44 
Apple’s pretty products do a good job distracting from the bleak reality of how they’re made. As we’ve learned from the Foxconn debacle, that means sub-standard working conditions. But it’s not just people that are affected, but also the environment.
Built to support iCloud, Apple’s new data center in North Carolina is another strike against the world’s most valuable company. In fact, the behemoth, which is one of the largest such facilities on the planet, is powered mostly by coal, through Duke Energy. Even though Cupertino is building a solar farm down the road from the data center, that renewable source only accounts for 10 percent of its juice.
Apple is one of the worst offenders in the industry when it comes to the use of clean energy. Greenpeace estimates that just 15.3 percent of Apple’s energy is clean, while 55.1 percent is powered by coal. That figure makes it the heaviest user of this dirty power out of any other tech company. Google by contrast uses 28.7 percent coal, with 39.4 percent of its energy classified as clean, and for Facebook, those figures are 39.4 percent and 36.4 percent respectively.
Apple has obviously reached astronomical levels of profitability and success, so it can afford to clean up its act when it comes to energy. And for our sake, let’s hope it does. [Mother Jones]
Apple Decides to Limit Its One-to-One Service to Safari Users Only
How Apple Plans to Define the Industry Standard in SIM Cards
Facebook Now Has One Billion Active Users
Maybe Apple should be putting some of that money into Solar research since they are building a farm of panels.
Though the idea of a iPanel without a metal unibody might be scary to them.
Quite funny; I read an article last night about how wrong Greenpeace’s numbers are: http://allthingsd.com/20120417/greenpeaces-hazy-icloud-numbers/
Basically Greenpeace have estimated the datacenter power usage according to the cost of the project ($1bn) and assigned a power usage of 1MW per $15m. This meant they came to a power draw of 100MW while Apple claim it is 20MW. This is obviously a huge discrepancy.
However they failed to take into account that a significant proportion of the cost is going into solar and fuel cell power sources to make the datacenter cleaner.
More covered here: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/04/17/apple-greenpeaces-cloud-math-is-busted/
Surely, unless I’ve read it wrong, the very title of this Gizmodo post is based on a massive assumption on Greenpeace’s behalf?
A more fitting title would perhaps be “The biggest company in the world uses alot of coal, probably”.
Not very attention grabbing but at least its honest
Yes, it appears Giz blindly accepted the Greenpeace numbers despite there being plenty of sources (including publicly available records from the power companies that supply these datacenters) that refute them.
In my opinion Greenpeace has lost all it’s credibility (along with PETA) with its sensationalist, unrealistic agendas, sloppy research and heavily biased reporting.
Wa? a ‘daeta’ centre?
There is no R in Data.
I completely blame blog sites like Gizmodo for this:
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/18/greenpeace-activists-protest-at-apples-irish-offices-over-data-center-energy-use/
Focusing solely on Apple in their posts and not reading the arguments against Greenpeace’s report. The factual figures for Apple’s DataCenter’s have been put to Greenpeace but no one has responded. Funny that.