Exploring Grid-Aware Websites

If we'd really want to lower the energy usage of our applications we probably have to simplify along the whole chain. Using Astro means the whole process relies probably on NPM, the build cycle is probably also more energy intensive. Static HTML hosted on some dirt cheap server is probably more environmentally friendly than hooking up to some API and giving us various experiences based upon the mix of the grid.

To me the savings as mentioned in the article feel rather superficial compared to the energy consumed just getting the basic infra for this up & running. Somehow this feels like greenwashing.

The article about Green Web on a blog that has scrolling implemented in some horrible way giving both slow experience and visible CPU usage (and therefore also power demand) spikes on my desktop...

Boy, using e-commerce as an example is pretty funny.

I don't know a single worse offender for document size and performance than e-commerce. I've worked on a site that was unwittingly loading >1Gb of images on categories.

Where is the comparison of the power usage between the two modes, is this not the entire point of the exercise?

Well-written blog post about something I had never, ever, considered. Maybe one day this will come up and I'll remember that something like this is possible. The general trick of "rewrite the entire webpage based on some external API status" seems like an interesting and powerful (... and dangerous) tool.

In terms of achieving the overall goal of "greening" the web, I would be very interested to see even some back-of-the-envelope math explaining how much energy this technique saves and how much of an impact that would have. Understanding the energy cost of webpages and massive edge rewriting serverless platforms like Cloudflare is unintuitive to me.

Cynically, my impression is that the overall approach is more like "greenwashing" than "greening" — at best I would guess it "raises awareness", with all of the implications to efficacy that such actions usually have. I followed the links through from the blog to The Green Web Foundation's FAQ [0] and did not find any tangible estimates of energy impact nor any attempts at measuring such an impact. The success metrics [1] they list do not include any measure of energy saved or understanding of the potential to save energy; rather, basically just attention.

[0] https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/tools/grid-aware-websi...

[1] https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/tools/grid-aware-websi...

I was going to write a more critical post about how PoW cryptocurrencies and AI are probably better targets to go after than Javascript execution on the edge. Upon further reflection, though, this might actually be a good idea.

1. This is about demand response (using less power during times of peak fossil fuel demand), while AI and crypto mostly affect base load.

2. Crypto and AI operators make too much money from their depreciating hardware to consider implementing demand response, but website operators would probably care less about externalizing the inconvenience of their demand response to their users and taking credit for the environmental win.

The only question left is "if you divide power usage from unnecessary JS execution by the difference between base and peak demand, is that ratio significant enough to warrant the extra SWE and infrastructure overhead?" To me, this feels like the kind of question to answer before even embarking on developing this kind of standard, so I'm sure the GAW AG can point me to an estimate of the total addressable impact. Right? Right?

I am smiling so big even those reading this can likely see it.

As the global energy issues continue to rapidly unfold in both availability and costs more and more in time will be questioning that "thing" that nearly all take for granted absolute. A resource that is critical to modern life yet cannot be seen and therefore our vision driven species yields little concern for something that has always been readily available for one's entire life. When something is neglected and treated as infinite it is only a matter of time before such conflicts will ensue as a result of holistic mismanagement of an unseen resource that is very highly impacted by business 101 rules, supply and demand.

Glad to know of yet another that is cognizant of their code energy consumption. What most will balk at, some will even laugh, but this is just one's ignorance in lack of respect of time as those business principles take further grasp on reality of the situation where our technology progress has led us.

In my former life as an electrician I ran circuits that became the roads for those electrons to physically travel on. After becoming a software engineer I then logically controlled those same electrons from the circuits I pulled to power those devices. Many more in the future will be thinking both physically and logically about their own electron usage as the costs continue to rise given the undeniable reliance many still have on centralized power grid version 1 design per Morgan and Tesla.

all this talk about doing more with less - i prefer, doing more with more!

"Grid" as in "power grid" not "CSS grid"

This is an intriguing idea that I haven't seen before, and I wouldn't have thought of it to be honest. From an "efficiency optimisation" perspective it's interesting... but if implemented badly could have some questionable implications. There must be an off switch, otherwise could it be unethical to give people in "dirtier-energy" countries a "second-class" experience? Dictating "your power is not clean enough" and taking away the autonomy gives me a sense of unease, though vehicle emissions laws are already a thing so perhaps it shouldn't be so alien.

I propose a more obviously user-beneficial application for this sort of graceful-degradation design: detect if the user's bandwidth is low, presenting a trimmed-down version if so to maintain a usable website. Too many sites these days are completely nonfunctional on slow (rural/patchy/etc.) connections with tens of MBs of scripts and frameworks.