Carbon Aware Computing (bluehands)

Overview

Carbon Aware Computing by bluehands is a set of open-source .NET libraries, services and data for time-shifting computing: it moves a computing load to the point in time when the power grid has the most renewable energy, which the project says lowers the CO2 emitted by that task. Forecasts come from the Green Software Foundation's Carbon Aware SDK, with forecast and actual data from Energy-Charts at Fraunhofer ISE for Germany and from UK National Grid ESO for the UK. The NuGet package CarbonAwareComputing exposes a CarbonAwareDataProviderOpenData with CalculateBestExecutionTime and GetCarbonIntensity, a Hangfire extension schedules background jobs into the optimal window, and the project also ships a Web API deployable to Azure Functions. It is MIT licensed and free for private, open-source and commercial use.

Editorial verdict

Fits .NET teams that want to schedule background jobs into cleaner grid hours with a NuGet package and a Hangfire extension rather than building the logic themselves. Data comes through the Green Software Foundation's Carbon Aware SDK, with forecasts for Germany and the UK sourced from Energy-Charts and National Grid ESO. The trade-off is coverage and scope: forecast regions are limited to the data sources named, it schedules workloads but does not measure what they consume, and no dashboard or reporting layer is included. Teams outside .NET, or needing global region coverage, should look at other SDKs.

Written by the GreenAIX editors from the recorded fields above. Vendors do not review or approve verdicts.

Use cases

• Calculate the lowest-carbon execution time for a .NET background task
• Read current grid carbon intensity for a region
• Schedule Hangfire jobs inside low-carbon windows
• Host a carbon intensity forecast Web API

Sources

• Carbon Aware Computing GitHub repository
• Carbon Aware Computing README
• Carbon Aware Computing MIT licence