Facebook collaborate with Greenpeace

Facebook, meanwhile, has sniped back, claiming at one point that Greenpeace's own energy record was just as bad. Now, it's to collaborate with Greenpeace on promoting green energy and encouraging major utilities to develop renewable energy generation. Facebook's agreed to work towards powering all its operations using clean and renewable energy.

"Our datacenter siting policy now states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy," says Marcy Scott Lynn of Facebook's sustainability program. Most of the electricity that powers Facebook’s data centers — and most other data centers — comes from coal-fired power plants. Greenpeace’s Facebook campaign, dubbed Unfriend Coal and centered on a Facebook page, gathered 700,000 supporters, according to the organization. Greenpeace and Facebook issued a statement Thursday outlining a collaboration on clean and renewable energy. Facebook launched the industry coalition in April with the aim of sharing and promoting specifications for energy-efficient data centers.

Facebook received an F on infrastructure siting in Greenpeace’s Clean Cloud Power Report Card. Of the 10 data center operators rated on the report card, Facebook was second to Apple in highest coal intensity for mix of power sources. Facebook’s agreement with Greenpeace also calls for the company to pursue research into clean energy for data centers and to “engage in a dialog” with the company’s utility providers about increasing the supply of clean energy to Facebook’s data centers. Greenpeace and Facebook promised to work together to use social media to organize people around energy conservation and clean energy issues.

Facebook partnered with the Natural Resources Defense Council and energy use data provider Opower in October to use social media to raise consumer awareness about energy efficiency. The Open Compute Project’s formation coincided with the opening of Facebook’s energy-efficient Prineville, Oregon data center. Greenpeace reacted positively to the Open Compute Project and Swedish data center plans.--Thursday’s announcement completes the thaw in the Greenpeace-Facebook relationship.

Facebook on Thursday announced a partnership with Greenpeace to promote and prefer the use of clean, renewable energy in its data centers, an arrangement brought about by a 20-month campaign by the environmental organization to encourage Facebook to "unfriend coal." Apple's energy usage was deemed to be the most reliant on coal (the source of 54.5% company energy usage) and Facebook followed, with 53.2% of its energy coming from coal. "Facebook is committed to supporting the development of clean and renewable sources of energy, and our goal is to power all of our operations with clean and renewable energy," Facebook said in a statement.