Holaluz is a green energy technology company that has been listed on BME Growth since 2019. The company advances their mission to create and live in a greener world by persuading people to switch to an energy plan made with 100 percent renewable energy.
Created with the conviction that companies can be tools to change the world, Holaluz leads the transformation of the Spanish energy sector with a commitment to the new model of distributed generation and differential supply in self-consumption.
The company has matured their infrastructure and architecture over the past few years to reduce the environmental footprint of running their operations. But, even for a green energy provider, it can be difficult to accurately measure carbon emissions and energy consumption of cloud infrastructure. To that end, Holaluz wanted insight into their cloud computing environmental impact, the kind of insights that the Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) tool can provide.
They partnered with us, and together we deployed our CCF tool to understand their cloud infrastructure’s carbon emissions and energy consumption.
Leading with data
The team began by setting up the tool and populating it with real cost and usage data to understand the environmental footprint of Holaluz’s current cloud architecture. To enable a repeatable, reliable and automated solution, we used infrastructure as code (Terraform – an open source solution) to define the resources needed to run the application in the cloud, instead of an engineer’s laptop.
Following the development phase, we undertook a FinOps analysis to determine cost reduction recommendations obtained from the CCF tool, and the AWS Compute Optimizer service. We identified opportunities to reduce their annual co2e emissions by ~20% by switching their workloads to a greener region, as well as reduce their monthly co2e emissions by ~14% based on rightsizing recommendations provided from the tool. In fact, Holaluz started taking action on these recommendations earlier this year by migrating workloads in the cloud to more efficient processors.
Implementation of the CCF tool allowed us to discern the principal AWS services responsible for both expenditure, and carbon footprint, and understand the differences in their variation over time.
By pinpointing unusual trends we raised awareness of infrastructure usage rates for certain business events, such as database migrations and licencing changes. We overlapped business context and KPIs against cost and sustainability metrics, which provided a view of past consumption peaks and helped determine the company’s future steps.
What’s next for Holaluz?
Working side by side with Thoughtworks gives us the peace of mind, quality and speed we need to be able to continue to connect the world to green energy. The passion of the team that has worked on the Cloud Carbon Footprint is spreadable , it has helped us gain visibility into our own green impact and what actions we need to take, always from a collaborative and technically excellent level.
The tool is now part of business as usual for the Holaluz team, enabling and supporting the company in their sustainable efforts when building, deploying, and running their workloads, and aiding their business decision making process.
