A lot of tech companies are trying to pick renewable energy for their data centers

Apr 3, 2014 11:11 GMT  ·  By

Tech companies are getting a lot better about being eco-friendly even when it comes to their data centers. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple have been making significant progress in adopting renewable energy sources to power up their businesses.

According to the environmental group Greenpeace, there are plenty of companies in the tech industry that think of the world when planning for ways to power up data centers. There are also others that continue to rely on carbon-emitting coal and gas, and that damages the environment.

Apple, for instance, is particularly efficient in fueling its data centers with the help of solar panel farms and fuel-cells, as well as with the help of three other facilities which provide renewable energy.

According to Greenpeace, Apple uses 100 percent clean energy, while Google, Facebook and Yahoo still have a long way to go. Yahoo, for instance, uses 59 percent clean energy, 20 percent coal, 12 percent nuclear and 6 percent gas. Google powers up its data centers with the help of clean energy as well (48 percent) but also uses other sources. Facebook got a similar clean energy index – 49 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, companies such as Amazon Web Services have been slammed by Greenpeace, that claims that they’ve refused to pay any type of attention to sustainability and they’re simply choosing to power their infrastructure based on lower electricity prices alone.

Amazon has contested the results and says that the assumptions in the report are inaccurate, although it did not give much more information.

Greenpeace is picking on tech companies because one single data center usually needs as much as 80 megawatts, which would be enough to power 65,000 homes. The research alone covers some 300 data centers.

The report that covers some 19 companies notes that only six major Internet service companies have committed to turning their data center operations entirely towards green energies, namely Facebook, Apple, Google, Box, Rackspace and Salesforce.com.

It should be noted, of course, that each company has a different number of data centers.

Google, for instance, has made a lot of deals to purchase wind power energy from utilities in several states but has a lot of work to do to shift to renewable energy for all its 13 data centers. By comparison, Apple only has four data centers, which makes it pretty easy to get a 100% score.