Carbon data and emissions disclosure

This page sets out the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Phoenix Education Consultancy and the operation of Phoenix Ember. It is published so that schools, trusts and other public bodies can complete supplier carbon assessments without needing to request a bespoke document from us.

Cloud hosting emissions at a glance

Phoenix Ember runs entirely in Europe (London) (eu-west-2). Emissions for that hosting, as measured by AWS, are:

Source: AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool.

Under the GHG Protocol, the market-based method reflects the electricity a purchaser has contracted for — here, AWS’s renewable power purchase agreements and energy attribute certificates. The location-based method instead reflects the average carbon intensity of the local grid, ignoring those contracts. Both are reported here; neither alone is the whole picture.

Reporting boundary

• Reporting organisation: Phoenix Education Consultancy
• Consolidation approach: Operational control (GHG Protocol Corporate Standard)
• Premises: No leased or owned commercial premises; home-based operation
• All Phoenix Ember production data is hosted in AWS eu-west-2 (London). No pupil data leaves the UK.

Our own emissions

Phoenix Education Consultancy has no leased or owned commercial premises. Scope 1 is therefore expected to be zero, but it is reported below as a confirmed figure rather than assumed to be nil.

Outsourced development

Software development and delivery for Phoenix Ember is performed by Zero Drift Ltd. Under the GHG Protocol this sits in our scope 3, category 1 — purchased goods and services: the emissions our development supplier generates performing our work belong in our inventory, even though we do not control them.

For an organisation with no premises and no vehicle fleet, this is likely to be one of the largest single lines in the footprint — developer workstations, their workplace energy, their build and development infrastructure, and their travel. We report it separately rather than folding it into general purchased services, because a reviewer assessing supply-chain maturity will look for it specifically.

• Supplier: Zero Drift Ltd
• Service provided: Software development and delivery for Phoenix Ember
• Basis: to be confirmed — supplier-specific data will be used in preference to spend-based estimation where the supplier can provide it.
• Whether the supplier operates development or build infrastructure outside our own AWS accounts is being confirmed; if it does, those emissions are additional to the AWS figures above.

How our hosting region is powered

Amazon reports that it matched 100% of the electricity consumed across its global operations with renewable energy sources, and describes itself as the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy.

Amazon reports 50 carbon-free energy projects in the UK — 9 offsite wind and solar farms and 41 onsite solar installations — totalling more than 1 GW once fully operational.

• East Anglia THREE offshore wind (159 MW contracted by Amazon), expected fully operational 2026
• Chirmorie onshore wind, South Ayrshire (90 MW)

AWS reports a global average data centre power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.14, against a stated public-cloud industry average of 1.25 and 1.63 for on-premises enterprise data centres.

A 451 Research study commissioned by AWS found European organisations can reduce the energy use of a workload by up to around 80% by running it on AWS rather than in their own data centre, with AWS infrastructure reported as up to five times more energy efficient than the European enterprise average.

These are claims published by our hosting supplier, reported here as supplier statements. They have not been independently verified by Pectech.

How the cloud figures are calculated

The hosting figures come from the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Methodology (Model 3.0, October 2025), which is prepared under:

• GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard
• ISO 14064-1
• GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard, with ICT sector guidance
• ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 (Life Cycle Assessment)

Figures are reported in Metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MTCO2e). Monthly, for the previous 38 months, broken down by AWS Region and service.

What is included

• Scope 1 — fuel combustion in emergency back-up generators, refrigerants, and natural gas at AWS owned or controlled data centre facilities
• Scope 2 — purchased electricity for AWS data centres, reported on both the market-based (MBM) and location-based (LBM) methods
• Scope 3 — fuel and energy related activities (FERA): upstream emissions of purchased fuels and electricity, plus transmission and distribution losses
• Scope 3 — embodied (cradle-to-gate) carbon of IT hardware, data centre buildings, and non-IT equipment such as generators and air handling units
• Scope 3 — upstream transport of server racks to data centre sites

What is excluded

Stated in full, because an exclusion a reviewer discovers for themselves undermines everything else on this page:

• End-of-life treatment of IT hardware, non-IT equipment and data centre buildings — not included in model version 3.0
• Emissions from AWS fleet vehicles
• Emissions from AWS facilities beyond data centres, such as offices and warehouses

Assurance and known limitations

• AWS recasts historical customer carbon footprint data at least annually, on completion of third-party assurance of Amazon’s corporate footprint, or when significant methodology updates are introduced.
• The emission factors used in the model are third-party reviewed each year, when the data for Amazon’s corporate carbon footprint is generated.
• Data is published in the month following the usage it describes.
• For the current month, AWS uses unassured primary Scope 1 activity data. AWS states this can translate into an under-estimation of Scope 1 emissions, which is corrected when the data is recast.

Full methodology: AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Methodology (opens in a new tab)

Net zero commitment

Phoenix Education Consultancy has not yet set a public net zero target date. We would rather state that plainly than publish a target we have not committed to. The measures already in place are set out below.

Measures already in place

• All production infrastructure runs in AWS eu-west-2 (London), a region supplied under Amazon’s UK renewable power purchase agreements, rather than in self-managed or co-located hardware.
• Application compute autoscales to demand on AWS Fargate rather than running fixed provisioned capacity around the clock.
• Non-production environments are placed into an out-of-hours maintenance tier outside working hours rather than running continuously.

Basis of preparation

• GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard
• UK Government (DESNZ) GHG Conversion Factors for Company Reporting, 2026
• Reported in tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e)

Conversion factors are the 2026 Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) factors for company reporting. The 2026 UK grid electricity factor is 0.177 kgCO2e/kWh. Note that this factor fell substantially against the previous year through a combination of grid decarbonisation and a change in DESNZ methodology, so a year-on-year fall in our reported Scope 2 emissions does not by itself represent a reduction we achieved.

This disclosure is self-reported and has not been independently verified. The AWS cloud figures within it derive from AWS’s Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, whose underlying corporate footprint is subject to third-party assurance.

Conversion factors published at gov.uk (opens in a new tab)