August 2025 Newsletter
We’re back with the third release of the ESCS newsletter!
Here is the monthly round up of the highlights from the forum last August, with news and resources to job openings and funding opportunities. As always, we invite you and your group to engage with the community by starting a new topic or chiming into one.
If you have ideas, let us know how we can make things even more relevant and useful to what you’re interested in and looking for in the green computing space. We’re all ears! And if someone has forwarded this newsletter to you and you’re interested to receive more, you can subscribe here.
August Recap of the ESCS Community Forum
News & Resources 📰
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Data centre developers in the UK are looking to connect new facilities to main gas pipelines. Energy demand from upcoming data centres will be pushing carbon emissions upwards around the world, regardless of interest from big tech companies to curb CO2 emissions. For England in particular, developers are looking to power new data centres using the main gas pipelines to help supply power to new facilities quicker. The same thing is happening in the US and more than 85 other gas-powered facilities are in the works around the world.
👉 Join the discussion on the forum -
Carbon-aware scheduling tools. From the July issue of Communications of the ACM, the Putting Carbon on the Clock article highlights carbon-aware scheduling tools (including open-source options) and how these have helped reduce the environmental impact of some universities in Sweden and the US. Has your team used carbon-aware scheduling tools? How was it impacted your work?
👉 Join the discussion on the forum -
Would energy hungry AI ever truly be green? The second of the Financial Times’ three-part series on the environmental impact of AI highlights that almost a fifth of the gas power capacity in development in the US will be used to power data centres, more than 50% of data centre power will be from fossil fuels, and in Ireland, data centre demand for power took up more than a fifth of the whole country’s supply, with expectations to take up to a third in 2026.
👉 Join the discussion on the forum -
Old power plants around Europe will be repurposed into data centres to support the AI boom. More on the AI boom, Reuters has reported that many old power plants across Europe are in plans to be converted into data centres by big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon. While majority of the power supply should come from renewables, we can still expect the surge in the demand to push fossil fuel consumption in the region.
👉 Join the discussion on the forum
Jobs & Funding Opportunities 📣
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The Lannelongue group at the University of Cambridge has an opening for a Research Associate/Research Assistant focused on the Sustainability of AI. This role is open to candidates with a PhD (or close to getting one). Deadline is on 16 September.
👉 Check the job listing- The UKRI Net-Zero Digital Research Infrastructure Vision and Expertise (NetDRIVE) project have announced their most recent call - the second of three - which will fund projects up to £1M, while £200K is reserved for projects led by early career investigators. Sandpit applications close on the 10th of September, while submissions will close on the 10th of October.
👉 Join the drop-in sessions in September and visit the page to learn more
- The UKRI Net-Zero Digital Research Infrastructure Vision and Expertise (NetDRIVE) project have announced their most recent call - the second of three - which will fund projects up to £1M, while £200K is reserved for projects led by early career investigators. Sandpit applications close on the 10th of September, while submissions will close on the 10th of October.
Q&A Discussions 💬
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We mentioned last month that we had a question from Laura Wilkinson about open access resources for green computing training. Thanks to Liz Ing-Simmons for chiming in and sharing links for the Green Software Practitioner course and a workshop on Green HPC system use. Does your group have other resources to contribute to the thread?
👉 Join the discussion on the forum -
For those working on Green DiSC, Dorottya Nagy has shared a slide that their lab group is using to introduce new starters to their sustainability accreditation schemes which they are involved with. Is this something your group or institution finds useful?
👉 Join the discussion on the forum
Share your questions, news, and resources on the forum 🗒️
We love seeing new posts on the ESCS Community Forum. Whether your new to green computing and eager to learn more or have been working in this space for years, we’re glad to have you in our community. Ask a question, share knowledge, and connect with others! Our Community Manager, Anica, rounds up highlights every month and your post may get featured in the next release.
🌱 What is this newsletter? This aims to be a round up of interesting news and developments in the sustainable computing space. Whenever we come across an interesting news item or publication on the topic, we will post it on the forum so that everyone can jump in and discuss it. Of course anyone’s welcome to post as well! At the end of each month, we will send out this monthly digest of the articles shared and of the discussions that happened on the forum.
🌱 Who is behind the forum and this monthly digest? This project is led by Loïc Lannelongue at the University of Cambridge and supported by the Wellcome Trust (among others). Anica Araneta is in charge of day-to-day community management. Any questions about that? Just get in touch!