Cloud
2. Scope and Applicability
What is in scope, out of scope, and the evaluation boundary.
2.1 In Scope
The methodology applies to the following:
- Public cloud workloads. Energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and embodied emissions arising from the use of compute, memory, storage, and networking services on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Emissions categories. Scope 2 emissions from cloud data centre operations, calculated via the location-based method in accordance with the GHG Protocol. Any Scope 1 emissions from on-site energy generation are accounted for within this figure rather than reported separately. Scope 3 emissions cover the embodied manufacturing and transport of server hardware, with estimated allowances for end-of-life processing and data centre shell construction, together with the fuel- and energy-related activities associated with generating the electricity consumed. Embodied emissions are calculated using Life Cycle Assessment principles.
- Water consumption. IT cooling water consumption, being the water consumed in cooling the data centre, and electricity generation water consumption, being the water consumed in generating the electricity the data centre consumes.
- Reporting granularity. Emissions and energy values are calculated at the level of individual units of cloud usage.
- Temporal resolution. Calculations incorporate hourly, daily, monthly, and annual variation in grid carbon intensity where available.
2.2 Out of Scope
The following are not covered by this methodology:
- On-premises IT infrastructure.
- Private cloud environments not hosted by the three supported cloud providers.
- Other Scope 3 categories not covered above, such as employee commuting or business travel.
- End-user device energy consumption.
- Network transmission energy beyond the data centre boundary, except as estimated for intra-region and inter-region data transfer.
2.3 Evaluation Boundary
The evaluation boundary encompasses server-level IT electricity usage across four component categories, being computation, memory, storage, and networking, together with facility-level overhead as captured by Power Usage Effectiveness factors, regional electricity grid carbon intensity, embodied emissions of server hardware components, and water consumption at both data centre and electricity generation levels.