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005 - Data-Driven Sustainability: Unlocking the Power of Carbon Analytics
226 Plays1 year ago
๐ฑ Our planet is getting warmer, and the undeniable impact of climate change is a stark reminder that we all need to take action. But as individuals, it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such a monumental challenge. That's where modern data teams come in, with the potential to drive positive change and make businesses greener and more efficient.
๐ In our latest episode of the The Stacked Data Podcast, we dive headfirst into the world of Carbon Analytics, a space filled with untapped potential. Join me as I sit down with the passionate advocate for sustainability, Nina Anderson from Infinite Lambda. Nina is on a mission to empower data professionals and shed light on the transformative power of Carbon Analytics.
Why Carbon Analytics? The Essential Business Imperative
You might be wondering, "Why does Carbon Analytics matter for my business?" Nina breaks it down for us in this insightful episode, outlining key reasons why it's no longer a luxury but an essential:
0๏ธโฃ NET ZERO Targets: As the world races towards carbon neutrality, understanding your environmental impact is crucial to achieving NET ZERO targets.
๐ Regulation Change: Regulations around carbon emissions are evolving rapidly. Being prepared is not just advisable; it's necessary.
๐ธ Cost Reduction: Carbon Analytics can uncover hidden efficiencies and cost-saving opportunities in your operations.
๐ฐ Competitive Advantage: Sustainability is a competitive differentiator. Embrace Carbon Analytics to stay ahead of the curve.
๐ Customer Satisfaction: Modern consumers favor businesses that prioritize sustainability. Happy customers mean better business.
We also explore practical examples of how you can leverage your own modern data stack to start generating actionable insights.
Did you know that the National Grid provides detailed data on the carbon intensity of electricity across regions? When combined in your Data Warehouse with your electricity consumption, you can quickly assess your carbon impact. Surface this in your BI tool per sale and you might be able to start shifting a culture! โก
A Wealth of Insight for Sustainability Advocates
This episode is full of knowledge about an emerging and important space. If you're passionate about sustainability and committed to making a positive impact, this is an episode you can't afford to miss.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Stacked Podcast and Modern Data Teams
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Stacked podcast brought to you by Cognify, the recruitment partner for modern data teams hosted by me, Harry Golub. Stacked with incredible content from the most influential and successful data teams, interviewing industry experts who share their invaluable journeys, groundbreaking projects, and most importantly, their key learnings. So get ready to join us as we uncover the dynamic world of modern data.
Leveraging Data Stacks for Climate Change
00:00:34
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Stacked Data Podcast. Climate change is affecting all of us, but how can we leverage the modern data stack to have an impact on this area in our own businesses? Today, I'm joined by Nina Anderson, who takes us on a journey of how your data team can relatively quickly and easily leverage your stack to uncover carbon analytics.
00:00:59
Speaker
She talks about how to execute a project like this, why it's so important, and the impact it can have, as well as discussing the challenges that you might face and how to overcome them. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hi, Nina. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today? Hey, Harry. Thanks for having me. Delighted to be on the pod. I'm doing very well. Thank you.
Transition to Carbon Analytics Leadership
00:01:24
Speaker
Today we're going to dive into carbon analytics and how businesses can really leverage the data stack and the technology that they already have to contribute to the world of carbon analytics. So I suppose you're going to dive a bit deeper into the topic. But before we do that, maybe it could be just for the audience to get an overview of yourself and your career and where you are today.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I actually started my career as an economist maybe nine years ago now. So looking at things like energy markets, valuation of renewable energy assets, and through that working with data, but on a relatively small scale and with a more traditional approach, traditional tooling, of course, things like Excel, VBA, and so on. But I think that initial period looking at energy markets really got me interested.
