Amidst all the excitement around emerging blockchain technology is the darker story of the massive energy quantities required to power on-chain innovations.

Filecoin Green aims to change that narrative.

Filecoin—which popularized the concept of a decentralized storage network—helps companies and individuals rent out their unused storage space while earning Filecoin cryptocurrency in return. The process—like with any computer data storage—consumes an immense amount of electricity. To help mitigate the effects of the process and create one that strives for long-term sustainability, Filecoin Green was created.

“Filecoin Green has two main objectives,” Marc Johnson, head of environmental, social and governance (ESG) and climate at Filecoin Green said to me in a recent interview. “One is to make the Filecoin network verifiably sustainable and the other is to build the world’s best tools to better manage and measure environmental impacts of all kinds across all types of networks and sectors of economic activity.”

Filecoin aims to achieve its mission through four main areas of focus: Evaluating the energy use of the Filecoin network, connecting the network to renewable energy, working directly with storage providers—or nodes—across the network to help them along their decarbonization journeys and growing a blossoming environmental community in web3.

“We know if more and more people are interested and focused on these crucial topics, it creates a rising tide that lifts all boats,” Johnson said.

The hope is that Filecoin’s internal work to decarbonize its own tech leads to developing tools and methods for other companies to decarbonize themselves as well.

One of those methods is a system that can pull environmental and sustainability data through the economy much quicker and with much more precision than the standard web2 databases or spreadsheet solutions that currently exist. It’s called the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a storage protocol that allows computers across the globe to store and interact with files as part of a global peer-to-peer file sharing network. Filecoin Green uses it to track energy emissions from data use across the lifetime of the stored data.

“In the sustainability space, to be able to see when an environmental impact—like a greenhouse gas emission is generated—is essential information,” Johnson said. “You can see who is responsible for the generation of that emission and also what things are being done downstream that contribute to, or mitigate, some of those emissions.”

The system of sustainable end-to-end audit tracking that Filecoin Green is using could also have benefits and positive ramifications to a slew of other industries and sectors that need to monitor the flow of energy or other transferable goods.

“We’re building solutions to a degree of generality that can also be applied to other web3 networks or other areas of the global information and communications technology sector and even into legacy industries,” Johnson said.

Carbon neutral

“The first thing we’re seeking to achieve is to make the Filecoin network carbon neutral,” Johnson said. “Along the way, we want to set it up to continuously go further into that negative territory over time. Through that work, we’ve made the Filecoin network the world’s most transparent major blockchain when it comes to electricity use, and you can go to filecoin.energy right now and see all of the statistics about the energy use of the network.”

The second area of focus for Filecoin Green is on connecting the Filecoin network to renewable energy.

“The primary way we do that is through a market instrument called RECs—Renewable Energy Certificates—which are similar in concept to carbon credits/offsets,” Johnson said. “But they’re also drastically different because RECs directly incentivize the deployment of renewable energy in specific locations on an energy grid, therefore proving—verifiably on-chain—that you are mitigating emissions that would have otherwise occurred.”

To date, Filecoin Green has procured just shy of 2.7 terawatt hours of RECs and attributed them to the roughly 3,500 storage providers across the global network. The company then continuously monitors their energy use through solutions like the Filecoin.energy dashboard.

To better understand that impact, one terawatt is equal to one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) watts of energy output for one hour. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, the average American consumes 29,130 watts per day. 

In this way, Filecoin is attempting to balance the energy consumption scales. There has to be homeostasis for longevity to occur, and Filecoin is focused on achieving it.

Monitoring electricity usage

“Every economic system that is currently employed is an extractive economic system,” Johnson said. “Every single economic activity that we engage in has some sort of environmental impact.”

Which is why Filecoin is closely monitoring the network’s electricity use and connecting renewable energy to nodes all around the world.

“Filecoin Green is a Protocol Labs initiative but we work very closely with both Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation as the two primary shepherds of the Filecoin network,” Johnson said. “They provided us the funding to go out and procure all of these RECs so that we could continue to drive massive decarbonization effort gains.”

According to Johnson, the RECs were procured from various REC brokers and suppliers all around the world that provide renewable energy to more than 100 countries. It’s been so effective that the renewable energy process is becoming a turn key operation for storage providers.

“We’re turning it into a solution people can utilize either within the Filecoin network or in any other area because we want it to be something that can be adopted by any web3 network, traditional data center or any other corporate actor that consumes electricity and wants to deploy renewable energy in their local grid region to mitigate the environmental impact of their electricity consumption,” Johnson said.

Filecoin is also building an entire community centered around sustainability.

“There’s a tremendous amount of people who interact with Filecoin and IPFS and a lot of products that other teams within the Protocol Labs and Filecoin Foundation networks build,” Johnson said. “We work very closely with a whole slew of people in the Regenerative Finance—ReFi—space, predominantly through our hackathons and events.”

Each quarter, Filecoin Green tries to run its seminal event—the Sustainable Blockchain Summit—for which the first virtual summit will be held August 16th.

“If web3 systems are baked into global energy systems—whether its renewable energy, conventional fuels, or matters of sustainability for corporate ESG reporting—we think there’s a huge amount of inherent benefits that web3 and crypto primitives bring to those areas,” Johnson said. “On a longer term basis, we do see them integrating more and more and we hope that we are able to be part of that journey.”