Episode 6 - Real time carbon intensity tracking with Olivier Corradi from Electricity Maps

In this episode, I interview Olivier Corradi from Electricity Maps.

Olivier is the CEO and Founder of Electricity Maps, an app that shows real-time (hour-by-hour) production and consumption of electricity by source and carbon intensity across the world. Recently, the app can also show historical data up to 5 years.

The same technology of the freely accessible app (which you can find at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map) is the basis of the data and technology that Electricity Maps is selling to companies like Google and Microsoft for them to minimize the carbon footprint of their own servers and their cloud products.

Some of the topics that we cover in our conversation:

• A bit about Olivier’s past career in data and machine learning
• Reducing carbon emissions by making the electricity grid "flexible"
• Why he started Electricity Maps and the effect it’s had on the energy conversations in the context of climate change
• What Electricity Maps is
• Their business model
• Their proof of concept project with Google
• How they managed to build their software using an open source model and leveraging the community that they’ve built
• Building algorithms to fill in the blanks where electricity data is not available
• Two of Electricity Maps' attempts at using their data for carbon accounting
• The importance of having a clear focus in building sustainability solutions

Thank you for listening, and I hope you'll enjoy it.