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Tech

Big Data's Dirty Secret

Greenpeace accuses some internet companies of using fossil fuels and lacking transparency.
Image: Shutterstock/White78

For all the futuristic aspirations of internet companies, there’s one area where some major players are still stuck in the past: energy. That’s according to a new report by Greenpeace, which accuses some tech giants of pushing dirty, dirty data from centres powered by fossil fuels and keeping quiet about it.

The report gives companies a scorecard based on their commitment to renewable energy. While some passed easily with a handful of As and Bs—Apple and Facebook found themselves top of the class—others, including Twitter and Amazon Web Services (AWS), were given mainly Fs.

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The focus of the report has shifted with the changing technological times to look closely at the energy requirements of companies’ data centres and networks, as well as end user devices. It quotes a 2012 report by the Global E-Sustainability Initiative that estimates the energy demand of data centres will increase 81 percent by 2020. Energy-saving technologies will of course help soften that impact--"However, it is difficult to assess which, if any, of these technologies will be proven and reach a large enough scale by 2020 to have a material impact on data centers’ GHG emissions."

It puts IT-related emissions at two percent of global emissions—about the same as the aviation industry.

While it’s harder to envisage emissions coming from the hum of your laptop compared to, say, the roar of a jet engine, keeping data centres in power requires a lot of, well, power. And as our data consumption increases and more people get connected, that’s only going up. As Greenpeace writes, “The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector’s sustainability efforts.”

The report commended some companies for committing to clean energy—it praised Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce for setting goals of 100 percent renewable energy for their data centres and making steps in that direction.

It was considerably less effusive in its verdict on AWS (whose data centres provide storage and computing to a whole load of internet heavy-hitters) and Twitter:

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“Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the infrastructure for a significant part of the internet, remains among the dirtiest and least transparent companies in the sector, far behind its major competitors, with zero reporting of its energy or environmental footprint to any source or stakeholder. Twitter lags in many of the same areas.”

To be fair to those companies, Greenpeace’s judgment is necessarily based on estimation—neither company makes much, if any, information available about the energy they use. AWS, Greenpeace wrote, was “the least transparent of any company we evaluated.” They noted however that these companies had data centres near utilities in Virginia and Georgia that rely heavily on coal.

An AWS spokesperson disputed the findings, telling the Guardian they missed the mark and were inaccurate, while Twitter said it was striving for “even greater efficiency of operations.”

But it’s also that lack of transparency in the first place that contributes to their low scores. It used to be that most tech companies kept their energy usage a (dirty) secret out of competitiveness concerns, but the report said there was a trend of data centre operators “acknowledging that revealing energy information is no longer equivalent to publishing the secret formula for Coca-Cola.” But AWS and Twitter both got an F grade in transparency.

While tech companies should of course be looking to improve their environmental record, Greenpeace does hold them to a particularly high standard, expecting them to push for greater clean energy generally, and not just in their own operations: One of the scores was for advocacy, with marks given if they pushed energy providers and government decision-makers for more renewables.

Of course, the responsibility here doesn’t lie entirely with tech companies, though they surely have a vested interest if they want to keep meeting energy demands of growing data centres—pushing for a widespread contingency for when we run out of stuff to burn certainly wouldn’t be a bad idea. Clean tech might not be the internet, but it’ll play a large role in its future sustainability.