Social networking website Facebook is being criticised by environmentalists in the north-west US state of Oregon after it became known that the electrical provider that will power its first data centre at Prineville in the state will use coal energy.
The California-based company has decided to construct the data centre – or server farm – to increase storage capacity for the website, which now boasts over 350 million users.
However, Facebook has signed a contract with power utility Pacific Power, a provider which relies heavily on coal-burning plants in its electricity supply grid. Now, Greenpeace has set up a group on Facebook entitled “Tell Facebook to Use Clean Energy for its Data Center” which has attracted 130,000 members since being set up a little over 10 days ago.
“The information technology industry is one of the largest, fastest growing, most energy-consumptive industries in the world right now. Facebook is symbolic of this,”Greenpeace spokesperson Daniel Kessler said. Mr Kessler thinks Facebook should grasp the opportunity to set a sustainable standard for IT development. “If they’re going to expand, they have to do it responsibly,” he said.
A petition at change.org urging the company to reconsider the contract has attracted almost 9,000 signatories with a target of 10,000.
Pacific Power is a subsidiary of PacifiCorp, 60 percent of whose total supply of electricity is sourced from coal power.
In its defence Facebook says that one of the main reasons for choosing Prineville to host the data center was central Oregon’s arid and temperate climate, which will allow the company to use an evaporative cooling system to chill the facility, rather than a more energy-intensive cooling system, such as air-conditioning. “This climate enables us to design what we believe to be one of, if not the most, energy efficient data centers in the world,” Facebook says.
It also argues that the electrical grid supplies electricity from a multitude of sources and that the choices the company faced when choosing an electricity providers for the Prineville centre are not as simple as clean versus dirty.
“The suggestion of ‘choosing coal’ ignores the fact that there is no such thing as a coal-powered data centre,” Facebook said. “Similarly, there is no such thing as a hydroelectric-powered data center. Every data center plugs into the grid offered by their utility or power provider.”
Mranwhile, Jason Carr of the local economic development programme, said that while Pacific Power offered the most competitive electricity prices - particularly as the supply of cheap hydroelectricity that has been around is dwindling – Facebook should be given credit for its energy-efficient building at Prineville as well as its use of what he described as “outside air economization” in its cooling system.
1 comment:
While we'd all like these high-tech, so-called forward-thinking companies to do more for the environment, perhaps the truth is that there's only so much they can do.
Facebook's attempt re their siting of the data center and the use of outside air is the most we can hope for in this case.
Or we all stop using Facebook!
Post a Comment