00:02:11
Speaker
in the world of carbon emissions and how that plays out for different businesses. So that was kind of the first few years. I then had a period in the startup world. So in a FinTech, which is really where I got to know the modern data stack, as you and I would know it today. And that was
00:02:30
Speaker
an amazing journey, working with a team, building out a data platform from scratch, making mistakes, but learning a lot about how that cloud-based approach works and how to build the data platforms that we know today. Fast forward to now, I now lead a solution architecture function at a data and cloud engineering consultancy called Infinite Lambda.
00:02:53
Speaker
And as part of that, have been developing our expertise around carbon analytics specifically, so helping businesses become more data driven in their sustainability efforts, but doing that kind of from a data engineering perspective. So what are our best practices and how do we deliver those for our clients?
00:03:11
Speaker
Amazing, amazing, a great journey. And yeah, it seems like you've had lots of experience in the modern day space up until now.
Importance of Carbon Analytics for Businesses
00:03:18
Speaker
And I think it's a really interesting topic that we're going to go dive into. I know you've also recently launched your Meetup, which is specialized in focusing the carbon analytics space.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's early days with that one. We just had our first meetup actually, but I think the idea behind it was really appreciating that some businesses and organizations are already taking their first steps in carbon analytics and really trying to share that knowledge so that as this area develops in maturity, we kind of all go on that journey together.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's obviously a very poignant topic. Climate change is obviously always a huge topic. And I think for businesses with many targets, 2030 being around sort of carbon neutral for many businesses, I think it's going to be interesting to get your insight as to what businesses can do to really get there quickly and use data to enhance that. On that, Nina, what is carbon analytics and why is it so crucial for addressing climate change?
00:04:13
Speaker
So the way that I think about carbon analytics, it's about generating useful insight on how your business or your organization is impacting the environment. People might have heard about carbon accounting. That's something that's kind of been talked about a little bit more. And I would think of these in the same way that we think about the difference between
00:04:35
Speaker
accounting and analytics in a financial sense or in a regular business sense. So while carbon accounting is about attributing and allocating carbon and seeing what happened in the past, what was my total carbon budget for last year and doing kind of a report on that.
00:04:51
Speaker
Carbon analytics actually takes things one step further and I think makes it more actionable. So we move from looking at what happened in the past and just going, okay, we'll try and do better next year to actually going, okay, what were our emissions per dollar of revenue or sales? How has that changed over time? Because maybe our emissions were just increasing because our business grew. Is that good or is that bad? So carbon analytics helps us kind of answer those with detailed questions.
00:05:18
Speaker
And then the other thing, you referred to businesses having net zero targets, 2013, we've got regulation chain coming in and so on. So actually what businesses will want to do is find the cheapest ways of cutting carbon. And we don't always have the right intuition behind that, whereas in low hanging fruit, where can we make improvements quickly versus what might be a more expensive sustainability initiative to do. So carbon analytics tries to address these types of questions.
00:05:45
Speaker
Perfect. I mean, that makes sense. It's why we use data in every other area of business, right? Totally. To identify the most effective solution when data is pivotal to that. So Nina, it's fair to say that many companies don't have the best idea necessarily about their carbon footprints. What are the benefits of being able to quantify this and to have data in this
Quantifying Carbon Footprints and Future Demands
00:06:10
Speaker
area?
00:06:11
Speaker
It's a great question because I think some of the initial resistance to the idea might be, why would we spend money on doing this thing if we don't need to? I guess there are a few different answers to that question. One is you might not need to now, but regulation is changing. We're seeing in the UK, it's widening every year, the umbrella of companies that are required to do certain kinds of reporting. I predict it's going to just
00:06:36
Speaker
you know, eventually encompass probably pretty much every business apart from the smallest. So I think there's a benefit to being ahead of the curve with that one. But that's like more stick than carrot, I suppose you could say. There's also, you know, there are an increasing number of businesses that want to go for B Corporation certification around being an ethical business.
