A quick confession. When most of us sit down to think about our environmental footprint, we picture plastic bottles, diesel cars, or long-haul flights. I do, increasingly so. I would think the vast majority rarely give a second thought to sending an email, streaming a video, or letting software run quietly in the background.
Digital work feels weightless, but the cloud is very much a physical thing. It is powered by millions of servers sitting in massive, power-hungry data centres all around the world.
I have been playing around with GreenCloud Computing recently after chatting with founder Richard Hill. To be clear, The Third Half does not run heavy data pipelines or massive cloud servers, so this is not about us shifting a giant compute stack over. But Richard is a great guy doing the right thing, and testing out his approach made me think far more about what all of us, especially in business, should actually be considering.
The Hidden Weight of Enterprise Tech
The scale of the problem is far bigger than most people realise. The International Energy Agency reports that data centres consumed roughly 1.5 percent of global electricity in 2024. And of course that number is going up.
For decades, the enterprise tech world operated under a lazy assumption. Compute power was treated as practically infinite, so software could be as heavy, bloated, and inefficient as developers wanted to make it. If an application ran slowly, companies simply threw bigger servers, extra cloud capacity, or more electricity at the problem. I am guilty. I was of a generation that sold that growth to enterprises - most of my tech colleagues of that generation did, many still do.
Here’s the thing. That mindset belongs to a bygone corporate era. We cannot keep scaling our digital lives without taking responsibility for the energy required to drive them. Fact.
Bringing Craft and Creativity Back to Code
Having spent over 30 years developing software, Richard Hill has watched the industry shift from an era of constrained hardware where every single byte mattered to one where computing resources appear endless.
In the early days, strict limits forced developers to be genuinely creative. Having to solve tricky technical puzzles with limited memory made building software a real craft. Modern programming tools, automated memory management, and AI make development much faster today, but they have also encouraged companies to rely on brute computing force rather than thoughtful engineering.
At GreenCloud, Richard is working to bring that sense of challenge and satisfaction back to software. Instead of defaulting to massive data centres, his team focuses on three practical approaches.
GreenCloud World connects underutilised computing power into a distributed network that makes better use of existing hardware and renewable energy.
GreenCloud Business enables organisations to run applications on their existing office computers and servers. This cuts down unnecessary cloud dependency, lowers energy bills, and keeps data secure.
GreenCloud Consultancy helps teams design leaner, faster software that achieves far more with fewer resources.
Extending the Life of What We Already Own
This philosophy sits very close to my heart and day-to-day work. As an advisor working with the Senior Leadership Team at Origina, I see the power of this mindset every day. Origina champions extending the life of existing enterprise software rather than falling for forced vendor upgrades, artificial obsolescence, and expensive, energy-intensive cloud migrations.
When you combine cleaner code with smart hardware reuse and third-party software maintenance, you stop wasting power (and money) on unnecessary computing cycles. Extending software lifecycles and making existing systems work properly is one of the most practical ways to curb digital waste.
What is this telling me? And what should we all be considering?
So while The Third Half is not moving a massive tech estate, playing with GreenCloud has been a great prompt for the questions we ought to be asking across our businesses and projects.
Are we making full use of the equipment we already own?
Does every single workload genuinely need to live in a centralised cloud?
Could our software be engineered with a bit more care?
The future of sustainable computing is not necessarily about building bigger, greener data centres. It is about writing better software, extending the life of existing systems, and bringing genuine craft back into engineering.
A Final Thought
Making a pivot is not just about changing your job title or walking away from corporate governance. It is about taking responsibility for the systems we build and rely on every day. Supporting ethical founders like Richard and helping organisations extend what they already own are practical steps we can take in our second and third chapters.
Have you ever looked into the digital energy footprint of your own business, apps, or software stack?
Drop a comment below, as I would love to hear how you approach it.