Greenpeace has intensified its campaign against Facebook’s use of coal-fired electricity, with a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, and a Facebook group that now has half-a-million members.
The head of the environmental campaign group has written directly to the boss of the social network giant, following news that Facebook plans to double the size of a data centre in Oregon which has been criticised for using coal-based electricity. At the same time, 500,000 people have signed up to ask Facebook to “unfriend coal“.
“Greenpeace regularly uses Facebook to engage its supporters and their friends to hold corporations accountable for their environmental impact,” wrote Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo in an open letter to the founder and chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. “Facebook is uniquely positioned to be a truly visible and influential leader to drive the deployment of clean energy.”
“Facebook appears to be on a path that will make breaking our addiction to dirty coal-fired electricity even more difficult,” said Naidoo. “As you are aware, following Facebook’s announcement to build a new data centre in Prineville, OR., Greenpeace and over half a million Facebook users have expressed significant concerns with your decision to power this data centre with dirty coal-fired electricity from PacificCorp, which runs an electricity mix that is disproportionately powered by coal, the largest source of global warming pollution.”
In response, to Greenpeace’s original criticism, data centre experts pointed out that the electricity needs of Greenpeace’s own web servers, are mostly met through coal and nuclear powered electricity, although Greenpeace pointed out that it has only 2,000 employees, and much smaller traffic than that generated by Facebook’s 500 million users: “It’s a question of scale,” said Greenpeace spokesman Daniel Kessler.
Facebook’s size and visibility, as well as its role in the growing use of social networking, make its example a crucial one, said Naidoo: “No global business leader, particularly not one who reaches so many people daily, could deny that in this time it is both a threat to a company’s reputation and financial health risk to ignore their company’s environmental impacts.
Facebook has no public environmental policies, and does not disclose its carbon footprint, according to Naidoo’s letter, and is doing worse than Yahoo and Google, according to Kessler who praised the environmental credentials of Yahoo’s new data centre in Buffalo and Google’s investment in wind power.
At present, electricity from renewable sources is generally more expensive than coal-fired power, but this difference varies from place to place, and the Greenpeace letter asks Facebook to choose locations where sustainable energy is cheaper.
However, carbon pricing may be implemented in the US, in which case Facebook’s deal with PacificCorp could be an expensive mistake, since the coal-powered electricity would rapidly become more expensive. Naidoo called on Facebook to advocate energy pricing as a way to speed the move to reduce energy use.
“Half a million people is impressive advocacy,” said Kessler, in reference to the Greenpeace-backed Facebook group, arguing that avoiding potential unpopularity with users would make the move to environmentally-friendly electricity a good one for Facebook.
Other IT companies criticised by Greenpeace include Apple, whose iPad has been slated for driving unecessary It use.
Facebook was contacted, but made no response before this story went to press.
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Here is a statement from Facebook:
We agree that environmental responsibility is important and we are committed to it as a company. In addition, we are proud that our service is used by more than 500 million people around the world to connect and interact in place of many more carbon-intensive activities such as air travel and postal mail.
Overall, we're thrilled at our choice in Oregon and we're challenging the industry to meet the standards we’re setting in energy efficiency there. As we continue to grow, we’ll seek and evaluate more ways to minimize and offset our environmental impact (on the planet). Our move from many smaller leased data centers to fewer larger customized data centers that we own is a great example. That is, the small data centers where we rent space are designed to accommodate many different companies, computers and services. By definition, these facilities can’t be customized for us and, because we must rent from multiple providers, we can’t customize our infrastructure for them. The sum of all the pieces that are designed to do more than is needed is a system that is not as efficient as it could be. It’s like driving a Hummer which is able to navigate any terrain when all you really need is a Prius to get you around. On the other hand, the data center we are building will be just for Facebook—the computers, racks, cooling, building and other parts of the facility are all specially designed to work together in the most efficient and minimal way possible.