00:06:54
Speaker
lots of benefits to that, including being an ethical employer and employee retention and so on. But actually, I think the last one is a lot of companies find that customers will want this information. So you look at businesses like Skyscanner or in the UK, things like Oddbox, people want to know and people want to be able to compare products and understand if they can have an impact as a consumer. So I think there's a benefit to quantifying and then offering that data back to your customer.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's as a business, that's what people are always looking to understand. How can they value add more value to their customers? So that makes sense. And along with all the other reasons why you've said so the stack podcast is obviously all about the community and about how as data professionals.
Implementing Carbon Analytics Using Data Stacks
00:07:41
Speaker
we can learn and help push this industry forward. So how easy is it and how would you go about implementing carbon analytics in your own organization? How can you leverage the model data stack to execute this?
00:07:54
Speaker
I think it would actually surprise people how straightforward some of the basics are. I think it's like with any area of analytics, right? It's easy to start, even if some of the more advanced things will take time as an organization to reach. So yeah, if you already do some sort of reporting, have some data tooling in place, I wouldn't say it's a huge leap. What I would do, I'll talk about the tech in a second.
00:08:17
Speaker
but as a data team I'd kind of start with the conceptual side. So there's a key global standard which is published by an organization called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. It's a downloadable workbook on the website which illustrates how to build estimations across every category that you could think of.
00:08:34
Speaker
and contain some supplementary data. So I'm talking about things like emissions factors, what's the carbon intensity of a certain type of fuel or electricity, common things that your business is likely to use. So I would actually start by familiarizing with that. And I think that makes the whole process a little bit less intimidating because what you see is that actually
00:08:57
Speaker
fundamentally, each estimate is just something multiplied by something else. We're not talking about really advanced analytics here. So that would actually be my step zero before the step one, right? But I think what's powerful about having a modern data stack if you already have one in place as
00:09:14
Speaker
Firstly, ability to integrate external datasets. If you run something like Snowflake or a BigQuery, you can access supplementary datasets that you need directly inside the platform already. Common ELT tooling like DBT, you can very quickly build and iterate on your models.
00:09:34
Speaker
and reuse existing data that you might already have. So let's say you've got your HR data, you might have financial data, what you've spent on different services or products as a business, that's actually going to be the foundation of your initial carbon estimates. So once you've got your external data sets,
00:09:51
Speaker
And then you've got kind of some of those existing first-party datasets. It might be a case of just then building a very simple SQL-based model right in your data warehouse and then eventually starting to expose that to, let's say, your BI tool because that's when you start to make those things visible next to your financial metrics. That's when you start to be able to drive a cultural
00:10:12
Speaker
change. So I'm going to give one example if that's okay. I think it just kind of speaks to the resources that are already out there, especially if you're kind of on a modern data platform already. So in the UK, for example, the National Grid publishes very detailed open source data on the carbon intensity of electricity across all postcode regions, both backward looking and forward looking. And so pretty quickly,
00:10:40
Speaker
If you can extract data from an API and put it into your data warehouse and you know roughly how much electricity your business uses, you've already made a huge leap towards estimating your carbon impact and pretty much electricity is the one common theme I would guess. So for example, there's a large housing provider that we work with who's thinking of doing exactly this.
00:11:00
Speaker
to make recommendations to its residents on when to use appliances to minimize the carbon impacts based on, you know, how carbon intensive electricity in their particular postcode is going to be in the next 24 hours.
Overcoming Data Acquisition Challenges
00:11:14
Speaker
And that is not as hard to do as you would think.
00:11:17
Speaker
So if you have a modern data stack already implemented, it's relatively easy and quick to pull the relevant data into your warehouse, combine that with the external data sets around carbon to produce simple reports that can easily quantify something like your carbon footprint. But Nina, what is the value in quantifying these metrics for a business?
