GRANTS PASS, Ore. | After an emotional breakup with
the timber industry, Prineville, Ore., was thrilled to get friended by
Facebook.
The social networking site chose the high-desert timber town of 10,000
to take advantage of its cool nights and dry air in hopes of making its
first data center an energy-efficiency landmark.
But the concept failed to impress Greenpeace.
In a report posted on the Internet last month, the environmental group
praised Google and Yahoo for tapping hydro power but challenged Facebook
for building in coal country.
The feud shows how hard it can be for the computing industry to
meaningfully reduce its environmental footprint. It can add to its green
glow through energy efficiency, but Greenpeace argues that information
technology companies should care more about the source of their power.
As the nation works to green up the grid in an effort to combat climate
change, data centers are demanding more energy than ever. A 2007
Environmental Protection Agency report estimated that data centers
doubled their consumption from 2000 to 2006 to 61 billion kilowatt
hours. That's 1.5 percent of the grid and enough for 5.8 million
households.
"If you want to really be responsible for your carbon footprint, you
should be trying to provision your electricity supply with renewable
energy as much as possible," said Greenpeace climate policy analyst Gary
Cook.
In what might be considered adding insult to injury, Greenpeace even
created a special Facebook page with a smokestack logo to say the data
center would be a greenhouse-gas hog.
But the complex equation that goes into how much something costs still
counts, said Ken Patchett, who was hired away from Google to run
Facebook's data center in Prineville.
"At the end of the day, Facebook is like any other major competitive
business," he said. "We do have to manage to our bottom line."
Facebook, Yahoo, Google and others have become fans of the Northwest as
they build more warehouses filled with computers to store data.
Facebook said the energy-saving features allowed by the Prineville
climate outweighed the source of the electricity, and that the utility
PacifiCorp is greening up its power sources, expanding wind power to
2,000 megawatts by 2013. It currently gets 58 percent of its power from
coal and 21 percent from renewables.