Green tech group the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance is holding a series of European workshops on sustainable hardware and software.

At events in Amsterdam on 16 September, Berlin on 23 September, and London on 28 September, the SDIA will be sharing ideas on measuring and controlling the energy consumption and environmental impact of digital products and software.

The Berlin event, organized with the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA), will be held at the start-up hub Spielfeld. The event will major on improving the climate impact of software, and aims to work collaboratively, in a Hackathon commissioned by UBA and UMA's SoftAWERE program.

Explaining the event's concentration on software, SDIA makes the point that small improvements in widely-deployed software could lead to large energy savings, taking the example of the open-source CMS Drupal: "According to Statista, there are 937,000 websites powered by Drupal worldwide. In 2008, the average power consumption of a server was 250 watts. Assuming that each Drupal website uses on average one tenth of such a server, the total energy consumption is 205.2 million kWh per year. An energetic improvement of the core software by percent of all Drupal installations corresponds to a reduction in energy consumption of approx. 2 million kWh per year. This corresponds to the annual electricity consumption of 1,380 one-person households in Germany."

The workshop will use tools from the SoftAWERE project which can measure the energy consumption of software applications during development and give feedback that will help reduce energy consumption and environmental impact. As well as applying them to real projects, participants will take the tools and use them in ongoing work, SDIA hopes.

"We are pleased to invite the open source, start-up, and developer community to this event and to jointly measure and reduce the energy consumption and environmental impact of software. Personally, I am pleased that we can make a concrete contribution to climate protection and the energy crisis with this event,” comments Max Schulze, founder and board member of SDIA.

The SoftAWERE project began in 2021 with the slogan "Measuring the immeasurable."

Mathias Bornschein, a project member from UBA, said: "We started the SoftAWERE project in 2021 and are now excited to share, test and critically examine the first concrete results with users virtually and on site. We look forward to the exchange with the community and to another important step on the way to making software and thus ICT more ecologically sustainable."

The Berlin event will take place in English, begins at 1pm, and is free (Register here).