Renewable Energy at Heart of Facebook Protest

The use of renewable energy, rather than electricity from coal-fired generators, is at the heart of the massive Greenpeace protest against Facebook. So far over half a million people have protested at the social networking site’s plans to run it’s new data centre on electricity supplied by carbon fuel burning power stations.

With over 5oo million users Facebook consumes massive amounts of electricity to play its videos and store information. The company will not say how much power it actually uses, but its plans to build what experts expect to be the world’s largest centralised data storage centre in Portland, Oregon will probably mean that it will consume more electricity than many third world countries.

When Facebook announced  the new data centre in February the plans showed that electricity would be supplied by Pacific Power which uses coal powered generators to produce 67 per cent of its electricity and renewable sources for only 12 per cent of its production.

In a statement Facebook said: “It is true that the local utility for the region we chose, Pacific Power, has an energy mix that is weighted slightly more toward coal than the national average. However, the efficiency we are able to achieve because of the climate of the region and the reduced energy usage that results minimises our overall carbon footprint.

“Said differently, if we located the data centre most other places, we would need mechanical chillers, use more energy, and be responsible for more overall carbon in the air – even if that location was fuelled by more renewable energy.”

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