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 you can programmatically access release notes in BigQuery.
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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 LogsSKU 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