Apple’s environmental credentials have again been called into question after the company was listed by Greenpeace as the least environmentally-friendly cloud computing business.
In a report entitled ‘How Dirty is your Data?’, Greenpeace listed major Internet businesses which rely on data centres to provide cloud computing services. Firms such as Akami, Amazon, Facebook, and Google were ranked according to the amount of energy their data centres consume and the proportion of that consumption which is generated from coal and nuclear sources.
The main reason for Apple’s poor showing was its 500,000 square foot centre in North Carolina, a facility which hasn’t yet opened. Nevertheless, Greenpeace evaluated it along with data centres from Google, Yahoo and the rest, according to its size and the provision of power to the grid in the surrounding area.
According to Greenpeace, the new data centre ‘will consume as much as 100MW of electricity, equivalent to the electricity usage of approximately 80,000 homes in the U.S. or over a quarter million in the E.U. The surrounding energy grid has less than 5 percent clean energy, with the remaining 95 percent coming from dirty, dangerous sources like coal and nuclear.’
Facebook, which finished fourth bottom, ahead of IBM and HP, was also criticised for its reliance on coal.
By contrast, Greenpeace commended both Google and Yahoo for their commitment to green energy sources. ‘Both Yahoo! and Google seem to understand the importance of a renewable energy supply, with Yahoo! siting most of its data centres near sources of renewable energy, and Google is directly signing power purchasing agreements for renewable energy and investing in solar and wind energy projects in many US states as well as Germany,’ said the report.
Apple’s choice of location for its facility came to light in 2009 when North Carolina governor, Beverly Perdue, announced that the company had chosen the town of Maiden to site a new data centre. That announcement followed the introduction of tax breaks for companies which invested heavily in the poorest areas of North Carolina.
It’s scheduled to open in the next few weeks, though Apple hasn’t publicly scheduled a date nor given details on the specific function of the data centre.
