In an effort to hold itself accountable to its sustainability goals, Google has developed a new publicly-available metric that provides an indication of exactly how clean the company’s cloud regions are around the world.
Called the carbon-free energy percentage (CFE%), the number reflects the average mix of carbon-free and fossil-fuel energy that is used to power Google’s data centers in each region.
The higher the percentage, the more carbon-free power was used in the mix; in other words, a high CFE% is indicative of a “greener” region. On the other hand, a lower-scoring region has more hours in the year that require fossil-fuel based energy.
