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Greenpeace sets Facebook world record

Nikita Ramkissoon
By Nikita Ramkissoon
Johannesburg, 18 Apr 2011

Tens of thousands of Facebook users around the world established a Guinness World Record last week for the most comments to a Facebook post in 24 hours.

The Facebook users joined with international environmental NGO Greenpeace to call on the social networking giant to start powering its services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.

The comments will be displayed for Facebook employees on an LED screen placed outside its California office, encouraging the company to meet Greenpeace's Earth Day challenge to phase out its use of coal power over the next decade.

“In places as diverse as Cairo and Madison, Wisconsin, Facebook is helping to foster activism and foment reform,” Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harrell says.

“This world record shows that people want Facebook to lead a new energy revolution by committing to phase out coal and power its transformative services with clean, safe renewable energy.”

The IT sector is the fastest growing in the world in terms of electricity use, says Greenpeace.

A Greenpeace report found that at current growth rates, data centres and telecommunication networks, two key components of the cloud that Facebook depends on to deliver its services, will consume in 2020 more than triple their current consumption and over half the current electricity consumption of the US. This is more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.

“By connecting its computing power to dirty energy sources, Facebook is lagging behind other IT companies like Google and Yahoo that are prioritising the use of renewable energy in their business,” Harrell says.

“Greenpeace is calling upon Facebook to commit to a plan by Earth Day that phases out its use of coal over the next decade. It is time for Facebook to step up and become a clean energy leader.”

Facebook will soon open the first of two new data centres, each of which Greenpeace says will use enough electricity to power roughly 40 000 US homes.

Greenpeace, along with almost 700 000 Facebook users, has called upon Facebook to 'unfriend coal' and transition away from using 19th Century technology to power its 21st Century services.

The issue began in January 2010, when Facebook said it would merge its various data centres into one building in Oregon. Facebook had boasted the centre's energy-efficient technologies, including an evaporative cooling system that negated the need for traditional cooling systems.

Greenpeace, however, pointed fingers at Facebook, saying the data centre's electricity will be provided by Pacific Power, which is a coal power plant. Greenpeace said in a release last February that 83% of the utility's generation capabilities come from coal, geothermal, and natural gas resources. Facebook responded, saying it was actually 58%.

The social network says its facility in Prineville, Oregon, is said to use 38% less power than existing centres. It hopes, by making the innovations public, to cut the amount of electricity the industry consumes.

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