As a result of 20 months campaign by Greenpeace, the giant social networking site, Facebook has agreed to reduce dependence on coal-fired power. Hence, it is ready to switch on supporting renewable energy for its all new data centres.
Such a wise step is taken after an initiative by more than 700,000 people, who poked Facebook to join the campaign with Greenpeace in order to fight against climate change by powering its mammoth server farms with total renewable energy. This is a giant footstep in conserving environment because the data centres of companies such as Apple, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Twitter use up to 2% of the USA’s overall energy, which will grow up to 12% each year.
According to the Greenpeace, the company’s servers are totally dependent on coal fired power stations for the electricity generation, which is one of the fifth largest sources of energy and a giant contributor of greenhouse gas pollution in the world.
Tzeporah Berman, Co-director of Greenpeace’s Climate and Energy Program said: “Greenpeace and Facebook will now work together to encourage major energy producers to move away from coal and instead invest in renewable energy. This move sets an example for the industry to follow.”
Facebook announced that coal will be its power source for the time being, but it will maximize its reliance on clean renewable energy for all upcoming data centres. The company added that it is striving hard to continue research on clean energy solutions as well as energy efficiency. It further justified that the company believes on the open sharing of the technology by the Open Compute Project – a free and open foundation aimed at driving down the cost of computer hardware technology through energy efficiency.
With such a wonderful prospect, Facebook is looking forward to encourage other IT companies to favour clean renewable energy. In fact, Facebook said that its new Menlo Park facility in California will have a solar cogeneration array installed on the roof of the campus fitness centre.
Image Credit: Creative Commons/Tom Raftery