Grid-Aware Websites: Making Your Site Greener

This article explores the concept of 'grid-aware websites,' which adjust website performance based on the percentage of renewable energy in the user's electricity grid to reduce carbon emissions. The author demonstrates grid-awareness implementation in 11ty and Astro frameworks using an e-commerce product display page example, detailing technical implementation, challenges, and future directions. The core idea is to dynamically adjust website functionality based on grid energy cleanliness, simplifying pages and reducing resource consumption on 'dirty' grids to lower the website's carbon footprint. While facing API cost and cross-stack collaboration challenges, this technology has the potential to become a significant tool for improving website sustainability.