The high-strung ecophiles at Greenpeace have placed Facebook in their crosshairs , whop Mark Zuckerberg over what they aver is a reliance on coal to fuel his ( substantial ) data center . A new video slams Zuck , and asks for a renewable alternative .
The video , roll by all odds at your heartstrings with the narration of what sounds like a cutesy British tot , tell a kid ’s al-Qur’an version of the Facebook story , of a sad nerd who founded a mega - successful companionship so he could be popular ( Aaron Sorkin , whatup ! ) Now his social web behemoth familiar lives in “ a big corner full of reckoner ” in Oregon — and this box seat needs a lot of electrical energy . A lot of electricity . Like$1 million a monthin electricity , and that was a year ago , before the ‘ Book smash the half a billion friends St. Mark .
So , Greenpeace says , this box is being fueled by coal . And coal is rotten for the environment . Their suggestion ? Unfriend coal , and tycoon Facebook ’s data heart with a renewable source instead .
But is it so simple?TechCrunch spot outthat Facebook ’s director of policy communications was agile to economize face , claiming :
It ’s dead on target that the local utility for the realm we choose , Pacific Power , has an Department of Energy premix that is weighted slightly more toward coal than the home average ( 58 % vs. about 50 % ) . However , the efficiency we are able to achieve because of the climate of the part minimizes our overall atomic number 6 footprint . say differently , if we located the data center most other space , we would want mechanical chillers , use more energy , and be responsible for an overall larger environmental impact - even if that location was fire by more renewable energy .
So picture Facebook ’s data point center are some sort of nineteenth hundred , carbon black - belching smokestack column might not be precise . But then Greenpeace returns fire !
We apprize your acknowledgement that Facebook has a ember job with its Oregon datacenter . However , where we disagree is your call to be powerless to do anything about it as , like Greenpeace and others , Facebook merely have to bribe whatever electricity is available . This is not the vitrine for Greenpeace , and is certainly not the case for Facebook , who is an industrial scale leaf consumer of electrical energy . Facebook is buy electricity in bulk to meet the needs of 500 million+ users , and is becoming a very influential company both inside and outside the IT sector . The expected powerfulness phthisis of the Oregon data center alone gives Facebook the purchasing power of 30,000 - 40,000 dwelling , which pay you the ability and standing to form how power is generated in Oregon and far beyond .
So what we have here is Facebook , on the one hand , saying ember is a reality they ca n’t avoid , and Greenpeace retorting they ’ve catch the clout nail ( and hard cash ) to go altogether light-green . Coal is certainly less expensive than , say , jazz or solar , so the job pursuit Facebook has in powering its servers on the cheap is well-defined . Then again , Greenpeace points out the efforts IT giants like Google and Yahoo are invest forth to increase their juice efficiency — which is certainly something we ’d like to see from Facebook too . Ogling photos of girl I went to midway schooltime with is guilty conscience - spurring enough — the last thing I need on my sense of right and wrong is a heavier C step . [ GreenpeaceviaTechCrunch ]
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