In today’s regulatory landscape, organizations need to report on the environmental impacts of their activities, with a particular focus on climate-related impacts, such as carbon emissions. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the state of California’s forthcoming emissions disclosure requirement have introduced a higher level of both regulatory and public scrutiny, driving organizations to look for opportunities to increase confidence in reporting outputs. To help address these new demands, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides our cloud customers with the ability to estimate carbon emissions that result from running their workloads using OCI services.

What are power-based emissions?

OCI is introducing a new type of sustainability reporting: power-based carbon emission calculations. OCI uses two methods to calculate carbon emissions:

1. Power-based emissions: This method tracks the power consumed by hardware in our data centers and then allocates energy to your resource workloads. Allocated energy considers both dedicated and shared hardware across customers. Allocated energy is then multiplied by a regional carbon emissions factor, which is based on the power grid mix of renewable and non-renewable energy.
2. Spend-based emissions: This method multiplies the amount a customer spends on a particular service by a regional carbon emissions factor. These calculations are based on the customer cost before discounts and the Oracle Clean Cloud OCI Data Sheet.

Power-based calculations are more accurate and are better positioned for future regulatory requirements that require higher accuracy in carbon emissions reporting.

We’ve updated our reporting experience

You can now create custom and exportable power-based carbon emissions reports for select OCI services from two locations: the OCI Console’s Carbon Emissions Analysis page, and the Usage API. Custom user reports provide filter and grouping settings that allow you to fine tune the reports to meet specific reporting use cases. 

You can also select the calculation method that is used for each report. OCI services such as Compute and Storage are currently supported, with Database support coming soon. These services account for most of the electricity consumed in OCI data centers. For services that do not support power-based calculations, spend-based calculations can be used instead.

For power-based reporting, you can also select how regional carbon emissions factors are calculated:

• Location-based: The raw carbon emissions output from the kWh of energy consumed, based on the energy grid for a given region.
• Market-based: The remaining carbon emissions output after accounting for renewable energy certificates purchased by Oracle, to offset emissions in those regions.

The new Carbon Emissions Analysis features will significantly aid addressing regulatory reporting goals, and bring more visibility to the environmental impact of your supply chain. The updated feature is available for you to use in your tenancy using this link. The OCI team is excited to hear about your experience. You can share any feedback with the team using the Submit feedback option in the Console’s Help menu.