Carbon

Carbon is a plugin which helps you to monitor environmental footprint of your asset. The plugins is under active development.

Requirements (on-premise)

Features

• Collect carbon intensity of electricity from various sources

  • RTE (France)

  • Electricity Map (most countries and regions of the whole world)

• Supports constant carbon intensity for the following regions

  • Quebec

• Fallbacks to yearly world carbon intensity if no data is available for the region of an asset

• Estimate consumed energy and carbon emission of assets

• Show results as charts

Supported assets

The table below describes how assets are supported by the plugin.

Install the Plugin

From the marketplace

Manually

• Uncompress the archive.

• Move the carbon directory to the <GLPI_ROOT>/plugins directory

• Navigate to the Configuration > Plugins page,

• Install and activate the plugin.

Install plugin dependencies

The plugin requires Boavizta to calculate non-GWP impact of assets. It is recommended to set it up using Docker as described in the README file of the project https://github.com/Boavizta/boaviztapi.

The access URL of this service must be set in the configuration page of the plugin.

Reading datas

In each asset, an Environmental impact tab is now visible.

Asset usage

You can (for computers) select the appropriate profile as well as the planned lifespan (in months)

Historization status

The logging status tells you whether all requirements are correctly met, ensuring that the data sent by Carbon is as accurate as possible.

If an item is in red, the plugin will operate in a degraded manner, providing less accurate, aggregated estimation information. Data in orange are optional items with a slight impact on data quality

Usage

A graph displays energy consumption and carbon emissions per month for the last complete 12 months.

• Consumption in appears in red

• Carbon emissions in green

Using the toolbar at the top right, you can:

• Zoom in/out on a specific period

• Zoom through a selection

• Scroll

• Return to the initial presentation

• Export (SVG, PNG, CSV)

Additional data, gSbeq, is available. These are grams of antimony equivalent. This index is used to measure the depletion of abiotic resources (rare earths, minerals, etc.).

You can reset and calculate this data with the corresponding buttons (There is an automatic action UsageImpact to set them if they are not already calculated. The buttons may be useful to update values after a change of an asset property.)

Embodied data

In the life cycle of an asset, we can measure the environmental impact associated with its manufacture/destruction/recycling. This data is visible in this insert

Carbon reports

A dashboard is available and customizable. Several types of data are available such as monthly carbon emissions, biggest monthly averaged carbon emissions per model, handled assets ratio, etc.

This dashboard works like the classic GLPI dashboard and can be customized in the same way.

Limitations

Carbon intensity of electricity

The plugin can collect carbon intensity from several sources. The accuracy of these datas varies :

• Data from RTE which represents the carbon intensity of electricity production

• Data from Electricity Map represents the carbon intensity of electricity consumption (which is more accurate)

Locations

The plugin uses locations to find the appropriate electricity source. The field Country must be populated in english. It is expected to be solved soon.

Dates handling

The plugin heavily relies on dates manipulation. Dates stored in its tables are set on time zone configured in general configuration of GLPI (Setup > General > tab Personnalization).

Dates are manipulated in the context of automatic actions, this means that changing the above setting will impact the timezone of dates manipulates after this change. This may will have an effect charts and reports. It is advised to carefully check the configuration of time zone before starting to use the plugin and avoid any change after it began to download data from external sources.

Daylight saving time

Handling timezones with daylight saving time (DST) is challenging because it is not possible to reliably convert dates from / to UTC.

Example : France switches from GMT +01:00 to GMT+02:00 in last sunday of march and switches back to GMT+01:00 in last sunday of october. This event occurs at 02:00AM.

Therefore the time 2024-03-01 02:00:00 is not visible in the table of carbon intensities if its date is displayed with time zine Europe/Paris and 2 rows have the same date. However if the timezone is UTC the 2 rows show an interval of 1H.

The reverse occurs on 2023-10-29 02:00:00 where there are two rows with the same date (visible when the table displayed with timezone Europe/Paris) but internally, there is an interval of 1H between them (visible when the table is displayed with UTC)

Not used assets

Computer

When a computer is not used it is recommended to remove its usage profile.

Monitor

If there are laptops in the inventory, their internal display may be inventoried. In this case, ensure that it has a model and a type without any power consumption set, or no type or model at all.

Deleted asset

GLPI usually handles a trash for assets. A deleted asset will be ignored. When an asset enters or exists the trash then it will be respectively excluded or included in the environmental impact history calculation.

Recommmendations

The plugin provides a diagnosis view for supported assets, in the tab Environmental impact. The administrator should refer to this page to easily find out which data is missing for a single asset.

Mandatory informations are:

• A location with a country or a state filled

• A startup date or a delivery date

• A usage profile for computers

• A model or a type

• A power consumption in the model or the type of the asset

• Financial information enabled with one of the fllowing dates filled (ordered by precedence)

• use date

• delivery date

• order date

Optional informations are:

• Category of computer filled in each computer type

Types of impact

Carbon dioxide equivalent

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that would have an equivalent effect on a specified key measure of climate change, over a specified time horizon, as an emitted amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) or a mixture of other GHGs. For a mix of GHGs, it is obtained by summing the CO2-equivalent emissions of each gas. There are various ways and time horizons to compute such equivalent emissions (see greenhouse gas emission metric). CO2-equivalent emissions are commonly used to compare emissions of different GHGs, but should not be taken to imply that these emissions have an equivalent effect across all key measures of climate change.

Climate change 2021, IPCC, glossary, page 2224 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_FullReport.pdf

Antimony equivalent

Antimony is a metalloid: it has properties of both metals and non-metals. It is used in life cycle assessments to assess the impact of tie extraction from the Earth crust of non-biotic resources, like minerals and fossil fuels.

Primary energy

The primary energy is the energy contained in natural resources before any conversion or transformation. It is used in lifecycle assessments to assess the impact of energy extraction from the Earth.

Methodology

Embodied impacts

Depending on the enabled engine, the methodology of embodied impact may vary.

Boaviztapi

Boaviztapi is a tool produced by Boavizta, an association helping organizations to assess, manage and reduce the environmental impact of their digital assets in a simple, fast and reliable way.

The Carbon plugin sends queries to this tool to get metrics which are locally saved and agregated.

Usage impacts

The plugin internally calculates the emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent, using the carbon intensity of the local electricity supplier of each asset. Other impacts are calculated by external tools.

Greenhouse gas emissions

The Carbon plugin identifies the location of an asset, the average power consumption and theoretical power-on and power-off times to approximate the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by the asset's usage.

The carbon intensity of electricity is collected from local providers and down-sampled to 1 hour time slots. For each asset where there is enough data, the plugin evaluates when it is powered on and calculates the average energy consumed then the carbon emissions of this energy consumption.

The results are then aggregated by day, and are used to calculate the total carbon emission on a larger time frame, like a month or a year.