Greenpeace is rather unimpressed with Apple's (News - Alert) recent claims that its new data centers in North Carolina and Oregon will be powered by a "high percentage" of renewable energy sources.
Gary Cook, a senior IT policy analyst at Greenpeace, has commended Apple for increasing its reliance on renewable energy but has openly questioned how much coal will still be required to run the new facilities, which are being opened to help keep pace with the company's iCloud hosted data center services.
Cook says that Apple's North Carolina-based facility will require around 100 Megawatts (MW) of power when fully operational, which is equivalent to the amount of energy that is used to power approximately 80,000 U.S. homes.
So how much of this energy will be provided from solar farm and the fuel cell investments, which Apple has claimed are the "largest end user-owned" and "largest non-utility installation" in the country? Somewhere between eight percent and 10 percent, says Cook, which falls well short of what one would consider a "high percentage." This number may be even lower if Apple's new facility is larger than what was announced (a strong possibility according to Cook).
This means that a minimum of 90 percent of the data center's power will come from local utility Duke Energy (News - Alert), which generates around 92 percent of its electricity from coal and nuclear resources, says Cook.
"And if that wasn't bad enough, these plants run on coal mined through 'mountain top removal,' causing the destruction of communities and entire ecosytems in the Appalachian region of the U.S.," he added. "Apple could use its standing and influence as a major customer to pressure Duke to help it clean up the other 90% of its electricity supply, but thus far, Apple is again silent."
As for the Oregon facility – one that Apple claims will be "green" – Cook points out that local utility Pacific Corp. generates around 60 percent of its electricity from coal.
"If Apple is really interested in having the 'high percentage' of renewable energy it claims to want for the iCloud, it will have to look beyond the initial steps for on-site generation and put pressure on its electric utilities," he says.
Simon Taylor, chairman of U.K.-based Next Generation Data (NGD) Limited, a data center services specialist, weighed in on the topic and told TMCnet that a "100 percent commitment to renewable energy is the only way for data centers to be seen to be green by Greenpeace."
Unlike other data centers, which Taylor says seem reticent to make a full commitment to renewables, NGD Europe's 750,000 square feet facility in Wales has been green for a number of years.
"Renewable energy supply, combined with the latest energy management systems, such as those provided by Schneider Electric (News - Alert) and as used by NGD Europe, really can enable modern data centers to achieve and sustain industry leading energy and emission efficiencies," Taylor said.
Edited by Carrie Schmelkin