Over the summer last year, we began some work with the European Standards body CEN-CENELEC, and another aligned non-profit interested in a fossil-free future called LINGO, to begin the process of developing an international standard for fossil-free products. Why do this? Well, products in this context also mean digital products – something relevant to our work, where we felt we could meaningfully contribute. In this post, Chris, our director of Policy and Technology, gives an update on how it’s been developing, and where it’s going next.
The quick version
Creating standards doesn’t happen overnight, and there are necessary steps you need to take to get one published and adopted. We now have the first step done, getting a CEN Workshop Agreement published on Fossil Free Products – Guidelines and Requirements for Fossil Fuel Free Supply Chains.
It goes into detail about what might count as fossil-free digital products too, and what we have is usable today.
This now paves the way to develop a full standard that for referenced in laws, commercial agreements, and carries real legal weight. There’s likely already enough there to inform future versions of our own verification process, and green web directory.
There is still time to be involved in developing the existing document into a fully fledged standard – we share some links for next steps below.
The longer version
Last year, we were approached by LINGO (the short version for the Leave it in the Ground Initiative), a fellow non-profit campaigning for a transition away from fossil fuels. As part of their advocacy work, they had the idea to create a standard for fossil-free products. And because we know digital is physical too, they asked us about contributing to the work on digital products.
This was totally up our street, so we were happy to contribute. There are multiple paths to getting a standard in place, and one thing that was interesting about LINGO’s approach was that they were taking the CEN-CENELEC route.
I’ve never heard of CEN-CENELEC – should I know about this already?
Probably not. For the terminally curious, the CEN standards for European Committee for Standardization and CENELEC stands for the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization, but for the most part, you can think of them as one entity shepherding ideas through the standards process.
Going the CEN-CENELEC route can sometimes be faster than going via other organisations like ISO, the International Standards Organisation. This is not just because an ISO has a broader international scope, but also because the governance model for CEN-CENELEC is linked to countries in the European Union. CEN-CENELEC was explicitly set up to make it possible to create standards that lawmakers in Europe can refer to.
This is important because in some other standards organisations, international corporations can effectively have the same voting power as sovereign nations with democratically elected governments, and can outnumber them – meaning standards can be very industry-friendly, but less so for everyone else.
Also, harmonised standards drawn up by CEN-CENELEC have to be made freely available for download to view and download, which is not always the case with every standard.
This is a pretty important point, because if you are going to write laws that reference standards, then people governed by those laws really ought to have access to them, to see what they say!
Anyway, we digress – back to defining “fossil-free” in the digital world.
Why publishing a CWA on “fossil-free” is important
As mentioned before, publishing a CEN Workshop Agreement (a CWA) is important because it’s the first major step in developing a standard which can be more easily written into laws or contracts, to compel meaningful action by entities that otherwise would not do so.
The next major step from here would be to take this CWA on Fossil Free Products – Guidelines and Requirements for Fossil Fuel Free Supply Chains, and begin the process to turn it into a full-on standard, referred to as European Norm (or EN), which carries more legal weight.
Ok. That’s nice, but what can I do with this CWA today?
Here’s the thing – CWAs were initially created to help fill standardisation gaps, particularly in fast moving technical fields. Having a CWA in the public domain setting out what counts as a fossil-free product means that you could write laws with them tomorrow if you wanted to, and use them in contracts (although they’d carry more weight as fully fledged standards). In our case, we could refer to this CWA for future updates of our own verification process, to refer to definitions with meaningful buy-in already.
This matters, because the process of setting up a CWA has already meant establishing a degree of consensus across multiple sectors. It didn’t just have non-profits like the us (the Green Web Foundation) and LINGO involved. It also had massive chemical corporations like BASF, and green energy certificate organisations like I-Track turning up to make their case too, to argue what fossil-free should mean. Everyone had a chance to raise objections, and work had to be done to reach a degree of consensus before people would have their name on it.
OK, what’s actually in this fossil-free CEN Workshop Agreement then?
We’ve linked to the published version a few times in this post, and we recommend reading through it in more detail. The CWA covers digital products and physical products, the kind you can drop on your foot. For brevity, we’ll focus on the key parts of digital products section. We’ll also provide some analysis about what it might mean from the perspective of someone using Green Web Foundation services or data today.
A clearer definition of fossil-free for energy
In 5.1 Energy sources in the CWA document, there is a much clearer definition of fossil-free, about what is in, and what is out. Crucially, offsets are no longer accepted as a substitute for using actual renewable energy, and there’s some guidance about what absolutely cannot be counted as fossil-free with a shall not. Where there was a degree of back and forth in the workshop process, and where thigns were not ruled out entirely, they were grudgingly accepted with a should not.
