This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a Cambridge Computer Science PhD topic, and is currently being worked on by Jessica Man. It is supervised by Martin Kleppmann and Anil Madhavapeddy as part of the Planetary Computing project.
Customers of online services may want to take carbon emissions into account when deciding which service to use, but are currently hindered by a lack of reliable emissions data that is comparable across services. Calculating accurate carbon emissions across a cloud computing pipeline involves a number of stakeholders, none of whom are incentivised to accurately report their emissions for competitive reasons.
This PhD explores mechanisms to support verifiable and privacy-preserving emissions reporting across a chain of energy suppliers, cloud data centres, virtual machine hosting services providers and cloud services providers, which are ultimately passed through to APIs used by customers. We hypothesise that adding verifiable and composable emissions transparency to cloud computing architectures enables providers to compete on the basis of sustainability, resulting in demand-side pressure on cloud services to shift to renewable energy sources.
We published a workshop paper on this topic in Emission Impossible: privacy-preserving carbon emissions claims.