Carbon Footprint release notes

This page documents production updates to Carbon Footprint. You can periodically check this page for announcements about new or updated features, bug fixes, known issues, and deprecated functionality.

You can see the latest product updates for all of Google Cloud on the Google Cloud page, browse and filter all release notes in the Google Cloud console, or programmatically access release notes in BigQuery.

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September 23, 2024

Scope 2 market-based emissions data is now Generally Available. This metric represents purchased electricity, incorporating Google's annual renewable energy purchases. Scope 2 emissions on this page are estimated using annual emissions factors from government sources (IEA, EPA & AIB). You can learn more here about the methodology and the difference between location-based and market-based emission metrics.

Scope 2 market-based emissions data is available only from January 2023 onwards and can be accessed in:

August 14, 2024

Beginning with the release of January 2024 data, Google Cloud Carbon Footprint has adopted a semi-annual methodology improvement schedule, with updates planned for January and July data releases each year.

For the July 2024 data release (in mid-August 2024), we have upgraded the carbon model to version 11 and implemented the following updates:

Updating Scope 1 & 3 emissions from Google's corporate footprint:

  • Updated Scope 1 & 3 allocation factors using latest Google company-wide data from 2024 Google Environmental Report. See the non-electricity emission sources section of methodology documentation on how we apply these Scope 1 & 3 emissions across Google products and services.

  • Notably, expanded the Scope 1 & 3 inventory boundary to include the following for a more comprehensive emissions inventory:

    • HVAC fugitive emissions
    • Additional emissions categories of transmission & distribution (T&D) loss
    • Extraction and transportation of fuels used to generate grid electricity

Updating renewable electricity percentage for Scope 2 market-based emissions from Google's corporate footprint:

  • Updated annual renewable electricity percentage from Google's clean energy procurement, in accordance with 2024 Google Environmental Report, as an input for Scope 2 market-based emissions. Note that Scope 2 location-based emissions are estimated using hourly greenhouse gas emissions factors. Read more about the difference in methodology between Scope 2 location-based and market-based emissions in the methodology document.

Improving allocation of shared internal AI/ML resources:

  • Improved the treatment of central machine learning compute resources and workloads across Google products and services, including corrected central resource impact to the following Google Cloud services:
    • Cloud Natural Language
    • Translate
    • Cloud Vision API
    • Cloud Speech API
    • Cloud Dialogflow API
    • Vertex AI
    • Cloud AutoML
    • Cloud Machine Learning Engine
    • Video Stitcher API
    • Cloud Video Intelligence API
    • Notebooks
    • Cloud Text-to-Speech API

Improving data accuracy:

  • Improved data center PUE mapping and energy allocation to internal services.

April 01, 2024

Scope 2 market-based emissions data is now launched in Preview. This metric represents purchased electricity, incorporating Google's annual renewable energy purchases. Scope 2 emissions on this page are estimated using annual emissions factors from government sources (IEA, EPA & AIB). You can learn more here about the methodology and the difference between location-based and market-based emission metrics.

Scope 2 market-based emissions data is available only from January 2023 onwards and can be accessed in:

Please note that data already exported to BigQuery for previous months will still have Scope 2 market-based emissions data as NULL in your exported tables. To see the newly-released market-based data, schedule a manual data backfill for the desired time period. Note that there is a half-month lag of our data release. For example, to backfill January and February 2023 data, run the backfill for February 15, 2023 and March 15, 2023, which will update the data for January and February 2023 in your BigQuery table.

March 15, 2024

Emissions reported for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) declined starting in February 2024. This change is a result of an update to Google's internal cost allocation, which determines how shared infrastructure costs are attributed to individual services. According to our methodology (Technical details - Electricity use), these internal costs are used to apportion electricity consumption and carbon emissions to services, so changes in cost apportionment result in corresponding changes to carbon apportionment and reporting for that service.

February 14, 2024

Beginning with the release of January 2024 data, Google Cloud Carbon Footprint will adopt a biannual methodology refresh schedule, with updates planned for January and July data releases each year.

For the January 2024 data release (in mid-February 2024), we have made the updates below and updated carbon model to version 10:

Data accuracy:

  • Improve internal machine-level power readings for storage machines. Update allocation of energy from some machines, improving Bigtable data accuracy.
  • Further improve mapping between Google Cloud services and internal resource use, particularly for a few Networking SKUs.
  • Improve Google Cloud region defaults and coverage. location.location/location.region with former NULL values are defined as global, and we improved data for the europe multiregion.

Corporate data input refresh:

Service coverage:

  • Reintroduce App Engine and GKE Enterprise/GDC services (formerly Anthos/GDC-V), as internal data mappings have been improved.
  • Remove Looker, Apigee, Chronicle, and AppSheet from covered services of Carbon Footprint, due to potential mis-attribution of carbon to these services. We are actively investigating and working on the improvements. Once internal data mapping improves for a service, we plan to add it back.

December 13, 2023

Fixed bugs for Scope 1 and Scope 3 (non-electricity sources) emissions apportionment for September 2023 and October 2023 and Scope 2 location-based emissions for October 2023. Specifically:

  • In September and October 2023, incorrect apportionment factors were used to estimate emissions from non-electricity sources. Some customers might have seen an increase in Scope 1 emissions and a decrease in Scope 3 emissions in their reports. To address the issue, we have corrected the apportionment factors from September 2023 onwards.

  • Customers may have seen an increase across all services in Scope 2 location-based emissions in October 2023. This was due to an error in an upstream hourly carbon intensity data source. The error has now been corrected for Scope 2 location-based emissions for October 2023.

