Snag – schedule tasks to minimise carbon emissions

Hacker News

Share card

Snag – schedule tasks to minimise carbon emissions

Hello HN - my first submission here, and first piece of OSS :) The National Grid in the UK has a great API ( https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk ) that provides a 48h ahead forecast of the carbon intensity (ie, gCO2 per kWh) of the electricity supply. snag is a little script that lets you schedule your non-interactive tasks to take advantage of times where the intensity is lowest. You provide the time you need it to complete by (and, optionally, the task length) and snag will start the task to meet the deadline at a time when the intensity is lowest. For example, you might want to put on a compute job when you go home to work on the results in the morning. It doesn't matter to your workflow if it starts now (at HIGH intensity), or at 0230 in the morning (at LOW intensity), so snag will run it at 0230. Or use it to schedule your weekly backup, a big download, etc etc... These are real savings, rather than carbon offsets, and it provides a summary of the carbon saving, which you can use directly for reporting purposes (of course, you would have to link task->power usage directly to get an absolute figure). It will work in the UK only (it would be great if other countries provided a similar service), but if you want to be Sherlock Holmes to try it out, your routing code would be `NW1`. Would love to hear anyone's thoughts and feedback, and hope you get some use out of it. TIA.