greenpeace.org  Clicking Clean:  How Companies  are Creating the  Green Internet  April201  Executive  Summary  For the estimated 2.5 billion people around the  world who are connected to the internet, it is  impossible to imagine life without it. The internet  has rewoven the fabric of our daily lives – how  we communicate with each other, work and  entertain ourselves – and become a foundation  of the global economy.  Seemingly on a daily basis, new businesses that use  the internet as their foundation are disrupting and often  replacing long-standing business models and industries.  From music and video to communications and mail, more  and more of our “offline” world is moving online. We can  expect that trend to continue and accelerate as the global  online population reaches 50% of the world’s projected  population, moving from 2.3 billion in 2012 to an expected  3.6 billion people by 2017.While the online world appears to grow at the expense  of some traditional business models in the offline world,  it is rapidly creating increased demand for at least one  offline product: electricity. The rapid growth of the cloud  and our use of the internet have produced a collective  electricity demand that would currently rank in the top six  if compared alongside countries; that electricity demand  is expected to increase by 60% or more by 2020 as the  online population and our reliance on the internet steadily  increase.While shifting businesses to an online model can create  significant gains in energy efficiency, the energy appetite of  the internet continues to outstrip those gains thanks to its  dramatic growth. Critically, the internet’s growing energy  footprint has thus far been mostly concentrated in places  where energy is the dirtiest.  But there is good news to report: since our last report,  How Clean is Your Cloud? (April 2012),3 leading data  center operators have taken key steps toward building  a green internet, particularly those companies that have  committed to build a 100% renewably powered platform.  These commitments are having a profound impact in the  real world, shifting investment from legacy coal, gas and  nuclear power plants to renewable energy technologies,  and disrupting the status quo among major electric utilities.  In US states like North Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, these  companies’ commitments to clean energy are resulting in  large amounts of wind and solar power displacing coal, gas  and nuclear plants or preventing them from being built, to  the tangible benefit of the global climate and communities  living in those states.  The environmental rationale for technology companies  to act has been clear for many years, as a rapid shift to  renewable energy is necessary to stem the worst impacts  of climate change. Now, the business case is becoming  more compelling as well: costs for renewable energy  continue to drop, prices for fossil fuel-based electricity are  rising, and leading companies are perceiving those price  cues. They are also heeding customers who increasingly  value sustainability.  Unfortunately, despite the leadership and innovation  demonstrated by green internet pioneers, other companies  lag far behind, with little sense of urgency, choosing to  paper over their growing dirty energy footprints with status  quo solutions such as renewable energy credits and  carbon offsets while rapidly expanding their infrastructure.  Other internet companies have refused to pay even lip  service to sustainability, and are simply buying dirty energy  straight from the grid. Those companies, most notably  Amazon Web Services, are choosing how to power their  infrastructure based solely on lowest electricity prices,  without consideration to the impact their growing electricity  footprints have on human health or the environment.  A Green Internet is Crucial  for a Healthy Climate  We witness on a daily basis evidence that the foundation  of our offline world, our planet, is out of balance as a  result of climate change and other threats caused by  our reliance on dirty sources of energy. The scientific  community is issuing warnings, increasingly dire in nature,  that our continued reliance on the energy technologies  of the past is putting our future in grave danger. We need  to shift at internet-like speed to a world powered by  renewable sources of energy, disrupting the status quo  to which electric utilities and other fossil fuel providers are  desperately clinging.  We cannot make the transition to a renewable powered  society fast enough unless the internet is a platform leading  the world toward a clean energy future, and not building a  new attachment to our dirty energy past.  The pressing need for the internet to drive the clean  energy revolution is perhaps most evident in China, which  will host much of the internet’s growth in the decade to  come. China is also the country with the world’s largest  carbon footprint. As companies begin to build their  internet infrastructure there, acceptance of status quo  dirty energy would be disastrous for efforts to wean China  off of polluting energy sources. Innovative approaches  to clean energy procurement, by contrast, could be  transformational there.  