Greenpeace Criticizes Apple, Twitter

Greenpeace on Thursday released a study that gave several top Internet companies low marks for the energy efficiency of their various data centers. During Google and Yahoo got some praise for their efforts, others like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter did not fare as then.

Apple was as well criticized for its massive North Carolina data center, dubbed the iDataCenter. The state has "an electrical grid among the dirtiest in the country," according to Greenpeace, so Apple's decision to build its $1 billion data center there "indicates a lack of corporate commitment to clean energy supply for its cloud operations," the organization concluded.

On its Web site, Apple says that the "vast majority" of its carbon emissions come from manufacturing, transportation, use, and recycling of its products. The other 3 percent comes from its facilities, Apple said.

Apple said its facilities in Austin, Sacramento, and Ireland are 100 percent powered by renewable energy, however it does not mention the pending North Carolina facility. Greenpeace said that location has an electricty demand in other words triple Apple's current total reported electricity use.

Request for comment

Facebook did not right away respond to a request for comment, nevertheless the social-networking site has tangled with Greenpeace on these issues in the past.

"We agree wholeheartedly with Greenpeace's goal of environmental responsibility however disagree on how best to achieve it," Barry Schnitt, Facebook's director of policy communications, told PCMag in September. "As other environmental experts have established, the watts you never use are the cleanest when all is said and done our focus is on efficiency. We've invested thousands of people hours and tens of millions of dollars into efficiency innovation and, when it is completed, our Oregon facility may be the most efficient data center in the world."

The Lockport facility

The Lockport facility, located about 25 miles from Niagara Falls, is the first center to use Yahoo's green data center design, known as the Yahoo Computing Coop. It was funded in some cases by a $9.9 million grant from the Department of Energy.

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