Please note that data already exported to BigQuery for previous months is not automatically corrected in your exported tables. To see the corrected data, schedule a manual data backfill for the desired time period. Note that there is half a month lag of our data release. For example, to backfill September and October 2023 data, run the backfill for October 15, 2023 and November 15, 2023, which will update the data for September and October 2023 in your BigQuery table.

Improved data consistency on BigQuery exports, particularly on the project_id field. In our BigQuery data exports, there were instances where the project_id field contained a NULL value, and in some of these cases, carbon for a particular project was split between two rows where the project ID was listed as NULL and non-NULL. (Note that the project_number field is always populated, and the total carbon when summed across all rows is correct for a given project number.) We have updated our reports for all prior months in order to populate the project_id field consistently, with a non-NULL value wherever possible. We have ensured each project's carbon is reported as a single row within a given month, service, and location.

To update previous months of data, schedule a manual data backfill for the desired time period.

August 14, 2023

Updated carbon model to version 9.

Customer carbon data for Cloud Functions will see a decrease starting from 2023-07-01 data onward. This decrease is a result of improvements in the apportionment of energy and carbon between Cloud Functions and App Engine. The impact is only seen in Cloud Functions, because App Engine is not yet supported in our covered services. This improvement is part of our efforts to support App Engine in the near future.

January 01, 2023

Improvements to customer carbon data starting 2023-01-01 onward. The following services are seeing the largest data changes: Compute Engine, BigQuery, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Networking, Cloud Filestore, Cloud SQL, Cloud Dataflow, Vertex AI, and Alloy DB. These changes are the results of ongoing improvement to the apportionment of machine idle power and shared infrastructure's energy consumption.

Updated carbon model to version 8.

December 23, 2022

Fixed an issue that omitted Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions for a given region in a given month that has zero Scope 2 emissions due to 100% carbon free energy.

Specifically, in July 2022, northamerica-northeast1 had 100% of its electricity generated from hydro power for the month, resulting in no Scope 2 emissions for the month despite positive energy consumption to run the data center. However, there were Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions apportioned to the usage of this data center, but our data erroneously omitted them.

As a fix, we have added the Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions back for any usage in northamerica-northeast1 in July 2022, and will not omit such emissions going forward that have positive apportioned Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions but zero Scope 2 emissions.

Electricity Maps (EM), our carbon emissions factors data source, is making improvements to their methodology that will affect carbon emissions data released beginning on December 15th. For a detailed description of the improvement, please see Electricity Maps blog post here.

In sum, EM will now be incorporating the efficiency and technology of power plants into consideration when calculating emission factors, increasing the precision of how emission factors are measured. It represents a data quality improvement, which will impact data for cost centers located in the United States and European Union.

Updated carbon model to version 7 to reflect the above-mentioned changes.

October 13, 2022

We fixed a bug that caused some customers to see duplicate rows in their BigQuery data exports. If you ran a manual data backfill between 2022-09-28 and 2022-10-13 (for any target date) and notice duplicate rows, you can correct the problem by re-running the backfill following the instructions here.

October 11, 2022

Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is now Generally Available.

October 05, 2022

We improved the data quality and updated coverage for the following services:

  • Improved mapping between Google Cloud services and internal resource use, particularly for a few Networking SKUs.
  • Removed App Engine (including Firestore and Datastore), Support, and Anthos from covered services of Carbon Footprint, due to potential mis-attribution of carbon to these services. We are actively investigating and working on the improvements. Once internal data consistency improves for a service, we plan to add it back.

Updated carbon model to version 6

August 23, 2022

The carbon_footprint_kgCO2e.scope2.market_based and carbon_offsets_kgCO2e fields of the exported carbon data are set to NULL instead of 0, to better reflect that the fields are not yet populated.

July 07, 2022

Carbon Footprint now reports carbon emissions broken down by scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 categories, following the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol carbon reporting standards.

We've renamed the Carbon Footprint export table from carbon_footprint_export to carbon_footprint within the target BigQuery dataset indicated by your data transfer configuration. The renamed table contains an updated schema. Furthermore, the renamed table is now partitioned by month. Each month's data is exported on the 15th day of the following month. Data for previous months is not automatically exported, but you can schedule manual data backfills to export data for previous months. Carbon Footprint will no longer update existing carbon_footprint_export tables.

We've made the following updates to data sources and methodology for Scope 2 location-based emissions:

  • Improved power data measurements.
  • Changed from LCA grid carbon intensity values to scope-2-compliant direct grid emissions.
  • Corrected data that led to changes in internal cost-based reallocation of shared infrastructure energy consumption.
  • Removed VPC Network Logs SKU that caused inaccurate results.

Updated carbon model to version 5

April 26, 2022

Viewing and exporting carbon footprint data now requires the billing.accounts.getCarbonInformation IAM permission. This permission is part of the Carbon Footprint Viewer (roles/billing.carbonViewer) and Billing Account Viewer (roles/billing.viewer) IAM roles.

March 31, 2022

Improved carbon accounting for Retail API

Improved carbon accounting for many AI services (these services aren't covered in 2021)

Improved mapping between Google Cloud services and internal resource use. This changes the carbon footprint of some Google Cloud services and adds other Google Cloud Services, like Networking, to the list of covered services.

Updated carbon model to version 4

January 20, 2022

A Carbon Footprint Looker block is available to create custom dashboards using Looker.

January 11, 2022

Unattended project recommender now reports the reduction in gross carbon footprint associated with your workloads. If there is a recommendation, it is now displayed directly in the Carbon Footprint dashboard.

October 12, 2021

Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is in Public Preview

August 25, 2021

Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is in Private Preview