Major brands are taking meaningful steps to steer their  infrastructure investments toward cleaner energy, but the  sector as a whole remains focused on rapid growth. Most  companies still are myopic to the critical nature of their  energy choices, focusing only on maximizing efficiency.  The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean  renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the  sector’s sustainability efforts.  With this year’s update, we have expanded our analysis to  examine a total of 19 global IT companies that are leading  the sector’s move to the cloud, including several major  colocation companies for the first time. These companies,  while less well-known than branded giants like Google  or Amazon, operate the data centers behind much of  the Internet. As a function of that expanded analysis, this  update now includes over 300 data centers in our survey,  up from approximately 80 in the previous edition. We  have updated our evaluation to account for how these  colocation companies are pursuing opportunities to play a  meaningful role in driving renewable energy deployment to  meet the internet’s energy needs.  Key Findings  (1) Six major cloud brands – Apple, Box, Facebook,  Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce – have committed  to a goal of powering data centers with 100 %  renewable energy and are providing the early signs  of the promise and potential impact of a renewably  powered internet.  (2) A number of leading brands, most notably Apple and  Facebook, have made significant improvements in  their energy transparency, discarding the previous  dogma within the sector of withholding energy data  due to competitiveness concerns. Transparency still  remains weak overall among many brands, particularly  colocation providers.  (3) 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.  (4) As a result of pressure by three major brands (Apple,  Facebook and Google) located in North Carolina,  Duke Energy, the largest utility in the US, adopted a  Green Source Rider, opening the market to renewable  electricity purchases for large customers in North  Carolina.  (5) Google maintains its leadership in building a renewably  powered internet, as it significantly expands its  renewable energy purchasing and investment both  independently and through collaboration with its utility  vendors.  (6) Facebook continues to prove its commitment to build a  green internet, with its decision to locate a data center  in Iowa driving the largest purchase of wind turbines in  the world.  (7) Apple is the most improved company since our last full  report, and has shown itself to be the most innovative  and most aggressive in pursuing its commitment to be  100% renewably powered.    Information Technology (IT) companies have  a central role to play in enabling a modern,  renewable-powered energy infrastructure.  An estimated 2.5 billion people are currently  online, and that number is expected to increase  by nearly 60% in the next five years.4 If the  rapid growth of the digital economy is linked to  renewable energy sources, the IT sector has the  opportunity to catalyze transformative change  in the consumption and production of energy,  with the potential to drive a significant reduction  in the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that cause  climate change.  Powering the Digital Economy  Despite significant improvement in transparency from  some companies since 2012, estimates of the energy  demand of our growing number of electronic devices  and the online world to which they are connected have  varied widely in their methodology and scope. Many of  the existing studies are based on country samples, annual  surveys or industry predictions that are difficult to compare  due to variant methods and areas of focus between the  three different parts of the internet system: data centers,  communication networks and end user devices.  One of the most comprehensive and well recognized  snapshots of the internet’s energy demand at the global  level is the SMART 2020 report (2008), and the update in  2012, the SMARTer 2020 report, which pegs IT-related  emissions at approximately 2% of global emissions, on par  with emissions from the global aviation sector.  The updated analysis of the SMARTer 2020 report shows  the relative shift in the energy footprint of the IT sector from  devices to data center and networks, tracking the ongoing  growth of internet-based computing and the shift to thin  client devices like tablets. Data centers will be the fastest  growing part of the global IT sector energy footprint as our  online world rapidly expands; their energy demand will  increase 81% by 2020.  