We have not done that work. We have used the published data online to establish that some of our providers are better than others. It’s a good suggestion that I’ll pass on to our team to request those details explicitly to let our providers know we are interested since that will show the demand! But, we do not expect all of our providers to use renewable energy in the immediate future.
Hi all - super happy to announce that we’ve taken to the first steps to formalizing our commitment to being transparent about our sustainability policies.
If you have constructive feedback, please do let us know.
Please note that I / we are not here to discuss the merits or criticisms of specific approaches to energy saving - that’s an ideological discussion that goes beyond the scope of this forum.
What we do hope to do is respond to the calls from our customers to be more intentional about information we disclose - and this page is the result of those early efforts!
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Hi guys,
happy to hear that a first step has been taken. Just wanted to add my 2 cents here as well. I co-founded a non-profit that is pushing digital companies to take climate action (lfca.earth), so I am basically advising founders to make sure that their digital services are emitting as little emissions as possible. I am a big fan of Netlify and our whole tech setup is JAM stack based. From an emissions point of view, it’s a great architecture due to its efficiency.
However, I had to move our sites over to the google cloud since I cannot advice people on “hosting green”, while not being able to show that we are leading by example. Maybe one constructive way to deal with this could be to allow users to choose their hosting provider (like Gatsby Cloud does it).
This trend will only continue over the next years and I know many startups who choose the google cloud over aws & co simply for sustainability reasons. This will become a selling point in a very competitive market.
All the best and happy to “move back” to Netlify whenever there is news on this
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hi @timo,
thanks for sharing. I do hope that we continue to find ways to offer our customers more choice as far as energy sources go, and I agree with you that this is an ongoing discussion that isn’t going away. We’ll definitely update here should anything change.
There’s been a year since the last reply on this but I wanted to add my voice to this. We’re a subsidiary of a Big Four and I’m looking to move our website to JAMStack + Netlify, concentrating on best practices and efficiency to reduce our digital footprint.
I’d like to create a dedicated page on our site talking about these decisions among other sustainability measures from our company and a key part of that is being able to point to what Netlify is doing as a company. Glad to see your new marketing page as a start but some metrics and goals would be key.
Just to add another data point here: this is also something I’m very concerned about. I’ve had customers asking me about our product’s carbon impact, and in terms of web hosting this thread is the best information we can offer them.
As a case in point, Cloudflare have been 100% renewable since 2018, and are committed to remaining so indefinitely and to actively removing greenhouse gases from the environment equivalent to all their entire historical emissions by 2025: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-committed-to-building-a-greener-internet/.
I’d love to see Netlify do something similar - at the absolute minimum to provide concrete numbers on the current situation, but preferably to commit to net-zero by some date in the near future. The current sustainability page is a start, but seems to mostly be a marketing effort rather than providing much real information.
I’m sympathetic that it’s hard to know the mix of providers that will be used in future, but it seems it should be possible to estimate past emissions based on real usage of each provider, and at least providing renewal percentages for the previous months or years would be a good start that could show progress towards zero.
At the moment it feels like Netlify is the worst of all cloud providers available. It’s increasingly difficult to justify hosting with Netlify to customers concerned about sustainability when there are many other 100% renewable alternatives out there.
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Hey there, @pimterry
Thank you so much for reaching out and sharing these thoughts. We’re so glad you are passionate about building a green web. We are committed to reducing and offsetting our carbon footprint for our customers and our employees.
Today, Netlify runs across multiple cloud providers, including AWS and GCP, who have publicly shared their sustainability commitments. I have shared your feedback with our relevant stakeholders and leadership, and 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.
Again, I appreciate you sharing this valuable feedback with our team.
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I hope you can solve this issue because the rest of what you do is amazing. We know that offsetting doesn’t work, its just moving the jigsaw pieces around. Other ISP’s are fully sustainable so please lets get there
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Hey there, @dommcloughlin 
Thanks so much for reaching out. I have shared your feedback with the team working on this. We will follow up here when we have more information!
I’m also concerned about this and would love to see some more transparency around specific metrics, actions and goals. Is there any update on the ‘comprehensive report, action plan, and climate vision’ that was in the works in 2021?
The apparent lack of progress for years does unfortunately send a different message to the one presented by the sustainability marketing page from Sep '20 (which was described at the time using terms like ‘first steps’ and ‘early efforts’). Please show us otherwise!
Hi @dylan.dev thanks for reaching and welcome to the forums! Thank you so much for sharing your feedback with the community. We hope to have an update on our sustainability initiative in the near future. Stay tuned.
As mentioned above, the need to publish specific numbers regarding energy consumption is rising. I can’t do anything with Amazon’s statement that they are 5x more efficient than typical European data centers . I need numbers. At least tell us what a typical European data center uses!
Also I don’t know if a mix of Google and AWS is used for my pages.
Please @Netlify make an effort to give us specific numbers regarding energy consumption. Even if it is a range, that would help a lot! I realize that this is an uncomfortable subject for Netlify, for Google, Amazon, you name it. Nonetheless, we need to step forward and gain transparency here. Otherwise society won’t be able to cope with climate change!
Thank you
PS:
I see that Amazon offers a Carbon Footprint estimation tool:
If they can do that on customer level, it should be possible to give you numbers about Netlify energy consumption and carbon footprint, right?
I’d like to throw my support behind this. If Netlify can be powered by 100% renewable energy, it is something that I could talk about as a massive positive for Netlify, among the ones I already use. But the need to be as environmentally conscious is growing at a significant rate.