Every software system consumes energy through the hardware it runs on. The Software Energy Efficiency (SEE) specification provides a methodology for calculating the energy consumption rate of a software system — a score where lower is better and reaching zero is impossible.
Developed within the Software Standards Working Group
SEE is a rate — energy consumption per one functional unit of work, measured in kilowatt hours (kWh). It gives developers and organisations a clear, comparable number that captures how efficiently their software uses energy. Reducing an SEE score is only possible through actions that genuinely reduce energy consumption: modifying software to use less hardware, use hardware more efficiently, or shift computation to more energy-efficient infrastructure.
The SCI specification measures carbon intensity — combining energy, grid carbon intensity, and embodied emissions. By focusing solely on energy, SEE isolates the signal to just energy consumption without the variability of grid carbon intensity in the mix. This is what's needed to truly focus on energy efficiency rather than carbon efficiency — giving teams a clear, undiluted measure of how much electricity their software consumes.
SEE calculates energy consumption per functional unit. The formula accounts for facility overhead through PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), ensuring that cooling, power conversion, and other infrastructure costs are captured.
SEE = E per R
The total energy the software causes to be consumed, calculated as the sum of each component's energy multiplied by the PUE of its facility. Measured in kilowatt hours (kWh).
A quantified performance characteristic that describes how the application scales — per API call, per user, per transaction, per device, or per data volume.
The first step in generating an SEE score is deciding what to include in the measurement. The boundary should include all components that significantly contribute to the software's energy consumption.
All computational hardware — processors, GPUs, TPUs, AI accelerators — performing work within the software boundary.
Energy consumed by host machines, memory, and reserved capacity that is idle but provisioned for availability and failover.
Cooling, power conversion, and other facility overhead (captured via PUE), plus networking equipment including routers, switches, and load balancers.
All actions that reduce an SEE score fit into two categories: energy efficiency (making software use less electricity for the same function) and hardware efficiency (making software use fewer physical resources for the same function). The specification is designed to encourage more of these actions during the design, development, and maintenance of software.
There are three approaches to quantifying energy consumption. Each component in the boundary can use whichever approach is most appropriate.
Real-world energy data from power monitoring equipment, smart PDUs, hardware sensors (RAPL, NVML), cloud provider energy APIs, or device-level power measurement.
Modelled energy consumption using hardware specifications, TDP ratings, utilisation metrics combined with power curves, or vendor estimation tools.
Published energy values such as cloud provider data per instance type, industry-standard coefficients for hardware, or third-party SEE scores for subcomponents.
The SCI specification measures carbon intensity using the formula SCI = (E × I + M) per R, which combines energy, carbon intensity, and embodied emissions. SEE focuses on the energy component alone: SEE = E per R. This makes SEE useful in contexts where carbon intensity data is unavailable or where the goal is specifically to reduce energy consumption regardless of grid mix. The two specifications are complementary — improving your SEE score will also improve the energy component of your SCI score.
Reducing an SEE score is only possible through actions that reduce energy consumption. This can be achieved by modifying a software system to use less physical hardware, use hardware more efficiently, or shift computation to more energy-efficient infrastructure.
Help Shape Software Energy Efficiency
SEE provides a clear, comparable score for the energy consumption of any software system. Whether you're optimising cloud workloads, edge applications, or AI pipelines, your expertise can help shape how the industry measures and reduces software energy consumption.