Based on the estimates contained in the SMARTer 2020  analysis, the aggregate electricity demand of the cloud  (including data centers and networks, but not devices) in  2011 was 684 billion kWh. If compared with the electricity  demand of countries in the same year, the cloud would  rank 6th in the world, with demand expected to increase  63% by 2020.The US remains the largest consumer of data center  power globally, followed by Japan, the UK, Germany  and France. Emerging markets in Latin America, China,  Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Poland and Turkey are  countries where power demand is growing above the  global average (See China ” The Cloud’s Next Stop: China”  on page 17). Global power demand for data centers alone  grew to an estimated 40GW in 2013, an increase of 7%  over 2012.Data Drivers  Internet data will almost triple from 2012-2017, growing  from 44 to 121 exabytes.8 Streaming video and audio are  the biggest drivers of explosive data growth, along with  a 50% increase in the number of internet users globally.  Netflix and YouTube combined represent more that 50%  of internet traffic at peak times in North America.9 Globally,  YouTube remains the largest single source of data growth,  but social media services Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest  are also growing rapidly.    Power for a Green Internet  is Growing Rapidly  Renewable energy is available to power the Internet: the  transition to a clean energy economy is underway, driven  by the increasingly competitive price of renewable power  compared to fossil fuels. Germany is leading the way with  25% of its electricity coming from renewable sources,  and targets of 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. More and  more studies show how renewable energy can provide all  future power needs for countries across the globe; indeed,  countries like Scotland, Denmark and the Philippines have  now set targets to be 100% renewable powered.  In 2012, over half of all new installed electric capacity  worldwide came from renewable sources. In the EU  the share was almost 70%, mostly due to solar and  wind power growth. The US added more capacity from  wind power than any other energy form in 2012, and all  renewable energy made up about half of total electric  capacity additions during the year.10 Solar is booming  in the US as well, following in wind energy’s footsteps; in  2013, solar energy accounted for 29% of all new electric  generation capacity, up from 10% in 2012.In the US, there are now nine states that are getting 10%  or more of their electricity from wind power, with Iowa  (25%) – a data center hub – topping the list.12 In China,  wind energy produced 135TWh in 2013 – 22% more  power than all of the country’s nuclear reactors.Fossil Fuels: Barriers to a Green Internet  While penetration of renewable energy technologies  like wind and solar energy has grown rapidly in the past  decade, legacy energy generation from coal, gas and  nuclear power remains the status quo for most parts of  the world. To prevent the most dangerous climate change  (brought on by global warming of 2 °C or more), global  emissions must peak before 2020. The International  Energy Agency (IEA) states that most proven reserves of  fossil fuels must stay in the ground in order to meet those  goals.Coal is the chief culprit for global greenhouse gas (GHG)  pollution.15 A combination of energy efficiency, activism,  environmental regulations and cheaper gas has started a  wave of coal plant shutdowns in the US in recent years,  and caused a halt in the construction of new coal-fired  power plants.16 However, coal is still the source for  approximately 40 % of electricity in the US,17 and is still  burnt for electric generation around the world. It should be  the energy source most avoided by IT companies when  making decisions about how to power their data centers.    Is it green?  Nuclear: Nuclear power plants create unacceptable  risk to the environment and human health and are an  expensive diversion from the deployment of renewable  energy and energy efficiency required to stave off the  worst impacts of global warming. Efforts to revive  the nuclear industry in the US have failed due to the  impossibly high costs of building and maintaining  nuclear power plants – that money is best spent on  renewable sources of power.Hydropower: Hydropower is the most established  baseload clean energy source. Sourcing energy for a  data center from existing hydropower reduces carbon  emissions and is more environmentally friendly than  powering from a predominantly coal, gas, or nuclear  powered grid. However, using existing hydropower  does not lead to investment in new renewable energy  capacity, and large hydropower projects can have  detrimental effects on local environments. Wellplanned  and managed small-scale or microhydro  power projects have much less impact on river  ecosystems, and have the potential to provide a  scalable baseload power source for data centers.  Geothermal: Geothermal energy is a consistent and  renewable source of power in areas of the world where  it can be found. It provides significant and growing  electric generation in countries like the US, Iceland,  and Indonesia. In 2013, 600MW of new geothermal  power was added globally.21 Apple has recently  secured electricity for its Reno data center for local  geothermal sources.Biogas: Biogas can come from many sources;  methane from landfill sites and anaerobic digestion of  farm waste or sewage sludge are the most common.  