Ethical Usage of AI at SheetsResume.com – Energy Consumption

Believe it or not, at SheetsResume.com we have serious moral quandaries about using AI, even in the noble pursuit of trying to help people find new jobs, earn income, get healthcare, and generate security and wealth for their families. Helping people with resumes, cover letters, and interview practice is a great cause, sure, but at what cost?

Whose jobs are we possibly taking by making this? Are we complicit in creating an atmosphere that leads to runaway AGI? Are we normalizing an arguably destructive new technology? And of course, with all these new datacenters being built, and with the world at the outset of a fossil-fuel-driven climate crisis: exactly how much energy are we using to make resumes?

While the other questions are deserving of their own blog posts – fwiw, we actually think we’re creating way more net new jobs with our AI activities specifically – I wanted to address the only question that is definitively, mathematically answerable: the energy usage of our AI Resume Builder.

We’ve run the numbers, and our best estimates (based on all available data from OpenAI and Gemini) is that a single resume / CV generated by our AI consumes only ≈ 0.001 kWh—about the electricity needed to keep a 10 W LED bulb lit for six seconds.

To offset this and then some, we automatically contribute 0.5% of all membership fees (so 49¢ from our $99 lifetime membership) to new decarbonization projects via Stripe Climate. Stripe aggregates similar pledges from 25,000 + businesses across 39 countries and, through its expert-run initiative Frontier, prepurchases permanent carbon-removal credits.

Frontier’s current offtake deals fall in the $400 – $600 per-ton range. Based on our average membership fee paid after discounts, the average SheetsResume.com member pays to remove roughly 0.6 – 1.1 kg of CO₂, cancelling out the emissions of 1.5 – 2.8 kWh of typical U.S. grid electricity. Or, put another way: 1,500 – 2,800 times what our AI had to use to polish your resume!

• Eion – Spreads naturally reactive “green rock dust” on farmland to lock away CO₂ by enhanced weathering, aiming for megaton-scale removal by 2030 (that’s 10 million tons per year!).
• Hafslund – Now generating enough renewable energy to power 1.2 million homes, Norway’s 100% renewable utility continually expands its hydropower, wind, and solar capacities to displace fossil fuel generation.

So while some very poignant ethical questions about AI remain – and likely always will – we are proud to say that we have tackled the energy dilemma head on, instead of shying away and ignoring the issue.

With the Sheets Resume Builder, advancing your career is actually climate-positive by default – so after we make you the perfect resume, the only thing you have to worry about is crushing the interview. (And we can help with that, too.)