Apple continues to score big and almost doubled its profits for its latest quarter. However, this did not stop Greenpeace from giving a
'Fail' score to the company when it comes to being a environmentally responsible. Greenpeace recently released its 'Green League Report' and Apple was placed at the bottom of the list. This should not come as surprising news since the company has never been known for showing any concern for social or environmental responsibility.
Greenpeace based its report on the data centers used by these companies. It took into account the coal dependency of these data centers and then calculated how dirty a company's data is. Apple also got slammed for its new data center in North Carolina. The new center is likely to triple the company's energy consumption. The energy used by the data center is roughly equal to the energy consumption of 80,000 average US houses.
Apple got 54.5 percent on "coal intensity" scale and is followed by yet another socially insensitive company, Facebook. However, unlike Apple, Facebook is seeking a little redemption on this front. The company's new data center in Oregon will attempt to use replace a fraction of its coal use with Solar energy. Apparently, the data center will employ an array of solar panels, which will generate 204,000 kilowatt hours of energy annually. However, this energy is teeny weeny fraction of the total energy used by the data center. Though, the exact power usage of the data center is not known, but is likely to be in the vicinity of a few thousand Megawatt hours.
Greenpeace also slammed the companies for the lack of transparency about their energy consumption. The energy intensive companies guard their consumption data with vengeance. Other companies featured in the list of shame are IBM, Twitter and Google. However, Google and IBM were lauded for their efforts for reducing their consumption level. Google has long been investing in the wind power projects. Since, the world is now moving towards cloud computing, the report very timely draws attention toward the environmental impact of the large scale data centers, which form the backbone of cloud computing.