You'd think that these rotten apples would be red-faced!
Facebook also came under fire earlier in 2011 when reporters found that the company planned to buy electricity for its new eco-friendly data center in Prineville, Oregon — one of the greenest such facilities ever designed and constructed — from a utility that gets most of its power from coal.
Green cloud services firms
The companies that scored best scored best in use of renewable alternative energy sources for cloud services?- Yahoo
- Amazon.com
- Microsoft
Google also leads in green
Google has been a real leader in the building of green data centers, even powering them with renewable energy. The company released environmental footprint scores for several of its data centers. While the energy usage required to run its cloud services (Google Search, Google+, Gmail and YouTube) seems huge in the aggregate (it used 260 megawatt hours to power its data centers in 2010), it boils down to only 7.4 kilowatt hours worth of energy annually per user.Google reports that to provide an individual user with its services for a month uses less energy than leaving a light bulb on for three hours. And because the company has been carbon neutral since 2007, “even that small amount of energy is offset completely, so the carbon footprint of your life on Google is zero.”
Cloud computing will help environment
In the long run, analysts think that the widespread shift to cloud computing will be a great boon to the environment. A report released in September 2011 by Pike Research, “Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency,” predicts that because of the shift to cloud computing and increasing efficiencies, data center power consumption will decrease by 31 percent between 2010 and 2020.Learn more about green IT and cloud computing
- How dirty is your data? (Greenpeace report) (PDF)
- Energy Star
- Cloud Computing Efficiency (Pike Research)
- Cloud comuting's green paradox (CNET)
- Green Computing via Cloud Computing
- Green Data Center Alliance
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