The environmental benefits of biogas vary widely  depending on the source.  Biomass: Large-scale biomass used for electricity  generation can create significant environmental  problems, as the source of biomass is likely to come  from unsustainable sources. Wood pellets from the  southeast US are currently being shipped to the UK  and other parts of the EU, simultaneously driving  deforestation and undermining climate protection  goals in both countries.Dont Frack the Internet  In the US, utilities have vastly increased their generation  of electricity from gas obtained from unconventional  reserves, known as “shale gas” or “tight gas.” Shale gas  requires drillers to crack the reservoir rock using a process  known as hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic fracture methods  (“fracking”) are associated with a range of environmental  impacts, including the pollution of local groundwater.  While natural gas from conventional reserves has a lower  carbon intensity than coal, it still generates significant  GHG emissions.The GHG footprint of shale gas may be  significantly greater than for conventional gas, with some  life-cycle analyses showing shale gas to have a GHG  footprint that is higher than even coal, due to fugitive  methane emissions that are leaked during gas extraction  and transportation.18 While the increasing supply of natural  gas due to fracking has helped to shut down a number of  coal plants, shale gas also diverts investment away from  renewable energy.A small but increasing number of data center companies  are deploying natural gas-powered fuel cells on site as  both primary and backup power supplies. Natural gas  used in fuel cells creates less pollution than when it is  combusted in power plants, and fuel cells can be a good  mitigation strategy when used as a primary power source  to unplug a data center from a coal-fired grid (See “eBay  unplugs from a dirty grid: p 29). Nonetheless, natural gas  cannot be considered renewable even when used in fuel  cells.    China has 618 million internet users and is the single  largest internet market on the planet,24 with more people  online than inhabitants of Western Europe. In 2012 alone,  almost 53.5 million people came online in China – a rate of  1.7 new online users per second. China will add another  200 million users by 2015,25 with most accessing the  internet via mobile technology.  Internet companies are growing rapidly to provide  services for the new market. China’s largest internet  company, Tencent, ranked as the 4th largest in the world  by market capitalization, behind only Google, Facebook  and Amazon.26 In addition to Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and  Sina (owner of Weibo) are the biggest internet companies  in China. Both Tencent and Alibaba are expanding into  international markets. These companies are investing  billions of dollars in new Chinese data centers to match  their explosive growth.The rapid growth in internet use in China means huge  quantities of electricity will be needed to power internet  and online mobile services. Between 1.5% (700TWh) and  3% (1412TWh) of all electricity generation in China was  used for the internet in 2011, according to estimates.That power comes from a national grid that is currently  dominated by coal.  Chinese IT companies have been introducing energy  efficiency measures to reduce power consumption, but  the rapid growth in demand for online services means any  carbon savings are quickly overwhelmed, and emissions  from the Chinese IT sector will continue to grow unless  aggressive energy efficiency targets are combined with  prioritizing renewable energy sources.  International internet companies are all looking at options  to grab a share of the Chinese market. Amazon has just  announced plans for a Chinese-hosted AWS China Region  and IBM has plans to build its own Chinese data center29,30.  Industry experts are predicting that China will become the  key location for data center construction in the coming  years.Until 2012, any company plugging into the grid in China  had no choice over its source of power. However, the  Chinese Government is now acting to cap the growth of  coal power in key regions to tackle its air pollution crisis,  and is introducing ambitious renewable energy targets  to transition China’s electricity generation toward clean  energy. 32 In 2013, China increased its solar target to  35GW by 2015 and enacted new policies to allow private  solar installations to connect to the grid and achieve  attractive economic terms for the power they generate.The changes represent a crucial opportunity for internet  companies and data center operators in China to invest  directly in clean energy and slash their growing energy bills.  IKEA34 and Lenovo35 are investing in their own solar PV  installations in China. China’s top internet companies have  yet to take advantage of the new opportunities to invest  in solar power, as sector leaders Apple, Facebook and  Google are doing in the US.    