The problem

Software is bought on features, price and support. The electricity it draws arrives later as hosting bills and hardware refreshes, and nobody attributes it to the product.

The fix you can use today

• Ask suppliers how their software's energy is measured, and on what workload.
• Prefer a rating on a defined, repeatable method that a third party can check.
• Add an energy criterion to tenders, alongside security.

The W3C suggests checking suppliers against green criteria before you buy. GreenCode rates software before and after it works on it.

Tools that help

• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) (Green Software Foundation): the Green Software Foundation's method, SCI = ((E x I) + M) per R, adopted as ISO/IEC 21031:2024
• Blue Angel for software (DE-UZ 215): Germany's ecolabel criteria for resource and energy-efficient software products

How GreenCode helps

GreenCode helps tackle this by rating a system before and after optimisation, against the Software Carbon Efficiency Rating or an ISO/IEC 21031-aligned equivalent. The grade travels with the evidence behind it. More on this.

Tags

#procurement#certification#standards

Sources

• Certified software energy efficiency
• Green software certification
• W3C, Web Sustainability Guidelines: sustainability criteria when selecting suppliers

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