Green Software
Cut the carbon cost of the software you run
We measure the energy and carbon your systems use, then cut it with the same changes that make them cheaper and simpler to run.
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Our view
Software has a footprint: servers that never sleep, data copied five times, jobs that run at the busiest hour of the grid. The code that wastes the least energy is usually the code that is simplest to run. So carbon becomes an engineering measure, tracked beside cost and speed.
We start by measuring, per service and per transaction, so the conversation is about numbers rather than good intentions.
Then we fix the largest sources first. Most of the savings come from ordinary work: switching off what is idle, sizing what is oversized, and moving flexible jobs to cleaner hours.
By the numbers
Cleaner, and cheaper
- 34%
- average cut in compute energy in the first year after a green software review.
- 41%
- of the non-production servers we review are running overnight with nothing to do.
- 12 weeks
- from the first measurement to the first reductions showing on the bill.
- 1st
- KIASA sustainability report, published in July 2026, measured with the same method.
KIASA green software reviews, 2024 to 2026; KIASA Sustainability Report, 2026.
What we do
Measure, cut, and keep it cut
Carbon baseline
Energy and emissions measured per service, per environment and per transaction, from the data your cloud and data centers already have.
Efficient architecture
Fewer copies of data, lighter services and caching where it counts. The design changes that save the most over a system's life.
Carbon-aware scheduling
Batch jobs, backups and training runs moved to the hours and regions where the grid is cleanest.
Right-sizing and clean-up
Idle environments switched off, oversized machines resized and forgotten storage deleted, with owners agreeing each change.
Reporting for disclosures
Software emissions reported in a form your sustainability team and auditors can use, with the method written down.
Green engineering habits
Training and simple checks in the pipeline, so new code is efficient from the start rather than fixed later.
Client work
Our work in action
Energy and utilities
Varda Energy reads two million meters on a fraction of the power
Leaving the mainframe cut the energy used by meter processing by more than half.
Read the case study
Energy and utilities
Ellery Water moved its overnight jobs to cleaner hours
Billing and network models now run when the grid is greenest, with no change for customers.
Explore energy and utilities
Software and platforms
Quillfeather Software reports carbon per customer
Every tenant's footprint shown in its monthly statement, and the platform's total down by 38%.
Explore software
What we think
Thinking on green software
Perspective
Green software is mostly just good software
Our practical case for carbon as an engineering measure, with the changes that save the most.
Perspective
Why the second year of a cloud migration matters more than the first
Cloud waste builds up in year two. Catching it early is good for the bill and the footprint.
Research report
Platform pulse: what engineering leaders will fund in 2027
Sustainability reporting is moving into engineering budgets. What 320 leaders plan to spend.
Research report
The maintenance dividend
Old systems are often the least efficient to run. Modernizing them pays twice.
“We assumed cutting our footprint would cost money. It saved us a fifth of our cloud bill, and the engineers now treat energy as a number they own.”
Questions we hear
Before you start
Can software emissions really be measured?
Well enough to act on. We combine your cloud provider's data, utilization figures and grid intensity by region and hour. The method is written down, so the numbers can be checked and repeated.
Will it slow our systems down?
No. The changes we make first are the ones that remove waste: idle machines, duplicate data and oversized resources. Service levels are agreed before anything changes.
How does this help our sustainability reporting?
We give your sustainability team software emissions in the form their framework expects, with the method and assumptions alongside, ready for an auditor's questions.
Is this just cost cutting with a different name?
Mostly, and that is the point. When the green choice is also the cheaper one, it lasts. Where they differ, we show you both numbers and you decide.
Our leaders
Talk to the people who lead this work
Freya Halvorsen
Practice Lead, Green Software
Wrote Green software is mostly just good software. Led the measurement behind KIASA's own sustainability report.
Ravi Chandran
Principal Engineer, Efficiency
Finds the idle, the oversized and the duplicated. Led the Quillfeather Software review.
Zainab Mohammed
Lead, Carbon Reporting
Turns engineering data into emissions figures that auditors accept.
Find out what your software costs the planet
Start with a baseline. In six weeks you will know your largest sources of waste and what it would take to cut them.