Here’s a fun tool. I haven’t tried it out yet (it’s in invitation-only beta mode), but looks like it’s worth some coverage. A Swedish researcher has developed a web app that measures the carbon emissions of your favorite websites. Here’s more from Business Green:
The application, called Greenalytics, uses regionally-specific data to calculate the energy used by client devices when surfing a specific site on the web. It also calculates the energy used by the servers and internet infrastructure, such as routers and switches, that deliver data to clients.
When measuring client usage, Greenalytics calculates the exact number of users, their locations, and the duration of each visit to arrive at specific figures. It then compares these figures against known carbon emissions data for each country that users are located in. A country that relies heavily on coal for its energy production, for example, would emit more carbon per hour of client-side usage than one that relied on renewable energy.
And here’s a little more from the Greenalytics website:
“By matching data from Google Analytics and environmental research it estimates the carbon footprint of websites, including server, infrastructure and final user.“
Simply put : the CO2 factor emissions database used by Greenalytics.org is a joke ! For example, they consider that the “Banque de France” (i.e : the national french bank) is a utility. Crazy !