The latest whine from Greenpeace is pretty funny. A rational person, capable of evaluating both costs and benefits, might think it a good thing to consolidate computing infrastructure into a cloud service designed to reduce costs by achieving greater economies of scale and better utilisation of available resources.
So Greenpeace overestimated Apple's energy consumption by a mind-blowing 500%.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
A student of history might note the remarkable growth in prosperity and improvement in environmental awareness that accompanied the evolution from the old industrial economy to the modern information technology world.
Not Greenpeace. The eco-fascists think cloud computing is “dirty”.
And which companies are guilty of these dirty deeds? Akamai, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce, Twitter and Yahoo.
In the short version of the report, only Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are singled out on the front page, even though three of those - Yahoo, Google and Facebook - actually occupy first, third and fourth place respectively in the ranking of the companies that Greenpeace evaluated (see the full report), and Flickr wasn't evaluated at all.
Not that Greenpeace's scores mean very much.
For a start, the report seems to contradict itself. It quotes oldish data from a Climate Group and Global e-Sustainability Initiative study, entitled: “SMART 2020: enabling the low carbon economy in the information age”, which says demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020, while carbon dioxide emissions will grow by less than 75%. It says PC ownership will quadruple between 2007 and 2020 to 4 billion devices, and emissions will double over the same period. It notes that mobile phone ownership will almost double by 2020, but emissions will only grow by 4%. Likewise, broadband uptake will treble over the same period, with emissions doubling over the entire telecoms infrastructure.
In short, computing will be twice as energy efficient by 2020 as it was only 13 years earlier, as measured by actual carbon dioxide emissions. This massive improvement is thanks in large part to the growth in consolidated data centres and cloud computing. These advances reduce the cost to companies and individuals who use technology and it should pacify those who fret over climate change. When we produce more from the same unit of energy, this is a good thing.
But Greenpeace detests the cost-cutting motive: “More cloud computing companies are pursuing design and citing strategies that can reduce the energy consumption of their data centres, primarily as a cost containment measure. For most companies, the environmental benefits of green data design are generally of secondary concern.”
And to prove that its concerns are more valid than those who live in the real world, Greenpeace proceeds to fudge the SMART 2020 numbers with a raft of adjustments to get scarier figures.
It helps to understand Greenpeace's strategy. Demonising little old ladies for making their own tea in inefficient little kettles is not a political winner. Evil is reserved for big companies with good brand recognition. Whine about Apple, and Apple will reply. Instant marketing for Greenpeace; just add waffle.
It's the same principle as the hammering Foxconn got from fretful busybodies over working conditions. Everyone knows it as “the factory where they make Apple iPhones”. Nobody ever mentions the dozens of other technology companies for which Foxconn also makes equipment, nor do they highlight the working conditions in less visibly-branded factories where workers are much worse off than at Foxconn.
Like with the Foxconn story, the lies spread halfway around the world before the truth had time to get its boots on.
Take Apple, for instance, which has become the most recent poster child for consumerist apathy in the face of evil corporate greed and exploitation.
Greenpeace says Apple's data centre in North Carolina uses 100MW of power. Not true, says Apple. It draws about 20MW. So Greenpeace overestimated Apple's energy consumption by a mind-blowing 500%. That's a very big exaggeration to support a storyline about dirty cloud computing. With margins of error like that, what possible value could anything in Greenpeace's report have?
The activists proceed to sniff at Apple's solar-array and biogas-fuelled power supply: “While much has been made of this announcement, it will cover only 10% of their total generation for the data centre.”
Except, it won't. It will cover at least 60%, and is the largest of its kind in the US. A new data centre, to come on-stream next year, will be 100% reliant on renewable energy, according to Apple.
Greenpeace's defensive response was to blame Apple for not disclosing proprietary information in the first place, and then to chide Apple for the cost of its data centre, from which it had extrapolated energy usage numbers using industry averages. Of course, it should come as no surprise to environmentalists that a green-energy data centre would be much more expensive than one relying on cheap coal-fired power, so using industry averages was clearly not appropriate. Besides, if you're trying to rank companies and give them “clean energy index” scores, shouldn't you get a little closer to the truth than industry averages?
With wildly overestimated numbers and layers of fudge factors to make even those look worse, Greenpeace concludes that Apple, Google, Microsoft and company continue to emit too much carbon dioxide for its liking.
True, they do. Despite vast amounts of capital invested in more efficient technology and cleaner energy sources, these companies have not succeeded in shutting themselves down.
Perhaps the activists at Greenpeace should consider that if it weren't for the cloud, we'd all have far more computing power on site, and be even further removed from Greenpeace's delusional ideal. Worse, they wouldn't have big juicy corporate brands to protest against, because they'd have to hunt down each and every one of us. And we're hard to find, because unlike Greenpeace, most of us are hard at work making the world a better place.
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