What are Scope 1 emissions?
Scope 1 emissions are direct greenhouse gas emissions from sources an organisation owns or controls, as defined by the GHG Protocol.
Why it matters
The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard sorts a company's emissions into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources it owns or controls, such as fuel burnt in its own boilers, furnaces and vehicles. Scope 2 covers purchased energy, and Scope 3 covers the rest of the value chain.
For cloud and AI, Scope 1 matters mostly because of where the line falls. A company running servers in its own building may have direct emissions from on-site generation there. Once the same work moves to public cloud, the data centres and their generators belong to the provider. Those emissions become the provider's Scope 1, and the customer counts its cloud use under Scope 3.
An example
A business moves an on-premises server room to a public cloud region. Fuel burnt in the room's backup generator used to sit in the business's own Scope 1. After the move, any generation at the provider's site is the provider's Scope 1, and the business reports its share of cloud emissions within Scope 3.
Where Greenpixie fits
Greenpixie does not report a separate Scope 1 line for cloud. Any Scope 1 emissions from on-site energy generation at cloud data centres are accounted for within its location-based usage emissions figure.
Greenpixie covers public cloud on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. A company that still runs its own server rooms or on-site generators reports those emissions in its own Scope 1, from its own fuel and meter data.