Defining a Green  Internet Company  The IT sector has made substantial progress in driving  innovation in data center and server energy efficiency  design in the past 5-plus years, which is helping to curb the  expected growth in data center energy demand. However,  given the scale of predicted growth in the energy footprint  of the online world, all major online companies must  factor access to renewable sources of electricity into any  meaningful sustainability strategy. At both a company and  a sector level, delivering a green internet has to include a  long-term commitment to growing with renewable energy,  and a near-term strategy that will put both existing demand  and future growth on a path to being 100% renewably  powered.  The environmental rationale for technology companies  to act has been clear for many years, as a rapid shift to  renewable energy is necessary to stem the worst impacts  of climate change. Now, the business case is becoming  more compelling as well: costs for renewable energy  continue to drop, prices for fossil fuel-based electricity are  rising, and leading companies are perceiving those price  cues. They are also heeding customers who increasingly  value sustainability.  Fortunately, several leading companies have recently  made meaningful commitments to embed within their  business model the goal of a renewably powered internet,  and taken steps to implement those goals. These  leaders recognize their rapid energy demand growth as  a responsibility, but also as an opportunity to disrupt the  status quo in the energy sector and ensure their longterm  sustainability. While each company will have different  opportunities depending on their business model and  geographic location, key ingredients for any company  that wants to build their part of the internet with renewable  energy must include:  • A long-term commitment to become 100%  renewably powered.  • A commitment to transparency on IT performance  and consumption of resources, including the source  of electricity, to enable customers, investors, and  stakeholders to measure progress toward that goal.  • A strategy for improving energy efficiency while  increasing the supply of renewable energy, through a  mixture of procurement, investment, and corporate  advocacy to both electricity suppliers and government  decision-makers.  By making better energy choices and demanding more  from utility vendors, some internet companies are already  demonstrating their ability to be critical catalysts in driving  utilities and governments toward the development of  cleaner electricity generation that will ensure a truly green  online world – and a greener offline world for us all.    I. Energy Transparency  It is not possible to properly assess whether a company  or its products are sustainable without adequate  transparency on the company’s inputs and outputs. Just  a few years ago, while there were a number of companies  touting how “green” the cloud or their cloud was, very few,  if any, offered useful details on one of the biggest inputs  into a data center: electricity. The sector was reluctant  to discuss electricity use in any level of detail, as if IT  companies had adopted a collective code of silence.  Fortunately, we are beginning to see a meaningful shift  among leading data center operators, particularly within  the last two years, to acknowledging that revealing energy  information is no longer equivalent to publishing the  secret formula for Coca-Cola. Business and government  customers increasingly want to know key data points  on the environmental performance of facilities to which  they have “off-shored” their computing capacity, as  they have goals on carbon reduction and renewable  energy they expect their cloud provider to help them  achieve. Customers need reliable data to evaluate the  environmental performance and carbon footprint of their IT  vendors and suppliers. Among the major cloud providers,  only Amazon refuses to provide any details on the energy  performance and environmental impact associated with its  operations.  Despite the adoption by the Green Grid of new data  center environmental performance metrics like Carbon  Utilization Effectiveness (CUE, to measure carbon intensity)  and Green Energy Coefficient (GEC, to indicate the  amount of renewable energy),36 the number of companies  reporting under these new metrics remains quite low,  though there has been some recent improvement. eBay  provides the best example, including CUE as part of its  regularly updated Digital Service Effectiveness dashboard,  illustrating the performance connection between  environmental and business metrics.II. Renewable Energy  Commitment & Siting Policy  Starting with Facebook in 2011, six major cloud  companies have now made long-term commitments to  be 100% renewably powered (Apple, Box, Facebook,  Google, Salesforce and Rackspace). These commitments  send a powerful signal to both utilities and colocation  providers that if they expect to earn the business of these  companies, they will need to provide a strategy for how  they can help them achieve this goal.  