Periodically, Greenpeace focuses on new technologies to deliver positive and negative points to the various companies involved. This month, Facebook is bringing the dunce cap. Ecologist Foundation denounces in a report. choice social network to build its data center in Oregon and have chosen to supply electricity PacificCorp, ” which gets the majority of its energy from coal power stations . It welcomes the contrary that Yahoo has chosen to implement a new data center in Buffalo, New York, where most energy is derived from hydropower. It is also necessary, as Greenpeace pointed out that these renewables are more expensive than coal or nuclear, are actually chosen by firms that implement solutions cloud.
Google appears in the report as the best student’s Datacenter Dalles use over 50% renewable energy, while Apple uses only 3.8%. The iPad, which must deport all data to the data center, this level is a concern for Greepeace, who welcomed the opportunity of the release of Apple tablet in 3 days to alert public opinion. Yahoo is also welcomed, with a data center that uses 27.7% renewable energy.
For Greenpeace, the development of storage of user data on remote servers interconnected (the “cloud”) poses a major impact on the climate, the carbon footprint of data centers. A study of GeSI , whose members were almost all industrial telecom necessarily interested in the inflation figures, the demand for information services and communication could quadruple by 2020 with the ICT development in China and India . Carbonic emissions due to the PC could also double in the same period. But the same study, always necessarily unbiased, concluded that emissions could drop by 15% globally in the ICT sector through a combination of improved technologies and extensive use of renewable energies.
While data centers today consume 330 billion kWh, they would consume about 1 billion kwh in ten years.