In addition, in selecting Oregon, we chose a region that offers a uniquely dry and temperate climate. This climate enable us to go beyond just customization in design, but also to think innovatively about what else we can do to use less energy. For example, almost all data centers use mechanical chillers or large air conditioners for part, if not all, of the year to cool the computers within the facility. These mechanical chillers use a lot of energy and are only exceeded in their energy use by the thousands of computers inside the data center. Because of the climate around Prineville and our unique design, we won’t use any mechanical chillers. None. We won’t even build any. Instead, the data center will use an innovative evaporative cooling system.
Imagine two identical houses with all of the same power consumption inside (appliances, electronics, etc.) only one is cooled by a large air conditioner and the other is cooled by ceiling fans. Obviously, the house with the fans will use significantly less energy. That’s why you may get rebates from your power company when you install a ceiling fan and why our data center will use less energy to deliver our service to people.
All of these investments in efficiency design, planning and technology will result in one of, if not the most, energy efficient data centers in the world. Data center energy efficiency is measured by Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The industry average for PUE ranges from 1.6 to over 2. Our Prineville data center will have a PUE of 1.15.
At the same time, it is simply untrue to say that we chose coal as a source of power. The suggestions of “choosing coal” ignores the fact that there is no such thing as a coal-powered data center. 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. The electrons powering that data center are produced by the various sources (e.g. hydro, natural gas, coal, geothermal, wind, etc.) the provider uses in proportions similar to the mix of sources used. That is, if 25 percent of the provider’s energy comes from natural gas, it’s a good guess that 25 percent of the electrons powering the facility come from that source. Even when a facility is in close proximity to an individual source of energy, such a dam or coal plant, there is no guarantee that the electricity produced by that source are flowing to the facility at any particular time.
It’s true that the local utility for the region we chose, Pacific Power, has an energy mix that is weighted slightly more toward coal than the national average (58% vs. about 50%). However, the efficiency we are able to achieve because of the climate of the region minimizes our overall carbon footprint. Said differently, if we located the data center most other places, we would need mechanical chillers, use more energy, and be responsible for an overall larger environmental impact—even if that location was fueled by more renewable energy.
In addition, we plan to have our data center in Prineville for a long time so when considering the sources of energy, we took a long term view. The state of Oregon has an aggressive plan for increasing their renewable energy mix. In fact, Pacific Power plans to increase their renewable energy mix in the coming years. Their most recent plan calls for having more than 2,000 megawatts of renewable resources by 2013. Thus, our data center is only going to get greener over time as these resources come on line and contribute to even greater proportions of the facility’s energy.
Finally, Greenpeace’s own infrastructure illustrates many of the challenges we face. As recently as March of this year, they indicated that they had a number of servers in a rented data center in northern Virginia (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/03/03/greenpeaces-hosting-not-truly-green/). Their representative commented that these servers are “using whatever the grid mix is in Virginia.” The reporter on the story estimates that mix to be 46% from coal, 41% from nuclear, 8% from natural gas, and just 4% of its power from renewable generation. While this mix includes a little less coal than Pacific Power, there is 5 times as much renewable energy available in Central Oregon (i.e. Pacific Power includes more than 20% renewable sources). I honestly can’t say whether the energy mix in Northern Virginia or Central Oregon emits more carbon per watt. That’s not the point.
We also recognize that Greenpeace’s technology infrastructure is probably small compared to ours. The point is, if an organization focused on environmental responsibility like Greenpeace can’t do better than the mix above for just a few servers, what options are available to Facebook? Unfortunately, there just isn’t a perfect solution yet. Therefore, we strongly believe that the best way to minimize our impact is to concentrate on efficiency and building servers that work towards that goal. We have invested heavily in efficiency are very proud of our achievements. We would welcome the opportunity to partner with Greenpeace to challenge others to meet our efficiency standards and, in parallel, help the world move to more renewable energy sources.
Sorry to drone on for so long but I hope this has been helpful.
Best,
Barry
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Barry Schnitt
Director, Policy Communications
Facebook
barry@facebook.com
650.543.4979
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