Energy and carbon¶
The co-op shows members how much energy its inference uses, and what carbon that represents. This page says where those numbers come from and where they are weak. The model list covers which providers we use and their energy sources; this covers how we count.
What we measure¶
Output tokens, per model, per day — read from our own gateway logs. Nothing is required of your client, and no per-member figure is published: the dashboards show co-op totals.
We count output tokens only, deliberately. That is the unit GreenPT's published metric uses ("mWh per 100 tokens"); input tokens are excluded so comparisons hold across prompts, workloads and models. It also means these figures are not total compute.
How tokens become energy and carbon¶
energy = output tokens × (Wh per 1,000 output tokens)
carbon = energy × grid intensity of the electricity (gCO2e per kWh)
Both factors are held per provider in one table, with the source recorded for
each row, in the portal's
metrics_snapshot.py.
Measured: GreenPT¶
GreenPT returns an impact object with every call — energy in watt-milliseconds,
emissions in µgCO2e — so these are fitted from their own numbers rather than
imported from a third party. Measured 2026-10-28 by regressing energy against
output tokens across prompt sizes (R² ≥ 0.999; there is a real per-request
overhead, because their energy derives from inference time):
| Model | Wh per 1,000 output tokens | Implied grid intensity |
|---|---|---|
greenpt/deepseek-v4.1-flash |
0.36 | ~193 gCO2e/kWh |
greenpt/glm-5.3-flash |
1.08 | ~193 gCO2e/kWh |
greenpt/green-r |
0.55 | ~24 gCO2e/kWh |
green-r is roughly an order of magnitude cleaner per unit of energy, which is
where GreenPT's claim of up to 40% lower CO2 per query comes from.
Estimated: everyone else¶
Providers that do not disclose impact — Tinfoil, Regolo, PublicAI — use a documented order-of-magnitude proxy: 0.5 Wh per 1,000 output tokens at an EU grid average of 250 gCO2e/kWh. It exists so a day's total is never quietly missing models. It is an estimate, and it is labelled as one everywhere it appears. Refining a factor is a data edit, not a code change.
What this does not cover¶
- It is a floor, not a total. Embedding, audio and image requests carry no completion tokens, so their compute is not counted at all. This is the largest known gap.
- Estimates for non-disclosing providers. The proxy is an order-of-magnitude figure, not a measurement of what a given provider actually draws.
- GreenPT's energy is itself estimated — from time and documented hardware power — so our per-token figures are an efficiency ratio, not a per-call meter reading.
- Training emissions are not included, for any model we serve. Nobody in this market can verify them yet.
Where to see the numbers¶
The member dashboard has them under "Co-op usage" — by day, alongside membership, requests and spend. Operators see the same series on the admin panel's Trends tab.
Units, for the curious¶
Wh is a watt-hour (a 100 W bulb for one hour is 100 Wh). kWh is 1,000 Wh.
gCO2e is grams of carbon-dioxide equivalent. Converting between them is where
mistakes hide: µgCO2e per mWh and gCO2e per kWh are the same ratio, and Wh to kWh
is a factor of 1,000.