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.   Got feedback? Send it to us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metatechpod), Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don't forget to follow our host @passy (https://twitter.com/passy). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/. 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