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. So my first answer, it's maybe cheating, but I think in practice it will resonate, I hope. So one thing we tend to find when we start with clients, when I started to dig into their businesses, carbon emissions, is they're so often tightly correlated with cost actually. So whether that's fuel usage, electricity usage,
00:12:03
Speaker
So with an NGO client, we were looking at emissions from their global fleet of vehicles. So that's obviously kind of fuel consumption patterns, which countries and even which vehicles are emitting the most. And when you do that, you naturally pinpoint issues that just might not have been uncovered otherwise. And the same with cloud computing, which I can get into a bit more later, but often when you do this exercise, you identify redundancies and I guess
00:12:29
Speaker
The other thing is it's kind of, if we're talking about embedded analytics, you can really make carbon analytics then part of your customer experience. Again, like I said, giving them a more informed choice. And to do that, you kind of have to create the foundations in your data platform before you go ahead and say, you know, we verified this information, we trust it, and now we're going to put it out there to customers. And so I think there are a range of ways that you can do that.
00:12:52
Speaker
Well, you mentioned that, I suppose, one of the points around having a foundation in order to build further and further analytics off of, when it comes to some of the biggest challenges in carbon analytics, what are they, you know, if someone's listening to this podcast and thinking this could be a valuable project for our data team to look into, what are the biggest challenges that they should expect? And I suppose then to elaborate on that, what and how can they overcome them? Yeah.
00:13:22
Speaker
It can be intimidating if it's not a domain that is core to your company organization. So I found there are a lot of sustainability consultancies. Their business models have traditionally been built on the fact that there's this expertise around how do you calculate this stuff. And that can sometimes, the reporting on that can be a bit of a black box.
00:13:43
Speaker
But over the past literally a year or two, there have been some quite pioneering companies and communities, I would say. So for example, Climatic is a company that's doing really interesting work in this space, which
00:13:57
Speaker
democratizes access to these frameworks. So it means with this new tooling, you can start to plug into the frameworks without needing to be an expert internally. So we are starting to see development in tech that's making these things easier. So I'd say check those out. The other challenge, which is
00:14:17
Speaker
I'd say it's a little bit harder, but it's really worthwhile doing. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult to get your hands on the data in the first place. And for that, I would say, like I'd recommend for any analytics project,
00:14:32
Speaker
Prioritize and go domain by domain. Identify what the low-hanging fruit is for your company, where you've got really high data quality. Focus on that, become confident in the whole exercise, and then start to identify which datasets do you want to collect next. I kind of move that way. So yeah, same as any transformation project, I'd say, prioritize, achieve one area, and then take the next step.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, then that seems to be the best strategy. Sandy, who's been previously on the podcast, spoke about rolling out their data mesh and they identified one area and one use case for that success and then build on that success once you've got a known formula.
00:15:12
Speaker
And I think you touched on it as well, but with the cloud computing, it's a huge part of also contributing to carbon and increasing a carbon footprint. I think identifying just your core areas is so important. I think it's only been recently that the data world is starting to adjust from this consuming all of this data, which most of it is not relevant and unneeded. It's about selecting the data, which we're really going to use and it's going to affect the business.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It feels like we're in the middle of a revolution where we're demanding more and more data and training these sophisticated models. I was looking into it because I was interested in, I think
00:15:54
Speaker
So there's this AI index report that Stanford puts out. And I think just trading TPT-3 took 502 tons of carbon dioxide just to do that. And that was at the end of 2022. And we know that so much more has happened since then, so basically- Well, it's been an explosion since then, hasn't there? Yeah, it's almost not the number that you want, but that's a huge underestimate of kind of
00:16:20
Speaker
emissions of data related stuff. So it's an ever increasing share of global emissions, right? And that's not going to reverse ever
Impact of Cloud Computing on Carbon Emissions
00:16:28
Speaker
anytime soon. So that can feel like a lot. And so, but as a data team, I think even with limited resources, there are some things that you can do in your patch without getting into really detailed analytical work necessarily.
