How to Measure the Energy and Carbon of a CI Run

You cannot reduce what you do not measure; Eco-CI estimates the energy a job draws on the runner.

Tools like Eco-CI (from the Green Metrics Tool project) estimate a job's energy use from CPU utilization and combine it with grid intensity to approximate carbon. Adding it to a pipeline turns a vague goal into a number you can track per run.

Steps

• Add the Eco-CI initialize step at the start of the job.
• Add measurement steps around the work you want to attribute.
• Emit a final estimate to the job summary and trend it over time.

Workflow

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: green-coding-solutions/eco-ci-energy-estimation@v4
        with:
          task: start-measurement
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run build
      - uses: green-coding-solutions/eco-ci-energy-estimation@v4
        with:
          task: display-results

Tradeoffs

• The number is an estimate from CPU model and utilization, not a wattmeter reading.
• Its value is relative: compare runs of the same pipeline to see if a change helped.

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