What is this page about?
Give a better sense on how much computation is going on in Mozilla automation.
What is that car's GIF?
The car is a Trabant. This car is often seen as symbolic of the former East Germany and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in general.
The trabant part of this tool is just a joke.
You may only consider looking at durations, which are meant to be trustable data.
Translating a worker duration into CO2 emission is almost impossible to get right.
And that's what we do here. Translate worker duration into a potential energy consumption,
which we translate into a potential CO2 emission, before finally translating that CO2 emission
into the equivalent emission of a trabant over a given distance in kilometers.
Power consumption of an AWS worker per hour
Here is a really weak computation of Amazon AWS CO2 emissions for a t4.large worker:
The power usage of the machines these workers are running on could be 0.6 kW.
Such worker uses 25% of these machines.
Then let's say that Amazon
Power Usage Effectiveness is 1.1.
It means that one hour of a worker consumes
0.165 kWh (0.6 * 0.25 * 1.1).
CO2 emission of electricity per kWh
Based on US Environmental Protection Agency, [
source]
the average CO2 emission per MWh is 998.4 lb/MWh. So 998.4 * 453.59237(g/lb) = 452866 g/MWh, and, 452866 / 1000 =
452 g of CO2/kWh.
Unfortunately, the data is already old. It comes from a 2018 report, which seems to be about 2017 data.
CO2 emission of a Trabant per km
A Trabant emits
170 g of CO2 / km [
source].
(Another [
source] reports 140g, but let's say it emits a lot.)
Final computation
Trabant's kilometers = "Hours of computation" * "Power consumption of a worker per hour" * "CO2 emission of electribity per kWh" / "CO2 emission of a trabant per km"
Trabant's kilometers = "Hours of computation" * 0.165 * 452 / 170
Trabant's kilometers = "Hours of computation" * 0.4387058823529412