Giving preference or premium to nodes powered by renewable electricity?

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I would like to draw attention to the fact that according to some sources the carbon footprint of the current Internet is in the same ballpark or even higher than that of the airline industry. [1]

For this reason I would find it useful to put in place some mechanism for rewarding SAFE nodes powered by renewable electricity over those powered by CO2 emitting electricity.

IDEA A) Perhaps the network could reward node runners that use renewable electricity by sending more data to store on the green nodes than the “gray” nodes and thus reward green farmers more by building up the utilization rate faster.

IDEA B) Perhaps it could be feasible also to set a green premium where writing data to the network would cost a little more if the user has selected to store the shards only (or preferedly) on green nodes and to run the apps on green nodes. For those paying this green premium a certificate (probably just in the form of a “hosted green”-graphic) would be awarded to be used on the websites / apps to help in marketing to environmentally conscientious consumers.

Any other ideas would be much appreciated.

Whatever approach is possibly taken to make the SAFE Network greener and less carbon emitting the obvious problem is:

“How to determine reliably and unobtrusively if a node (not run in a data center where a 3rd party database knows that the hosting provider is committed to green electricity) actually uses electricity from renewable sources?”

If relying only on statement made by node owner, this would obviously open up the possibility to cheat in order to gain something.

Maybe it would be feasible for the electricity companies to build a system where the sources of electricity for some individual / organization could be queried or a digital certificate issued, but I do not know the SAFE Network so well enough to evaluate how something like this would effect the right to privacy of the farmers.

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/ allows one to check the green electricity status of web hosts and Currently also offers a browser add-on that draws little dotted green line under links to sites that are recorded in the database as using green electricity. Selecting which link to visit or not to visit based on if they are hosted green does not sound applicable, but at least consumers could send messages to websites that they like to make the switch to green.

Sources:

  1. How viral cat videos are warming the planet | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian
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Quite impossible, especially in a trustless network.

Please don’t trigger me…

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Zero chance that this should be baked into the base protocol IMO. As you say, very difficult to verify

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This will not be feasible since it can be faked since there is no way to verify the use of “green energy”. SAFE has no authority to appeal to since this would introduce a method to shut down SAFE and/or remove content (ie censor)

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Oxygen: it’s what plants crave!

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Oh I’ve been predicting 2020 since last year. Possibly 2021, only if public testing proves crazy.

That’s more realistic than being a fanboy and every year predicting release that same year, right?
That shows some semblance of learning, right?

…OH I thought you were replying to my reply about Dogecoin in the other thread.
Nevermind this post’s attitude then, lol. Yes, it is an Idiocracy reference.

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I think a big problem here is that “green energy” is not binary. So your electricity production itself makes no CO2? Great but did you damn up a river to harvest hydro and mess up the local environment with that? Maybe at this point we just give everyone a sticker for effort. Even then, its like how much effort = they tried? And as you have mention how do we verify this trying?

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The SAFENetwork would probably reduce the amount of energy the internet consumes on a like for like basis. At the moment we have massive data centres plus client devices - mostly alway on. With SAFENet the load is shared between the client devices to a greater degree and so its possible the energy overhead will reduce.

Well, looking at it another way, data centres are probably more energy efficient than the equivalent processing power aggregated from consumer PCs.

Oh well.

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