Green Hosting at Netlify

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1

Hi guys,

Currently, I have my Nextjs app deployed on Netlify and I need to get the green certificate from the Green Web Foundation. Please let me know how I can achieve this. To my knowledge, Netlify is using AWS underneath. Therefore, we just have to change the current AWS region to an AWS green-supported region.

Site: https://luhn-website.netlify.app/

Thanks in Advance!

2

Welcome to the forums @JayJayNinetyFive

While not an official answer, https://luhn-website.netlify.app/ could appear “green” or “not green” depending on the time the site is checked. I initially received a “green”, followed by a “grey” rating. This is because the the site is served from a global CDN, some of which are green, some of which aren’t. The same would apply for the custom domain you use too.

I believe you will find the following thread of interest

3

Hey there, @JayJayNinetyFive :wave:

Welcome to the Netlify Forums and thanks for reaching out! Echoing @coelmay, this will depend on the time of day due to our global CDN. If you are looking for further information in the interim, I suggest checking out AWS and GCP, as these are two cloud providers we run across who have publicly shared their sustainability commitments.

I have surfaced you request to our internal teams here at Netlify. Like I mention in the thread Coel linked above, we are currently working on a comprehensive report, action plan, and climate vision that we will be ready to roll out in the coming quarters, so please stay tuned!

We genuinely appreciate folks taking the time to raise questions such as this. Thank you!

5

Ran the Green Web Foundation check on my website and I got the same result as OP.

Is it correct that in order to guarantee renewable energy web hosting for my website, I have to change to a host other than Netlify?

6

I don’t know what changed with the checker, but it did say that Netlify was running on green energy some time back: https://answers.netlify.com/t/3951/43

7

So four years have passed and we did not see anything going into the direction of a comprehensive report or alike. As far as I understand you just forward AWS’s statements. But as we all know AWS is not truly using 100% green energy.
Stating in their document here: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-methodology.pdf

To calculate the percentage of electricity consumed by Amazon’s global operations matched
by renewable energy sources, we evaluate the amount of energy generated from renewable
energy projects enabled by Amazon plus renewable energy in the grids where Amazon
operates, and divide this value by the total energy consumed by Amazon business operations
globally during the reporting year.

So they offset their electricity consumption with projects that they “enable”, and here it get’s very intransparent.
Reading their environmental reports the numbers for emitted green house gases only know one way: UP! (Mainly due to the rise of AI)
(Cathleen Berger has a nice summary of big techs reports: https://cathleenberger.medium.com/hidden-under-all-the-ai-big-tech-companies-are-missing-their-climate-targets-eb10cd2098af)

What would help here is

  1. More transparent reports how much electricity is being used by Netlify, estimates on how much energy is used for specific hostings or teams.
  2. It would be great to see in which areas of the world there is actual green energy (by AWS) and
  3. some control for us users to omit those regions, maybe even opting out of CDN servers which are in non-sustainable electricity grids.

Anyhow, I would be really glad if you, Netlify could give us an update, as we were left in the dark for 4 years after promising the above.

Thanks a lot.