Platform.sh, a platform for building, running and scaling web applications, is offering customers a discount based on how "green" the data center they use is.
Customers will have access to a three percent 'greener region discount' when using a data center that consumes electricity that is less than 100gCO₂e/kWh.
The discount offering is available to Upsun customers, a platform-as-a-service offering from Platform.sh. Customers have a choice of six data center regions across five countries to select from that qualify for the discount, covering France, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the US. Those data center regions are provided by four cloud providers: Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and OVH Cloud.
“With Upsun, we are offering our most efficient cloud orchestration, providing better alignment between cost optimization and carbon footprint," said Fred Plais, co-founder and CEO, Platform.sh. "With the greener region discount, we aim to contribute to making a real impact by bearing the cost of this incentive, thereby empowering our users to reduce their carbon footprint in the cloud while staying cost-efficient."
Platform.sh is regularly updating the carbon intensities for its regions using data from Electricity Maps which is averaged out, to help customers make greener choices.
Leah Goldfarb, environmental impact officer at Platform.sh, said: “Using a location-based approach, we display the underlying carbon intensity (in gCO₂e/kWh) of the electrical grid supplying the individual data center. For our typical client, this is more accurately aggregated over a full 12-month period."
Upsun is currently available in open beta. The discount is available for all open beta users immediately, and will also be available to those new customers at the point of official launch in April 2024.
The major cloud providers are some of the biggest purchasers of power purchase agreements, or PPAs, in an attempt to offset some of the emissions generated by their data centers. AWS claimed to be the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in 2023, and that it will reach net zero by 2040. Many of the energy grids facilities draw power from, however, still rely on varying amounts of fossil fuels.
However, this would not necessarily make its cloud regions applicable to the Greener Region Discount. A study released last year by researchers at Princeton University's ZERO Lab found that large energy purchases can have unintended results. They can simply displace emissions, or fail to stimulate net new energy production, thus not actually "greening" the grid.
Unless the local grid for a data center meets Platform.sh's requirements, customers will not receive any kind of discount for selecting that data center region.
AWS, unlike Microsoft and Google, does not enable its customers to choose their data center based on emissions, nor does it share the PUE rating of its facilities.
