When we talk about sustainable technology innovation, it’s tempting to focus on the new: new infrastructure models, new energy sources, new ways of building. Those things certainly matter, and genuinely disruptive ideas are already delivering real value in the public sector and beyond.
But there’s another side to the conversation that doesn’t always get enough attention at events like the GDSA Summit. Before we innovate, we should eliminate. And in our experience working on big technology problems for clients across the globe, there can be a lot to eliminate.
Waste is the hidden carbon cost
Datacentres are often the main focus of sustainability conversations, and rightly so – but the carbon footprint of digital services isn’t only about where compute happens. It’s also about how much of that compute is happening unnecessarily.
How much waste happens because of zombie servers that someone forgot to decommission, or cloud estates that were sized for peak demand three years ago, and never revisited? It’s not uncommon to see test environments running overnight or at weekends, or bloated code that takes five minutes to complete a task that should be finished in 30 seconds.
Across the government’s digital service estate, apparently small instances like this represent a significant and largely avoidable source of carbon emissions.
When we talk about GreenOps, we’re talking about the discipline of eliminating waste from your digital estate. What makes this especially compelling to public sector organisations is that GreenOps can help you meet financial and sustainability targets at the same time.
Turning audits into action
At Defra, our team took on a significant rationalisation of application infrastructure. We helped Defra to coordinate the migration of critical services away from legacy platforms, while decommissioning lower environments that had quietly stopped providing value. The result was a significant reduction in monthly infrastructure costs with carbon reduction coming along for the ride.
At HMRC, the story is similar. We worked across the estate to identify AWS under-utilisation across the cloud estate. Right sizing the estate delivered an impressive >£1 million in annual savings, and every pound saved is due to energy that is no longer being consumed.
These examples aren’t one-off or exceptional cases. By regularly auditing on what we’re running, what we need, and what can be turned off, we’re able to generate high-return sustainability decisions that deliver immediate benefit.
Don’t overlook the code itself
It’s important to remember that infrastructure efficiency is important, but the code running on the infrastructure is just as critical.
We recently helped HMRC to refactor a suite of automated tests. This helped the organisation to reduce run times from five minutes to just 30 seconds.
It’s worth mentioning that these changes were not made for sustainability reasons, but were seen as engineering improvements. This sort of careful, quality-focused engineering is what good teams do as a matter of course – the carbon reduction is a signal that we’re doing the job well.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember as we head into a summit focused on sustainable technology is this: the most impactful sustainability interventions won’t necessarily look like sustainability work at all. It might just look like turning off a server that should have been decommissioned 18 months ago, or fixing a test suite.
Innovation and efficiency aren’t either/or
We’re looking forward to conversations at the GDSA Summit about what’s new in sustainability disruption. We’ll have more to share about some genuinely exciting models that we are piloting with Defra.
For the last three months, we’ve been working with Defra to build a pilot programme in collaboration with Heata, a UK company doing something quietly radical – using waste heat from compute workloads to heat domestic hot water tanks. Heata’s infrastructure offers a 37.5 percent reduction in operational intensity, just from eliminating wasted cooling energy. This approach also reduces net carbon footprint by 87.5 percent compared to a traditional data centre, based on the gas emissions avoided because Heata’s servers are heating water that would otherwise be heated by a boiler.
While conventional data centres vent heat into the atmosphere, Heata’s model displaces gas heating, distributing servers into people’s homes. In the process, the service is able to reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills for families.
But let’s not overlook the fact that sustainability isn’t always outward facing, or about new approaches and possibilities. We should also be looking inward at everything we’re already running. Maybe it’s time to ask a very simple question: does it need to be?
We’ll see you there.
Equal Experts is an active member of the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance and a signatory to the Green Software Foundation’s recommendations. We’re committed to Net Zero carbon emissions by 2030 — and to helping our public sector clients get there too.
