Nuclear power is included in carbon-free energy but it obviously has severe disadvantages when compared to renewable sources.

[birtheb]

Review Feedback

Carbon-free energy is defined as "energy generation that produces no direct carbon dioxide emissions during operation",
However, compared with renewable energy, nuclear power has severe differences in scope 2 and 3 emissions.

• For nuclear power, fuel rods are necessary for operation which are produced with high energy input. These fuel rods are "consumed" during operation.
• In contrast to green energy, nuclear power also requires water to cool down the fuel rods during operation. Since water consumption is also considered for data centers, it should be also for energy sources.
• Nuclear power has a long term impact on the environment due to nuclear waste and radiation which also causes carbon emissions for transport and storage. Other impacts include human health and the risk of nuclear accidents resulting in long-term contamination and waste of/useless land.
• Finally, nuclear power plants have very long lead times which also result in high emissions before the plant operates.

There may be additional substantial differences.

All in all, nuclear power may be a green energy in operation at first sight but its specific characteristics should be considered and it shouldn't be in the same category as renewable energy. There should be at least a distinction between these energy sources for more elaborated considerations.

[mrchrisadams]

hi @birtheb - regardless of how I personally feel about nuclear, I understand the definition of carbon-free here as being one that has already been defined below here:

https://www.epa.gov/greeningepa/carbon-pollution-free-electricity-epa

The IEA also refers to carbon-free energy, frequently:
https://www.iea.org/reports/carbon-free-electricity-in-g20-countries

As do groups who publish data like Ember - who referred to carbon free as clean, Without explicitly breaking out renewables versus nuclear.
https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/clean-electricity/

One reason it is not included at present

As far as I am aware, none of the companies listed in this dataset provide a breakdown of renewable versus carbon free breakdown in their sourcing of power. The closest we have in the dataset, where there is explicit reference to renewables are the energy efficiency directive columns.

Are there some specific datasets you're looking to refer to that we might use?

The closes thing I know of right now for example, might be some data we are planning to release at the Green Web Foundation (where I work) - we have recently incorporated some data from a collaboration with Electricity maps to publish carbon-free vs renewable share data for various parts of the world in our CO2.js, an open source software library.

You can see the PR below where we added it:
thegreenwebfoundation/co2.js#276

However, this just shows the info about the grid mix a provider is on, and is not something a cloud provider directly controls for those we have provider-carbon-intensity-market-annual and provider-carbon-intensity-average-consumption-hourly. We define those at the link below

https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud/blob/main/Cloud_Region_Metadata_specification.md#cloud-region-metadata-table