Guidelines Feedback - Carbon intensity of the grid / behind the meter

[jamescrowley]

Would you mind clarifying the reasoning behind SCI's treatment of carbon intensity measurements? I understand the intent, but a little more context on the 'why' would be super useful. Apologies if I've missed this elsewhere.

What I'm particularly interested in are the areas of grey - for instance, fully off-grid (where custom emission factors are permitted) vs those with behind-the-meter measures (where they are not).

Suppose there is directly connected solar, or peak shaving energy storage to reduce usage of the grid at times of higher marginal carbon intensity. My understanding under SCI it would be treated as if the energy was drawn directly from the grid, is that right?

What about 'best-case' PPA - such as a solar farm connected to the same (general) electricity grid, financed by the cloud provider, and a PPA with granular matching (I-REC etc)

• Is this because the target audience for this standard is those building software - not data centres - and so creating incentives through the standard in this area are irrelevant? (even if developers could choose to relocate workloads to data centres with these approaches?)
• Is it a conclusion that in fact these are ineffective routes to decarbonisation / not truly additional, even in these 'best' cases?
• Simply a necessary simplification? Or something else I'm missing entirely 😁

Many thanks all for your time, and congrats on the ISO standard 🎉