The latest retweet doing the rounds involves people crying out in anguish that Facebook’s new Oregon data center gets its power from a coal powered plant and not alternative renewable sources of energy. The story comes from this article at, wait for it, treehugger.com, one of the most unbiased sources you could possibly find (not). The retweet links to a meta article at Alltop and I bet most never even clicked through to the original. It amazes me how people retweet incendiary statements based on a soundbite and absolutely no depth of knowledge on the subject.
Treehugger (can’t stop sniggering) asks:
But why would Facebook choose to site their new center at a place powered by coal over another place in renewable energy-rich Oregon? Look no farther than cost.
Er, exactly. Facebook is a business. They may not be public but they have shareholders. They have a fiduciary duty to keep costs low. And as the article also points out, data centers use a lot of power. Facebook uses a lot of power itself. The difference in cost would be enormous. It would be one very expensive statement which would have a massive impact on their bottom line. The sort of impact that causes shareholders to vote off directors or not invest in the company any further. And who would want to buy a company with an overhead like that.
If the world wants big business to use renewable energy then the market needs to provide it at a price point which enables the switch to be made within the context of sound business decision making.
My favourite statement however comes at the end:
Companies like Facebook can use their spending power to influence government policy over new clean energy capacity.
You are kidding right? Why the hell should they? If people don’t like it they can close their accounts. Somehow I doubt they will.
I am a massive proponent of clean air. I volunteer a lot of my time doing technical marketing work for Hong Kong Clean Air Network.
I will jump for joy when coal power plants are a thing of the past, although I won’t be chafing my thighs around any tall trees.
But the answer is not for consuming companies to make a stand and take a massive financial hit. Even if you could make them, that way leads to slower growth and more people on the dole queue.
The answer is for the market to innovate alternatives which can compete.
Then companies will face a no-brainer decision and be able to jump while maintaining their corporate responsibilities. Good for the environment. Good for the economy.
Oh, and just so you know; the data center where treehugger.com is hosted at a data center based in Pennsylvania.
And it’s powered by a coal plant.
Funny that.
Update:
I completely forgot about HipHop, possibly one of the greatest advances in energy saving ever developed for the data center industry.
One company found a way to run all their code in an efficient way (compiling it to C++ for the technically inclined). Same code. But a 50% reduction in required resources. That means halving the amount of servers.
Now many companies would keep such an advance to themselves and gain incredible competitive advantage. They would also own some potent intellectual property.
But this company decided to release the code as an open source project, available to all. The result? A possible paradigm shift in the power requirements of large scape web operations. Such a company should be lauded for its impact on the environment.
The name of the company? Facebook.
At least I did my research.