Apple committed to using only 100 per cent renewable energy sources to power its facilities. Particularly the new data centre Apple opened in Maiden, North Carolina. But the environmental group Greenpeace issued a report that raises question about Apple’s commitment.
Greenpeace rescored Apple’s performance, updating an April analysis of the clean energy performances of Apple and several other companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and also companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google. All these companies have some or all of their operations based in the cloud.
In May, Apple made the welcoming commitment that all their data centers will be coal-free and powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. But unfortunately, the analysis by Greenpeace revealed that Apple still hasn’t committed to their promises. They even don’t have a plan yet to outline a realistic plan to eliminate the reliance on coal to power its iCloud centre. Apple’s iCloud service is a service which allows Mac, iPad, iPhone and other Apple device users to back up data to the cloud. This service operated from the North Carolina data centre.
But Apple sure wants to be an environmentally friendly company. They even have a whole section on their website devoted to their environmental commitment and practice. In this section, they say that four of their data centers, the one in Austin, Texas, Sacramento, California, Munich, Germany, and Cork, Ireland are already 100 per cent powered by renewable energy.
As to the North Carolina data centre, apple promises to have it running on 100 per cent renewable energy by the end of 2012. They have some major projects under way to achieve this goal. For example, they want to build the nation’s largest private solar arrays and build the largest operating non-utility fuel cell installation.
Greenpeace thinks that this are very nice promises but doesn’t believe that Apple can reach these goals. One of the reasons is that Duke Energy, the utility that serves North Carolina, still relies mostly on coal and nuclear power for their electricity generation. It’s predicted that only 4 per cent of the generating capacity will come from renewable by 2030.
So Greenpeace is now calling on Apple to produce and use their own power from an onsite generation so they can directly power their North Carolina facility. The grid power from Duke Energy can then only be used for backup. So they want Apple to invest directly in renewable energy generation in North Carolina instead of buying from Duke Energy’s. They also want Apple to use biogas to directly power fuel cells at the Maiden data centre.
According to Greenpeace, what Apple also can do is use their leverage as a major Duke Energy customer to push the utility to use more renewable energy sources. They could also make access to renewable energy sources a top priority when they plan on building new data centers.
The report by Greenpeace assigns an overall Clean Energy Index to each company, expressed as a percentage. They also record the use of coal and nuclear sources for the electricity it consumes and they grade companies on the transparency of their energy use disclosures, how they site their infrastructure, their energy efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigation, their use of renewable and their clean energy advocacy.
According to all these performance measurements. Apple improved some of its performance in the July rescoring of the April report. Their Clean Energy Index moved from 15.3 per cent to 22.6 per cent. Their use of coal-generated electricity dropped from 55.1 per cent to 33.5 per cent and they now only use 11.6 per cent nuclear energy instead of 27.8 per cent.
Greenpeace will also review the Clean Energy Index for Amazon and Microsoft later this year.
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