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"Environmental activist organization Greenpeace emphasized the environmental effects of cloud computing this Earth Day, releasing a report that assigns grades to 10 prominent technology companies based on how they power data centers.\nAccording to the report, computer servers in data centers account for about 2% of global energy demand and are growing their energy consumption at a rate of about 12% per year. About half of the companies studied, which include Google, Facebook and Apple, used coal to meet 50% to 80% of their energy needs instead of renewable energy resources like wind and solar.\n\"Many IT brands at the vanguard of this 21st century technological shift are perpetuating our addiction to dirty energy technologies of the last two centuries,\" reads the report's executive summary. \"Whereas the factories of the Industrial Revolution got us into a mess by burning coal and releasing carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the factories of the Technology Revolution have the ability to make use of better energy choices.\"\nGreenpeace admits that the impact of data center power use is hard to measure, as the same centers enable reduction of energy inefficiencies like CDs, paper media and commuting. The companies mentioned are also hesitant to release information about their energy use, and Greenpeace calculated \"clean energy index\" and \"coal intensity\" based on estimates of power demand for evaluated facilities.\nNo company received high marks on Greenpeace's chart (nor, we suspect, would major companies in any industry), but many are making efforts to reduce dependence on coal. Google, for instance, recently signed a 20-year power purchasing agreement with a wind energy company for its Oklahoma data center, and Microsoft recently announced an agreement to buy wind energy for its Dublin data center.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/04/22/cloud-computing-dirty-energy/>