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Gone are the days of waiting for one of your family to get off the landline so you could fire up the clunky sound of dial-up internet to load a plain HTML page about that band you liked. We now live in an age of seamless streaming, infinite scrolling, and everything on-demand. And that simple text website is nowhere to be found. It’s been replaced with embedded videos, rich interactivity, high-res motion graphics – and if your website dares to take three seconds to load, you can kiss your visitors goodbye. Never mind that all these features come with a hefty data and energy cost.
Hidden behind the glass of our screens, every click, tap, and swipe is powered by a very physical infrastructure – vast data centers, content delivery networks, and the cloud (a cleverly marketed, light nature-sounding word to conceal its weight). To make things worse, the energy that fuels our digital experiences often comes from carbon-intensive sources, but rarely do we associate our web browsing habits with ‘dirty’ energy in the same way we might a long-haul flight or a gas-guzzling car.
This disconnect raises a vital question: How do we make the invisible visible? How do we reconnect the online world with the natural systems it ultimately depends on?
An almanac for the digital world
Instead of viewing the internet as always-on and consequence-free, what if we saw it as something that pulses with the same unpredictability and fragility as the climate? Clean energy is inherently tied to the rhythms of the earth – the sun, the wind, and the seasons. In agriculture, farmers have long turned to the Farmer’s Almanac, a guide based on these natural cycles, to determine when to sow and harvest and how best to adapt to what the year may bring.
What if the digital world could use this thinking for a Digital Almanac, to help us understand when clean energy is abundant and encourage us to use those moments to browse, stream, and upload in harmony with the natural world? And when it’s not?
Maybe that’s the moment to pause, to adapt, and perhaps even reconnect with nature instead of auto-playing the next episode of whatever everyone is watching.
Just as a farmer waits for the right conditions, could we learn to time our digital behaviors based on the grid’s natural highs and lows?
Browsing by the grid
The idea of Grid-aware Websites begins here, sites that adapt their energy demands based on the availability of clean power. The possibilities of what that looks like are still being explored – perhaps it’s changing color schemes, not loading custom fonts, images or animations – all in response to real-time grid data. It’s an emerging concept, but it aligns with a broader history of responsible, adaptive web design: Progressive enhancement, responsive layouts, and accessibility-first thinking have already changed how we build for the web. Why not energy-aware design too?
While we’ve made sites more inclusive and flexible, we’ve rarely made them aware of their energy impact. There are only a handful of low-carbon web projects today but what if these early experiments are the seeds of something bigger? A future where responsible web use is a shared effort between creators and users, and these few sites become the pioneers of a whole new way of browsing?
In the physical world, we’re used to being nudged toward energy awareness but so far the digital world has managed to detach itself from the massively polluting body that it is. We’re asked to recycle, to fly less, to drive less, even to use energy less at certain times (think of those saving sessions offered by energy providers). These actions are often voluntary, but they’re framed as collective responsibility. So why hasn’t the digital world caught up? And perhaps the bigger question is: Are we moving too fast in the opposite direction?
Resisting the next leap forward
Of course, the real challenge is that expectations are hard to reverse. Once we’ve tasted faster, richer, more immersive digital experiences, it’s difficult to go back. We’ve been trained not to wait – for food, for travel, for information. Everything is instant, and we’ve come to expect it that way. But do we really need it all right now? Or have we just forgotten how to slow down?
Today, we don’t even have to browse to find what we’re looking for – AI is already serving answers before we’ve finished typing the question. We’re standing at the edge of yet another leap in digital demand, and it’s happening fast. So the question is: Are we already too far gone, or can we harness this next wave to help change our mindset?
Not all technological progress is harmful. In fact, some advancements gently nudge us toward better habits. Anyone with a smartwatch knows the feeling: time to stretch, drink water, meditate, unplug. What if digital systems could do the same for energy use – quietly encouraging us to pause our streaming, delay that upload, or opt for a lower-energy version when the grid is under pressure?
Can we build a digital world that prompts us not to consume more, but to consume more thoughtfully, especially when the energy behind it isn’t clean?
Attuning the digital to the natural
So how does this work in practice?
Thanks to tools like the Electricity Maps API, we have access to real-time global energy data. With it, we can begin to design digital experiences that respond to current conditions – just like farmers adapting to their forecast. A website might load in a lighter mode when clean energy is scarce or suggest less intensive content during peak times.
But this must not become a form of digital privilege, rewarding users in regions with abundant renewables while penalizing those who simply don’t have access. A Digital Almanac must be inclusive. It should be a tool for education and awareness, not guilt or exclusion. If the data can be localized, perhaps we can still encourage the cleanest possible browsing window, even if it’s not perfect, and invite everyone to participate in their own way.
Imagine a world where website analytics don’t just show bounce rates and click-throughs, but include carbon metrics and green-hour performance reports. Suddenly, environmental impact becomes part of the design conversation: not an afterthought, but a core metric of success.
Looking to the future
This kind of shift won’t happen through technology alone. It requires everyone – developers, designers, clients, users – to share in the responsibility of building a more sustainable web.
The choices we make in pixels and code ripple far beyond the screen – into the power grid, the environment, and ultimately the climate we all depend on.
We’ve adapted before. We’ve learned to design responsively, to build accessibly, to account for different devices, bandwidths, and abilities. Now, we face a new kind of responsiveness: one that listens to the rhythms of the natural world.
The Digital Almanac is just one idea, but it points to a broader possibility – a web that is in tune with the world that powers it. Where browsing can be a little slower, a little lighter, a little more intentional – not as a sacrifice, but as a new kind of digital experience. A new kind of design thinking. One that doesn’t see nature and technology as separate, but as deeply interconnected.
If the digital world is going to grow (and it will), then it has to grow consciously – not in opposition to the natural world, but in rhythm with it.
Lucy Sloss is a web developer with a strong interest in data-driven and mapping websites, particularly those focused on environmental themes. She is co-founder at design studio Studio Mothership, based in Bristol, UK.