Site selection is a critical decision for determining the nearterm  sustainability of the facility, whether a company is  building or renting data center space. Location has a large  impact on what options are available to leverage outside  air cooling, as well as access to renewable energy sources.  These six companies and others have also strengthened  the weighting of access to renewable electricity in their  site selection criteria and energy policies, as shown by  Facebook and through the energy policies published by  Google38 and Apple. “ Utilities are now much more  interested in collaborating  with us, and I think we are at  the beginning of a period in  which we could see a very  rapid change in the energy mix  utilities are providing in just a  few short years” Bill Weihl, Facebook Manager of Energy  Efficiency and Sustainability    III. Energy Efficiency and  Mitigation Strategy  Energy efficiency is a critical element in each aspect of  operating a data center: data center design to reduce  energy spent on cooling; energy efficient servers; and  software and load management strategies to maximize  utilization of data center compute capacity. Improvements  in the utilization of data center compute resources has  been a key factor in curbing the rate of growth across the  sector.  Those companies which own and operate their own  facilities are already aggressively managing energy use,  and many have begun to collaborate in sharing and  developing more efficient facilities with peer operators  as well as many equipment manufacturers (see “Open  Compute Project shows potential of collective action”  p 30). While some companies still conflate their energy  efficiency with operating a green data center, often with  little in the way of comparative data to substantiate their  claims, leading companies such as Akamai, Yahoo and  IBM are setting clear benchmarks for improving the  energy efficiency and carbon intensity of their operations,  and regularly report their progress to stakeholders and  customers.  IV. Clean Energy Strategy  The options for securing a greater supply of renewable  energy for data center operators varies significantly  depending on their business model (cloud, colocation or  managed hosting) and the options available to them by the  state or utility to choose their electricity supply or electricity  supplier.  Moving away from RECs  With a few notable exceptions, the trend away from simply  buying renewable energy credits (RECs) as a means of  achieving environmental performance goals has continued  and accelerated among data center companies. By  themselves, RECs (and their cousins carbon offsets) are  largely instruments that preserve the status quo, as they  do little to increase the amount of renewable energy on  the grid, or displace dirty sources of electricity.40 RECs  also do not provide any meaningful return on investment,  as companies must continue to “rent” the right to claim  they are renewably powered each year. Companies  that buy them should only do so when they do not have  more meaningful options for securing renewable energy  in the locations available to them. If companies do buy  RECs, they must at a bare minimum buy RECs that  demonstrate strong additionality, and are in close proximity  to the facilities they wish to claim are renewable. They  should otherwise look to make more direct investments  in renewable energy or push utility and government  policymakers to add more renewable energy on the grid,  allowing customers to have the right to directly contract  for it.  Utility-based Strategies to Procure  Renewable Energy  Renewable Grid Power  Options for grid-supplied renewable electricity for a  data center operator depend upon the location of the  data center, its proximity to available renewable energy  generation capacity, and the investment strategy of the  respective utility. High availability of low-cost hydroelectric  or renewable sources of energy has led many companies  to locate in the Pacific Northwest in the US (hydropower),  Iceland (geothermal), and Sweden (hydro and wind).  “ Our goal is to power  every facility at Apple entirely  with energy from renewable  sources — solar, wind, hydro,  and geothermal” Apple Facilities Report  on Renewable Energy  Investment in renewable energy  While renewable energy and energy efficient technologies  continue to develop and grow, there are still significant  gaps in private-sector financing needed to deploy them at  scale across many markets. IT companies such as Google  have demonstrated significant interest (over $1 billion  invested) in making direct clean energy investments.Google’s investments have created much higher impact  than when companies purchase RECs; such investment  can provide much-needed capital for the development and  deployment of renewable energy, as opposed to RECs,  which only “rent” the clean attributes of renewable energy  generated by others. Investments can be structured so  that the investing company becomes an owner of the  project, or is only providing capital for the tax equity portion  of the project.  