion about insights into energy use of specifc software tools or architectures.

In order to lay a foundation to follow these articles we have created at a CO2 Formulas page, where you can find all the relevant formulas how to calculate the energy use of software. Often times software can be directly instrumented and measured, but when the complexity gets too high (in network transmissions) or data is limited (in the cloud) then often assumptions are made.

Version 0.1-beta released

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have have released the 0.1-beta version of our Green Metrics Tool

Version 0.1-beta is considered a non-production version.

Progress on energy measurements

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have pushed the first beta of our metrics providers for full OS Intel RAPL readings.

You can see the full details of our demo runs with the static version of the Green Web Foundation Page in our Green Metrics Tool Repositories Overview

Youtube Extension

Thu, 19 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How many times do we use Youtube only to listen to songs, or to watch videos without the necessity of going for that fancy 4k/HD resolution? Also: do we really want to automatically watch other (algorithmically-chosen) videos after the current video is finished? In other words, how can we have a carbon-friendly approach while still getting the content we wanted?

Change of license

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As some of you following our Green Coding github have maybe noticed is that we have changed the license of some of our repositories.

The tools and the demo code where prior licensed under MIT, which is a software license that we have come to love through popular libraries like Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, Joplin and many more …

FAQ - About Green Coding

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What exactly is green coding?

Green Coding means the practice of software development with a strong focus on resource efficiency in terms of energy use. It is also known as green software engineering or green software development.

We are hiring!

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we have big news which shine a light on what we have planned for the coming months.

Green Coding Solutions is becoming a legal entity in form of a non-profit [Green Coding Solutions gGmbH].

Green Metrics measurement tool open sourced

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are happy to announce the first prototype of our tool for measuring resource usage.

The tool is fully open sourced under MIT license and can be used and copied by anyone for any purpose.

Links and resources now on Github for Green Software Development

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Now just after announcing our public repo on with our website as HUGO source in it , we are now also publishing our resources repo.

When we started to get an overview in the field of Green Coding and Green Software Engineering we found a landscape of many solo coders / bloggers.

New Blog and Github Repos

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

First update comes right with this first blog-entry and is regarding our Github Repository.

At https://github.com/green-coding-solutions you can find our code repositories with all the source code that we generate in our meetups and in internal projects.