Is Greenpeace’s War On ‘Dirty Data’ A Just One?

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Greenpeace is justified in highlighting the importance of the fossil-fuel content of the energy used by data centres. However, it could be argued that an extremely energy-efficient data centre that uses a high percentage of coal-based energy could still have a lower overall usage of fossil fuels than a very inefficient facility using a high percentage of clean or renewable energy.

Facebook used this efficiency-over-energy-source argument when defending its decision to build new facilities in Oregon and North Carolina. Facebook’s response at the time was that there is there is no such thing as a ‘coal-powered’ data centre or a ‘hydroelectric-powered’ one. The high-coal mix of the local utility powering Facebook’s Oregon facility was largely offset by the local climate, which meant mechanical chillers could be replaced with free-air cooling.

Specifics aside, Greenpeace is generally critical of the transparency of data centre industry as a whole. The organisation criticises cloud providers and the wider data centre industry, including bodies such as The Green Grid and even the US Environmental Protection Agency, for obfuscation. Greenpeace maintains that the data on the direct energy use of data centres and the source of that energy does exist, but suppliers choose not to make it public.

Lack of metrics

One probable defence from data centre suppliers is that there is still a lack of workable metrics to measure the efficiency of data centres. Greenpeace does acknowledge that the industry has developed data centre efficiency metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE). However, not much reference was made in Greenpeace’s latest report to the considerable work from organisations such as The Green Grid to develop a successor to PUE, which more accurately measures the productivity of the IT infrastructure within the data centre.

The conclusion from Greenpeace is that the shortcomings of industry metrics such as PUE are, again, due to a lack of interest from the industry in solving the issue, rather than the inherent complexities involved.

Greenpeace’s report rightly identifies the lack of clear measurement, reporting and management of energy as a fundamental problem for the data centre industry. However, the subtext that this is down to deliberate obfuscation on the part of suppliers and wider industry is a strong claim given the complexities involved. Data centre companies are not alone in lack of transparency. Unless required to disclose, most companies choose to keep most of their operational data secret, especially if the data could make them look bad or provide intelligence to competitors.

Greenpeace is right to ask some hard questions of the data centre industry’s approach to energy and carbon. However the industry has been asking itself many of these self-same questions for a long time. External scrutiny may help to speed up this process but ultimately its up to data centre owners and operators to find the answers or face the consequences.

Andrew Donoghue is Analyst, Eco-Efficient IT and Datacenter Technologies, at The 451 Group.

Representatives from Greenpeace and the data centre industry will take part in a live debate at The 451 Group’s Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit in London from the 28th to 29th June.