Greenpeace Report Identifies Energy Deficiencies in Cloud Use

It’s hard to dispute that employing a utility infrastructure either as a cloud or even a multi-tenancy environment will provide opportunities for energy efficiencies that are greater than what an average mid-sized enterprise can experience in-house. For the mid-sized business and large enterprises, a cloud deployment does promise lower operating costs and zero hardware investment.

The question that remains, however, is whether the cloud is still a significant ‘Green IT’ win. For the enterprises that are evaluating, or have deployed cloud there are real benefits. These include the fact that cloud-based services have significantly lower capitalcost barriers to deployment than deployment scenarios involving in-house infrastructure. The on-demand nature of cloud infrastructure also means that in addition to solutions being deployed more cheaply, they are deployed faster.

A recent Greenpece report titled “How Clean Is Your Cloud?” stated that Internet companies who often conduct themselves as environmentally aware are moving facilities to North Carolina, Virginia, northeastern Illinois and other regions whose main sources of energy are coal and nuclear power. However, a few other companies, including Google (News - Alert) and Facebook, have demonstrated much bigger commitment to shifting some of their electricity demands to renewable sources like wind, solar energy and hydroelectric power.

According to Gary Cook, an information technology analyst at Greenpeace and lead author of the report, “Companies whose images are tied to the Internet are likely to be the most responsive to the findings. They are very brand-conscious companies. They want to be presenting themselves as responsible and innovative.”

He added that the companies “don’t want people to be concerned about, when they post their videos, that that’s somehow attached to coal.” The bottom line is that many customers confirm that energy efficiency is a desirable side-benefit and not a primary driver for cloud adoption.  For most organizations cloud adoption is about saving “green,” not being Green.

The North Carolina data center powers Apple’s (News - Alert) iCloud – one of several cloud computing services offered by companies that allow consumers to store large amounts of data, including photos and videos, and perform other digital tasks. Apple disclosed that the data center would consume about 20 million watts at full capacity – much lower than Greenpeace’s estimate, which is 100 million watts. In territory served by the Duke utility company, a million watts is enough to power 750 to 1,000 homes.

In another response to the report, Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy (News - Alert), defended the utility’s environmental record. “The utility was required by state regulators to ensure that its energy was affordable, reliable and as environmentally clean as possible. The [Greenpeace] report not only focused exclusively on environmental factors, but also neglected to point out that the utility was retiring some coal plants and installing scrubbers – which reduce smokestack emissions – on others.”

“Our emissions have come down substantially over the last decade,” Mr. Williams said. Now that new cloud platforms and services are coming at a steady clip, it's helpful to give endusers a reality check: The cloud is most definitely not the answer to all energy and IT problems.

Google disclosed in September that in absolute terms, the company’s data centers consume enormous amounts of power: almost 260 million watts, or about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant. ¶ Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president for technical infrastructure at Google, said in a statement that the company welcomed the Greenpeace report and believed that it would intensify the industry’s focus on renewable energy.