GreenDot joins the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance

Ask most organisations what their technology estate consumed last month and you'll get a number. Ask where the number came from, and things get vaguer. An average. A model. A supplier coefficient applied to an assumption applied to a spreadsheet. 

Estimates got our industry started. They won't get it to net zero. 

The gap between what gets reported and what's actually happening - on the devices, the servers, the workloads drawing power right now - is the reason GreenDot exists. It's also why we're delighted to have joined the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance. 

What the GDSA is 

Formed at COP27 by Defra's Chief Digital and Information Officer, the GDSA brings together UK government, its ICT and digital supply chain, academics and third sector organisations to drive progress on the sustainability of government's digital estate. 

More than ninety organisations are now members. Seven working groups - Circularity and Waste Reduction, Emissions, Planetary Impact, Resilience, Social Impacts, Disruptive Technology and Embedding Sustainability - produce guidance that feeds, through their chairs, into the Cross-Government Digital Sustainability Steering Group. 

This is not a talking shop. Government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the UK, spending around £14 billion on ICT every year. What government asks for, industry builds. The Alliance is where that asking gets shaped. 

The Alliance has already named the problem 

Its Digital Scope 3 Insights report grew out of a survey of sustainability leads across government, and the barrier they reported most often wasn't ambition or budget, it was access to data. The report's answer is unambiguous: score suppliers on measured, actual data rather than modelled and apportioned figures, and treat spend-based reporting as the stopgap it is. As it puts it, "the baseline is not the goal - just step one." 

The Alliance's report on Water Use in AI and Data Centres arrives at the same place from a different direction. Its first recommendation to government is mandatory, location-based reporting because, as the report states, there is "no reliable data on the quantity of resources used by data centres." 

Two working groups. One conclusion. You cannot manage what you have not measured. 

What we bring 

Measurement at source. GreenDot is vendor-agnostic digital energy telemetry. Lightweight collectors and integrations capture what endpoints, infrastructure, applications and connected systems are genuinely consuming, then show you the watts, kWh, carbon and cost so you can act on it now. Idle draw. Refining your out-of-hours load. Energy per unit of useful work. 

Not another dashboard. The Scope 3 report is right that data belongs in the systems people already use. GreenDot strengthens the evidence layer underneath them, feeding the asset management, ESG and FinOps platforms already in place rather than competing with them. That's what makes a procurement conversation specific, a reduction target defensible, and a comparison between two suppliers mean something. 

We're joining an Alliance full of organisations doing serious work on circularity, frameworks and policy. We're here to help with the layer underneath all of it: the data. 

Our data experts are ready to join the dots. 

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