Episodes

  • #62 Thirsty datacenters in the heart of Silicon Valley with Masheika Allgood

    #62 Thirsty datacenters in the heart of Silicon Valley with Masheika Allgood
    Aug 18 2025
    A month ago, Google released its 2024 sustainability report. Its overall water consumption increased by 28% in a year. Less publicized than the data center energy boom, water is also pivotal for the Tech industry and data is even scarcer. To better understand this secret but serious love affair between big tech and water, what better location to investigate than its birth place? Yes. THE silicon valley. And no one there is better qualified to explore the topic than Masheika Allgood who lives in Santa Clara and recently created a Data Center Water Consumption Calculator based on public data. Over their conversation, Gael Duez and her covered: - The astonishing amount of water used by data centers in California and why it could have been even worse - “Back to the loop” & the limits on the efficiency gain from new cooling technics - Air pollution & the trade-off of heat reuse in urban area - The unignorable noise pollution - How big tech lawyers have an edge on city council and community activism And much much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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    49 mins
  • #61 Scaling Green Software with Anita Schüttler

    #61 Scaling Green Software with Anita Schüttler
    Jul 8 2025
    What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as Head of Sustainability at IT company neuland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundesverband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for software and a Champion of the Green Software Foundation. Together, they covered many topics including: - The formation of the Bundesverband Green Software, - The CO2 challenge project, - Scaling green software initiatives & measuring its success, - The challenges in certification processes, - The emotional roller coaster of nonprofit initiatives, And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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    49 mins
  • #60 Why Tech companies should not deprioritize future readiness with Rainer Karcher

    #60 Why Tech companies should not deprioritize future readiness with Rainer Karcher
    Jun 24 2025
    “Climate activist in a suit”. This is how Rainer Karcher describes himself. It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. In this episode Gaël Duez welcomes a strong advocate of moving the corporate world into the right direction from within? Having spent 2 decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz, Rainer Karsher knows the corporate world well, which he now advises on sustainability. In this Green IO episode, they analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris agreement, but also caring about biodiversity or human rights across their supply chain. Many topics were covered such as: Why ESB has nothing to with “saving the planet”, 3 tips to tackle the end of the month vs end-of-the world dilemma, Embracing a global perspective on ESG and why the current backlash is a western world only issue, Knowing the price we pay for AI and how to avoid rebound effect, the challenge with shadow AI and why training is pivotal, and yes they talked about whales also and many more things!
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    50 mins
  • #59 Debriefing Qcon Sustainability track with Erica Pisani

    #59 Debriefing Qcon Sustainability track with Erica Pisani
    Jun 10 2025
    How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences? Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences? To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed: - The inspiring speakers in the track - Why Qcon didn’t become AIcon - How to get C-level buy-in by highlighting the new environmental risk - The limit to efficiency: fine balancing between hardware stress and usage optimization - Why performance and sustainability are tight in technology - Why assessing Edge computing’s positive and negative impact is tricky And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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    40 mins
  • #58b Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 2

    #58b Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 2
    May 27 2025
    Why is the model of a Nobel prize winner not necessarily good science? What is “good” modelling? Is access to information enough to change a system behavior? This episode is the second part of a long interview with Laetita Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As presented in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! In this second part, Gaël Duez and Laetitia Bornes moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode however we would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. Among the topics covered in this second part are: - An impressive transparency exercise about the limit of the model used for the Vinted use case, - Why models are “wrong” and how to still use them purposefully, - Why a Nobel prize modeling in his lab without publishing isn’t doing science (yet), - Access to information and its connection to the four main categories of leverage points, - The concept of protopia, And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here: https://greenio.tech/blog
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    39 mins
  • #58a Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 1

    #58a Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 1
    May 20 2025
    Can a digital company be “carbon negative”? What should we think of these claims of “tons of carbon avoided” coming from 2nd hand platforms such as Vinted or Back Market? Dr Laetitia Bornes conducted research on Vinted claims, investigating its data sources and the methodology used with her colleague David Ekchazer. Their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! Among the ones she share with Gaël Duez in this first part of the episode were: - The pitfalls of assessing "Tech for Good" even using Life-Cycle Analysis, - The complexity of rebound effects and other indirect effects, - How to improve things as a Designer, … and as a CEO! - The need for a systemic perspective and some tools to build it, and much more! And because this conversation was so rich that it couldn’t be reduced to a one hour discussion, this episode comes in 2 parts, the first one focusing on the Vinted use case and the second one where we discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here: https://greenio.tech/blog
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    48 mins
  • #57 Greening Intelligence: Bridging Infrastructure and Governance for a Sustainable AI Future with Pr. PS Lee and Pr. Heng Wang

    #57 Greening Intelligence: Bridging Infrastructure and Governance for a Sustainable AI Future with Pr. PS Lee and Pr. Heng Wang
    Apr 29 2025
    “It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering”. Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and governance perspective of the ongoing AI Boom. Among the topics covered in this episode recorded live from the Green IO Singapore conference with Gael Duez were our imperfect, incomplete and unpredictable knowledge on AI, the fit for purpose approach with the right mix of cooling solution, dealing with legacy datacenter infrastructure, the moratorium on new data center and the other tools used by the Singapore government to cap energy consumption, and much more!
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    25 mins
  • #56 Building Green Software, the one year anniversary with Sarah Hsu

    #56 Building Green Software, the one year anniversary with Sarah Hsu
    Apr 8 2025
    A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Designing for sustainability” (8 years ago!), O’Reilly didn’t publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So, it’s a fair statement that this book was long awaited. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why Sarah Hsu, one of its 3 co-authors as well as the chair of the Green Software Foundation’s Principles of Green Software committee, joined the show to talk about the trends she witnesses first hand in the green software engineering field and how she would envision a v2. More specifically she talked about: 🌟 GreenOps being the new kid in the block 👨‍🏫 What FinOps can teach to GreenOps 📈 How SRE can help treating environmental metrics like any other business metrics 🕵️‍♀️ The hard truth about the four nine 📏 Progress made in measurement 🔬 What the Rumsfeld’s Metrics can tell us about the difference between monitoring and observability 🚧 Why it should always be space and time for deviation And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here: https://greenio.tech/blog
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    49 mins