Modelling Scenarios for Carbon-aware Geographic Load Shifting of Compute Workloads

We present an analytical model to evaluate the reductions in emissions resulting from geographic load shifting. This model is optimistic as it ignores issues of grid capacity, demand and curtailment. In other words, real-world reductions will be smaller than the estimates. However, even with these assumptions, the presented scenarios show that the realistic reductions from carbon-aware geographic load shifting are small, of the order of 5%. This is not enough to compensate the growth in emissions from global data centre expansion.