00:16:42
Speaker
So one thing I always say is look at if you can change your cloud region, not necessarily store but for compute. So sometimes there are regulatory reasons you can't, but sometimes you might find you can depending on the data that you're dealing with. And you'd be surprised how much impact that can have. And the reason for that is, you know,
00:17:00
Speaker
Some countries are just much more carbon intensive in the electricity that they produce than others, right? So if you have a look at Sweden, their renewable percentage is super high. And so if you can have your data center there, that can make a huge difference. And you haven't had to do a huge analysis to figure that one out. And that's just quite simple. The other thing I'd say is take advantage of
00:17:23
Speaker
in bulk tooling that you already have through. So that's if you use GCP or if you use AWS, they now have some off the shelf tooling that can give you a quick overview of your carbon emissions from your data platform specifically. And it gives you a few basic recommendations. So that could be a good starting point for coming up with some ideas as a data team.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah, the last category of things tend to be maybe more common sense and also correlated with cost, which is something as a data team, as a tech team, you're quite conscious of anyway. So things like reducing data pipeline frequency to just-in-time delivery when your stakeholder says, you know, I need this.
00:18:03
Speaker
near real time? Well, do you? And can you make them more aware of what the impact of that is from both a cost and a carbon perspective? Can you move data to cold storage? So refactoring your analytical code, looking at your tech debt, that's something that you're going to want to do regularly anyway. But I think
00:18:22
Speaker
Thinking about the carbon impacts of that and potential improvement is just another reason to go back and refactor your code. And I guess, you know, stuff like building caching policies. Do we need the BI tool to rerun the same queries so many times a day? These things are all saving money, but they will also kind of reduce your environmental impact.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, it seems like there's a clear correlation between the cloud spend, tooling spend and the impact it's going to have on the environment as well. So it's a double-bladed sword.
Securing Business Buy-In for Carbon Initiatives
00:18:51
Speaker
So I think that's the point of the, one of the points of this podcast is to get people to start thinking about that area and that side of data. So for the listeners, Nina.
00:19:04
Speaker
If they're thinking about applying carbon analytics, they've heard some of the stuff that you've been talking about, what advice would you give around selling a project like this? Because obviously it's not just about them being excited about this, but it's typically, as we said, we need to get that business buy-in. And I think that's something that no matter what type of project in data you're running is always a challenge. So what is your advice for the community in regards to this?
00:19:30
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say that actually, you know, it's something that we struggle with sometimes as kind of tech leaders as how do we get by and on an engineering project in general. And I think the answer is similar in this case as well, which is figure out what the link is to the things that your stakeholders care about.
00:19:49
Speaker
So, you know, as a CEO, do they have regulation that they need to get ahead of? Do they even know that? Do they know that in five years time, the business will start having to report on something by law? They may not. B Corp, again, is something that people, some businesses are increasingly looking to do. Company culture, do you have kind of an internal sustainability group that would really like to have this thing? And then I think,
00:20:17
Speaker
If it depends on the business rate, if you're a product business, customers will start to see it as a differentiator more and more so. And I think part of the reason
00:20:27
Speaker
that they maybe don't yet in across the board is because it's simply that information isn't available. So I'd say I'd recommend highlighting this as a potential future differentiator. So can you be the leader in this space in your industry and kind of win customers that way? So definitely tying it to ROI in some way is going to be what gets you the green light.
00:20:49
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that goes with all data projects and everything that the people want to get off the ground, focus on the ROI and find out what makes people tick and is going to add value to the business. 100%.
Promoting Carbon Analytics in Data Communities
00:21:02
Speaker
Perfect. Well, is there anything else, Nina, that data folks can do to promote the adoption of carbon analytics in their communities or workplaces? And I suppose just what's your final bits of advice for the community on this space?
00:21:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is my personal view, but it feels like it's kind of a unique problem, unique crisis that we're facing as a global community. And in that sense, sharing knowledge is possibly more important than it is for kind of most other areas of analytics or tech.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yes, while it can be a differentiator, it's actually something that we all need to get on top of. This is why I started the Meetup because I think if you've solved this particular problem, maybe you've got a particular supplier or a particular tech product that you use and you've done that estimation internally, you've invested your own resources in it.
