Environmental Report

At a glance

• The Cherished Book production infrastructure runs at our office in Coventry, UK, powered by a 5.8 kWp rooftop solar array and 27 kWh of battery storage.
• Grid top-up (used overnight in winter when the battery is depleted) is supplied by E.ON Next on a 100% renewable-backed tariff (REGO certificates).
• Over the year the array is forecast to generate more electricity than the server and office infrastructure consume; surplus is exported back to the grid.
• Off-site backups live on Google Cloud (London, europe-west2); DNS, CDN and edge protection are provided by Cloudflare. Both publish independent sustainability reports linked below.
• This report covers Scope 2 emissions (operational electricity). Scope 3 (manufacturing footprint, supply chain, end-of-life) is acknowledged qualitatively but not yet quantified.

Scope of this report

We follow the language of the GHG Protocol, but as a small business we do not yet produce a fully quantified Scope 1 / 2 / 3 inventory. Specifically:

• Scope 1 (direct emissions, e.g. fuel combustion): none. We do not operate vehicles or burn fuel as part of running the platform.
• Scope 2 (purchased electricity): covered in this report. Quantified using measured solar generation, measured load on the server, and specced load on the supporting office infrastructure.
• Scope 3 (everything else, including manufacturing of the panels, batteries, server, networking gear, and their eventual disposal): acknowledged, not yet quantified. See "What this report does not cover" below.

Where Cherished Book actually runs

Compute is hybrid, by design. The user-facing application runs on hardware we own. Everything else is contracted to specialist partners with their own published environmental commitments.

Our solar generation system

Installed at the start of 2026 by GB Solar Ltd, an installer accredited under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS reg. NIC5984) and the Home Insulation & Energy Systems Scheme (HIES reg. GBS/A/0561).

The installation is grid-tied: surplus generation is exported to the public grid; deficit (overnight in winter, after the battery is depleted) is imported. We do not claim to be off-grid.

Generation versus consumption

Forecast generation

Using the MCS standard performance calculation (MCS 3002), the array is forecast to generate approximately 4,280 kWh per year. This figure is the MCS-quoted output for the original 8-panel proposal (3,805 kWh), scaled by 9/8 to reflect the 9-panel installation.

Measured generation to date

The system has been operating for approximately 5 months at the time of writing. Measured generation: 1,752.3 kWh. Against the MCS month-by-month profile for January–May (1,613 kWh expected for 9 panels in this period), this is approximately 8% above prediction.

Coventry receives the majority of its annual solar yield between May and August, so the first 5 months under-represent full-year performance. We will publish a measured full-year figure once 12 months of operating data is available.

Server & office load

The Cherished Book origin servers draw approximately 125 W on average (measured at the wall via smart plug during normal load), with peaks to 465 W during AI/GPU-bound workloads such as memorial content generation. Supporting office infrastructure — firewall, routers, networking, and Synology NAS — draws an additional ~300 W on average (specced, not directly metered).

Net position

Annual generation (~4,280 kWh forecast, trending ~8% higher in measured data) exceeds annual server + office consumption (~3,723 kWh). The system is net positive over the year. Allowing for ~10% round-trip battery losses, the operational margin is still positive but tight. We publish this honestly rather than overstating it.

Our partners

The parts of Cherished Book we don't run ourselves — backups, email, edge caching, DDoS protection — sit with two large infrastructure providers, both of which publish independent sustainability disclosures. We rely on these claims; we cannot audit them ourselves.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare provides our DNS, CDN, TLS termination, and edge protection. Key claims from Cloudflare's annual Impact Report:

• 100% of Cloudflare's global electricity use is matched with renewable energy purchases (the same REC/REGO mechanism that backs our own grid top-up).
• Commitment to net-zero emissions by 2030, including Scope 3.
• Cloudflare's published research indicates that delivering web traffic via its global network uses materially less energy than equivalent traffic served from origin alone, meaning their fronting of our site lowers overall energy per visitor.

We acknowledge that "100% matched" is annual matching via certificates and is not the same as 24/7 renewable supply at every data centre. Cloudflare's report is open about this.

Google

Google Workspace hosts our email; Google Cloud (London, europe-west2) holds off-site backups. Key claims from the latest Google Environmental Report and Google Cloud sustainability page:

• Google has matched 100% of its annual electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases every year since 2017.
• Google has committed to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy across every data centre by 2030 (a stricter standard than annual matching).
• The London region (europe-west2), where our backups reside, publishes its own carbon-free energy percentage; Google updates these figures regularly on the Cloud sustainability page.

As with Cloudflare, annual matching is not the same as instantaneous green supply. Google is open about this distinction.

Beyond electricity

• Hardware: we extend the life of equipment for as long as it remains secure and serviceable. New hardware is bought only when needed.
• Paper: the business operates digitally end-to-end. There is no printing under normal operation.
• Travel: we are a small home-office business. There is no commute.
• End-of-life: panels, batteries and electronics are returned through the installer / WEEE channels at end of life. We have not yet had to dispose of anything.

What this report does not cover

We have set out only to claim what we can defend. The following are honestly outside the current report:

• Embodied carbon of the solar array, battery and server hardware. Lithium-ion battery manufacturing is energy-intensive; modern silicon PV panels typically achieve carbon payback in 1–3 years of UK operation, but we have not done the calculation ourselves.
• Supply-chain emissions of our partners. We rely on Cloudflare's and Google's published disclosures. We have not independently verified them.
• Visitor-side energy. When you read a memorial page, your phone or laptop uses electricity. This is real but outside the boundary of what we can influence directly. Our use of Cloudflare to deliver pages efficiently is the main lever we have.
• End-of-life of electronics not yet disposed of. We will publish actual disposal figures once they exist.

Verification & questions

If you are reviewing this report on compliance grounds, or you simply want to challenge a claim, we are happy to provide source documentation on request — MCS performance calculations, smart-plug measurements, E.ON tariff details, partner contracts. Get in touch and we'll send it over.

We treat this page as living. When measured figures replace forecasts, we update the numbers. When something changes — a new region, a new partner, a different supplier — we update the page and note the date above.

Document control

• Last updated: June 2026
• Boundary: Scope 2 (operational electricity), with qualitative acknowledgement of Scope 3.
• Methodology: MCS 3002 for forecast generation; smart-plug measurement for server load; manufacturer specs for office infrastructure.
• Next review: after the first full year of solar operation.