Silicon Valley looks east for cheap energy to power data centers: Greenpeace

While Silicon Valley maybe a center of the environmental activism, Greenpeace issued a report on Tuesday accusing IT companies of setting up data centers in the eastern United States where power is cheaper and dirtier.

“Instead of linking their IT innovation to equally innovative clean sources of electricity, many IT companies are simply choosing to attach their modern information factories to some of the dirtiest sources of electricity, supplied by some of the dirtiest utilities on the planet,” writes the report authors.

Greenpeace accuses Amazon, Apple and Microsoft of expanding rapidly without considering the source of their power needs. Apple disputed the findings saying that it is making efforts to use renewables to power its data centers.

“Because of the tendency within the IT sector to cluster in the same geographic locations, these investments are driving significant new demand for both coal and nuclear power in many regions of the world – and in rapidly growing economies like India, they are driving demand for diesel from large onsite generators.”

The report does laud some IT firms for efforts to pursue renewables, and singles out Yahoo and Google who are making a greater investment in renewables.

“Akamai, responsible for carrying a tremendous amount of internet traffic, is the first IT company to begin reporting its carbon intensity under the new Carbon Utilization Effectiveness (CUE) standard. There has been a notable absence of reporting under CUE by other companies.”

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