00:21:56
Speaker
why not, I'd really encourage sharing that with others through kind of, yeah, whether it's through a meetup or kind of through a Slack community. There are a lot of amazing communities in tech and that's the way that we're going to kind of be able to move forward quickly enough. So that would be my one message, I think. Don't be afraid to share knowledge with one another. That couldn't be a better message to share on the Stacked Data podcast. We set up this podcast to share knowledge and help push the community forward. So I couldn't agree more.
00:22:24
Speaker
So please everyone reach out to Nina if you have any questions on this topic. I'll put some links to communities and meetups where you can learn more about this area as well in the description. Awesome. Yeah, please do reach out.
00:22:37
Speaker
No worries. Nina, final part of the show is the quickfire round. So this is around where we asked all of our guests the same questions and it's really to help our listeners to get engaged on some key areas, I suppose, within the modern data world. So the first one is how do you assess a job opportunity in your career and how do you know what moves the right move?
00:23:02
Speaker
Oh, this is a good one. I'm going to go on some personal experience, I guess, based on the description and based on kind of the conversations you have with people. And by the way, I'd say have conversations with as many different people in the business as you can. Does it feel like it's going to put you onto a new learning curve?
00:23:21
Speaker
That would be my advice. And I guess the way that you can look out for that are a few different ways. It might be a new industry, but it might be, you know, is it new technologies? Basically, will it make you jump to a new curve instead of kind of staying on the same one?
00:23:36
Speaker
Have conversations with the business, really understand what the challenges are and see if that's going to help further develop your career in the long run and you're going to enjoy the people you're working with. I think that's great advice. Nina, second question, what's your best piece of advice for people in an interview?
00:23:55
Speaker
I would say really try and get your head around the vision of the company before you go into that interview, their vision over the next few years. So that might be annual report if they publish one, it might be kind of doing your own research, and then spend some time beforehand thinking about how your background, your unique skillset will move them closer to that and see if you can reflect that in the language of your answers.
00:24:21
Speaker
Perfect. You understand what they're trying to achieve and frame your answers to tailor your expertise to help them achieve that. Makes sense. Makes sense. Very good piece of advice. Final one, Nina. If you could recommend one resource to the audience to help them up skill, what would it be?
00:24:38
Speaker
I think it's all about community, especially if we're talking about data, tech. There's such a rich community, whether it's in the UK or US or globally, things like the analytics engineering community are amazing, the meetups that you have not just in London, but across the country. And I think it's putting yourself in the way of those conversations and subscribing to those newsletters and really talking to people who have had the experience that you want to have. And it's probably the best way to go.
00:25:06
Speaker
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm a big fan of meetups. Cognify is all about the community. So for anyone listening, if they're looking for advice of what meetups to attend, then do reach out. We'll be able to point you in the right direction because there's definitely a meetup for everybody, particularly in London. I know that there's a huge meetup community here and if there's not one near you, why don't you start one? Absolutely. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with yourself. Thank you for giving us a diving into carbon analytics.
00:25:36
Speaker
Pleasure. Thank you so much, Harry. No worries at all. And again, reach out to Nina if you have any questions or to myself. But for now, Nina, thank you again and speak soon. Cheers. Thank you.
00:25:51
Speaker
Well, that's it for this week. Thank you so, so much for tuning in. I really hope you've learned something. I know I have. The Stack Podcast aims to share real journeys and lessons that empower you and the entire community. Together, we aim to unlock new perspectives and overcome challenges in the ever evolving landscape of modern data.
00:26:12
Speaker
Today's episode was brought to you by Cognify, the recruitment partner for modern data teams. If you've enjoyed today's episode, hit that follow button to stay updated with our latest releases. More importantly, if you believe this episode could benefit someone you know, please share it with them. We're always on the lookout for new guests who have inspiring stories and valuable lessons to share with our community.
00:26:34
Speaker
If you or someone you know fits that pill, please don't hesitate to reach out. I've been Harry Gollop from Cognify, your host and guide on this data-driven journey. Until next time, over and out.