For example – Oil, fossil gas, coal and are all definite shall nots (duh).
However, with some forms of non-fossil energy it’s more complicated.
Take nuclear, certain forms of biomass, and hydroelectric power that doesn’t follow the guidelines from the World Commission on Dams – these are all forms of energy that can displace fossil fuel use, but still have their issues.
In this case they ended up as a should not, to recognise these issues, but stop short of an outright ban. In many cases the practicality of ruling something out in terms of having a tracking system played as much a part as how anyone felt personally about one form of energy generation over another.
This is broadly inline with our recent post No Fossil Fuels in Our Tech Stacks, and previously, we’ve had a definition of green energy that was to some extent determined by a) what you could reasonably expect hosting providers to be able to meet and b) what various conflicting national standards could agree on.
There’s a lot here we could use if we wanted an updated workable definition of fossil-free.
Reflecting the physical realities of the grid
These guidelines also follow the physical reality of how electricity grids work better, with a preference for fossil-free energy that is timely, additional and deliverable, rather than being based on annual energy certificate claims (see section 5.1.7 in the document)
This is important, because it’s a much more rigourous definition. It’s also one that large companies and small companies have already committed to.
Google and Microsoft both have made big splashy commitments to reach this by 2030, that they have said they intend to keep (right guys? RIGHT?), and it’s not just massive companies with infinite money shooting for this. In California, smaller not-for-profit energy organisations, like Peninsula Clean Energy, have been transparently sharing their own progress for a few years, and in the UK, if you’re buying power from Good Energy, 90% of the power bought way already matches this new definition.
What about other places though?
While this tighter timely, additional and deliverable is new, there are promising signs for adoption.
Recently a technical pilot was run in Ireland, to see if moving to a traceable system to track the provenance of electricity this way this would work. Ireland is significant because it’s where around 20% of the power used by the country is used by datacentres, and claims to use green energy there are controversial, because the amount of green energy claimed can far exceed what is actually generated in Ireland, or could even be delivered over any cables connecting Ireland to other national grids. This calls into question claims by large tech companies about their use of green energy, and highlights the need for a better system.
The outcome of th study, paraphrased, was “yes this is totally doable – there is a clear path to transparent, dynamic, and credible electricity emissions reporting – we just need the policy decision to be made” (see the full study for more).
We’ve written about why we think this timely, additional and deliverable definition is important, and as it becomes more widely available, we would like to support it in our platform too – having it referenced like this is helpful.
Improvement over time
One of the other relevant parts was the concept of partially fossil-free in a supply chain (see section 7.3 How fossil free is a partially fossil free product?), and annual reporting of progress towards a goal.
This is different to our binary green / not green, approach, and expressed as a percentage, with annual updates on the way to an entirely fossil-free state in the future.
This is obviously more complicated to visually represent than a simple binary like we have in our green web check, but arguably more honest. Going fossil-free for most organisations is likely a multi-year process, and it may be better to acknowledge this on the way to 2030.
An awareness of digital supply chains
There’s also some interesting detail in Section 6 Digital Products, which acknowledges that web sites and web applications are increasingly composed of multiple services these days, rather than being a single server.
The CWA document explicitly refers to a supply chain of digital services from multiple companies, and this is something we are exploring with our carbon.txt project.
For an example, try taking a peek at our own carbon.txt file on our site, where we list the providers in our supply chain, and the services we use from them.
If you’re interested in getting a carbon.txt file yourself for your site, we’ll be iterating on this in the coming month with some new features, but in the meantime take a look at our dedicated site for the project.
What now?
In this post, we shared an update on some of the standards work we do, and tried to provide some context for sustainability-minded techies. There is now a document in the public domain that gives a useful reference for discussions about what “fossil-free” means.
It’s not a full standard yet, but hopefully this post has shown a few examples of where having a clearer definition of “fossil-free” can be useful, and given some good for thought for what updating a platform like ours might look like, informed by these guidelines.
We’re going to stay involved in the development of a standard around “fossil-free”, and if you want to stay in the loop we’ll keep posting updates here and in our newsletter. We’d expect a new set of workshops will take place in the next year to refine this work, and we’ll post as soon as we know.
In the meantime, we owe a massive thank you to LINGO who lead on this work, and helped build momentum around “fossil-free” as a concept online. Onwards!
