The Web is Killing Polar Bears

The 'cloud' of data that is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal, Greenpeace said in a new report to be released on Tuesday.

A Facebook facility being built in Oregon will rely on a utility whose main fuel is coal, while Apple is building a data warehouse in a North Carolina region that relies mostly on coal, the environmental organization said in the study.
"The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power,'' said Greenpeace, which argues that Web companies should be more careful about where they build and should lobby more in Washington for clean energy.

The growing mass of business data, home movies and pictures has ballooned beyond the capabilities of many corporate data centers and personal computers, spurring the creation of massive server farms that make up a "cloud,'' an emerging phenomenon known as cloud computing.

Data center energy use already is huge, Greenpeace said.
If considered as a country, global telecommunications and data centers behind cloud computing would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use in 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan, it concluded.