1. Introduction
Purpose, audience, and context of the methodology.
This document describes Greenpixie's methodology for scoring the grid carbon intensity, water stress, catalogue prices, and service availability of public cloud regions. It is intended for customers, partners, procurement teams, auditors, regulators, and technically literate readers who require a clear understanding of how Greenpixie produces the scores published on its region scorecard.
The region a workload runs in determines the grid that supplies its electricity and the water catchment its data centre draws on, so the same computation carries a different environmental impact depending on where it is placed. Region choice also determines what a provider charges for a service and whether it sells that service there at all. Organisations increasingly need these four factors together at the point a deployment is planned, while the region is still a decision.
This methodology produces four scores for each public cloud region, being a carbon grade assigned from the region's average grid carbon intensity, a water stress category taken from the World Resources Institute's Aqueduct 4.0 database, a pricing score positioning the region against the middle of its provider's own estate, and an availability score measuring how much of that provider's catalogue the region prices. This methodology supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The grid carbon intensity factors are produced by GPX Grid and derived as set out in the companion Greenpixie Methodology for Cloud Emission Measurement.
The sections that follow describe the scope, inputs, calculation process, quality controls, governance, and outputs of this methodology. The pricing and availability scores are derived from prices as published by the provider and contain no estimated component, and no customer usage or spend data is used in any of the four scores.