41: Earth Week Special - Carbon Explorer with Bilge

For our second special for Earth Week, we are talking to Bilge who works as a research scientist at Meta AI. Her open-source project Carbon Explorer evaluates solutions to make data centres operate on 24/7 renewable energy. Why this is easier said than done and how engineers can help within their day-to-day work to reduce their carbon footprint are among the many things Pascal and Bilge discuss in this episode.

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Links:

• Carbon Explorer: https://github.com/facebookresearch/CarbonExplorer
• Holistic Approach for Designing Carbon Aware Datacenters: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10036
• Open Catalyst: https://opencatalystproject.org/
• Open Catalyst SchrepTech Interview: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/how-ai-is-helping-address-the-climate-crisis/

Timestamps:

• Intro 0:05
• Intro Bilge 2:18
• Optimising for the Environment 4:01
• Carbon Explorer 5:02
• Mitigations for Renewable Intermittency 7:17
• Operational and Embodied Footprints 10:57
• Motivations for Carbon Explorer 13:06
• Battery Storage 14:36
• Renewable Curtailment 15:52
• Empowering Engineers 18:20
• Carbon Intensity APIs 19:22
• AI Carbon Intensity Forecasts 22:07
• Carbon Metrics 23:17
• Where to Learn More 25:38
• Outro 27:32
• Bloopers 29:45