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Who’s Right? Greenpeace or Facebook?
Greenpeace has been blasting Facebook over the fact that the company’s new Oregon data center will receive its power from a local utility that gets the majority of its power from coal. As Greenpeace steps up its campaign with letters and videos targeting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, we thought we’d get your opinion. Who’s right in this dispute? Take our poll.
About Rich Miller
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Mats Knapp
Posted September 20th, 2010Yes, energy efficiency is an important tool to get away from coal, but we need to get away from coal fast and Facebook actually could make an footprint in history if you publically took a stand against coal
sofwan tsauri
Posted September 20th, 2010facebook must stop using coal for it’s power
Sam
Posted September 20th, 2010I need to stop using coal, nuclear power, and facebook.
Wait, I’ve already done that last one.
Anna
Posted September 20th, 2010Both efficiency and the choice of energy source are important.
But Facebook is wrong to claim that just because their data centre is ‘efficient’ that it is therefore ‘green’… an efficient data centre that runs on coal power won’t stop climate change – it will just make the problem worse a little more slowly than otherwise…
chris
Posted September 20th, 2010ok, Improved energy efficiency is A way to reduce the carbon footprint, but if Facebook turned to renewables, that would be a better way. And as facebook is iconic, they should lead rather than wait and follow. It’s a great opportunity for Mark Zuckerberg to do something in the real world.
I appreciate the sentiment regarding Coal, but we need to keep in mind that Coal is our most readily available resouce in this country, and that a lot of work has gone into cleaning up the exhaust from the process. It is unfair to Facebook to somehow make them a poster child for a problem that is not of their own making. Most of the people that will be reading this get their power from coal at some level. We can’t have nuclear power plants if the Government won’t let us build them, and we can’t all get powr from Hydro everywhere.
Facebook should find a renewable source to power its data center and get off coal.
Scott U
Posted October 18th, 2010Facebook should not have disclosed their datacenter locations. 
RESOURCE LINKS:
Building A Cloud-Savvy Model for TCO and ROI
How Storage is Shaping The Cloud Data Center
Bringing Colo to the Customer: Modular Gets Local
Microsoft’s $1 Billion Data Center
September 17th, 2010