Mountain View, California, USA
#00161
Case study of
#00167 Attribute cloud emissions from provider billing and usage data across multiple providers
Implementer
Google Cloud (provider-native tool)
Location
Description
Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is a provider-native emissions tool included as a deliberate contrast to open-source multi-cloud approaches. It reports both location-based and market-based scope 2 emissions computed on an hourly grid-mix basis using machine-level power data, broken down by project, region, and product, with export to BigQuery. Because it uses Google's own machine-level and hourly data, it is more accurate for Google Cloud than a billing-derived multi-cloud tool, but covers only one provider and its methodology is not directly comparable to AWS's Customer Carbon Footprint Tool or Azure's Emissions Impact Dashboard. Many organisations run both, using the open tool for cross-cloud baselining and the native tool for the most accurate single-cloud figure.
Funding
Lessons learned
- Provider-native tools gain accuracy from hourly, machine-level data the customer cannot see, but lose cross-cloud comparability because each vendor's methodology differs.
- Location-based and market-based scope 2 figures answer different questions; reporting both avoids conflating clean-energy procurement with physical grid emissions.
- Running an open multi-cloud tool alongside native tools gives both a comparable baseline and a best-accuracy single-cloud number.
Sources
2Documented Jul 13, 2026