V. Advocacy  In order to ensure that the supply of clean energy can  keep pace with a data center’s growing electricity demand  over its lifetime, companies need to at a minimum make  a corporate commitment to engage in energy policy  decisions in regions where they establish operations. As  large commercial consumers of electricity, IT companies  have standing with utilities and policy-makers to influence  acceleration in the investment and deployment of the clean  electricity supply, enabling data centers to operate on  100% renewable energy. Companies can support:  • Adoption of renewable energy investment incentives,  including those specific to the IT sector for energy  efficiency and renewable energy deployment.  • Deployment of cost-effective, regionally appropriate  sources of renewable power generation for data centers,  and the retirement of coal-fired generation.  • Increased distributed generation to drive greater  deployment of renewable energy, which increases  grid stability and enables the retirement of older, dirtier  centralized generation. Facebook and Microsoft recently  advocated for this in Iowa.• Investment in the development of grid infrastructure and  energy storage technology to enable higher utilization of  variable renewable energy sources, such as wind and  solar.  • Greater availability of options for renewable energy  procurement, especially in states with monopoly utilities  that do not allow third-party sales of electricity.  Renewable Energy Tariff Programs  A number of utilities have recently established renewable  energy tariffs, or green tariffs, as a means of offering  a renewable class of electricity service to interested  customers, often at the behest of major data center  operators.41 Utilities in regulated markets in the US, such  as North Carolina and Virginia, which otherwise offer very  low percentages of renewable energy in their generation  mix, have been among those to offer renewable energy  tariffs.  Direct Access  Direct Access programs allow the customer to purchase  electricity from a different generator than the utility,  potentially creating stronger options for securing a  renewable electricity supply. Direct access is not available  in every jurisdiction, and is often made difficult by utilities  aiming to discourage participation.  Non-Utility Strategies to  Procure Renewable Energy  On-Site Generation  A growing number of data center operators have installed  renewable or alternative generation technology (primarily  fuel cells) on site to generate power for their facilities. The  declining cost of solar technology, along with tax incentives  available in many jurisdictions, has made solar an  increasingly attractive option for some facilities. However,  it may be difficult technically or economically for many data  centers to power a significant portion of their electricity  needs with on-site renewable energy, unless there is  nearby land available, as Apple had in North Carolina.  In jurisdictions that allow third-party sales of electricity,  it may be possible for data center operators to allow the  renewable technology to be owned and operated by third  parties.  Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs)  An increasing number of cloud companies, such as  Google and Microsoft, have begun to take charge of their  electricity supply chain by signing long-term contracts to  buy renewable electricity from a specific source through  a utility or renewable energy developer via a power  purchase agreement (PPA), which helps to increase the  supply of renewable electricity onto the grid, and provides  the purchaser an effective buffer against rising or volatile  electricity prices.  “ The wonderful thing about  power purchase agreements  for clean energy is that they’re  at a fixed price, unlike brown  power costs which are going  up” Gary Demasi, Google Director  of Global Infrastructure.    Your Online  World: Green  IRL, or #dirty?  From social media to music, streaming video,  email and commerce, we are increasingly  moving much of our lives online. That means a  lot of new data to store. But where is that data  being stored, which companies are storing it,  and what kind of energy are they using?  Unlike internet giants like Google and Facebook, most  online companies do not, in fact, own their own data  centers. Most internet sites, video streaming services,  and cloud based storage services operate in data centers  managed by other companies, paying rent to digital  landlords that rent data center space or computing and  storage capacity. Many companies have turned to Amazon  Web Services to host their data, a problematic trend as  long as Amazon continues to power its data centers with  dirty forms of energy.  In the graphic on the next page, we offer a sampling to  show where some of the internet’s most popular sites and  services are being hosted – and the relative greenness  of the energy that those data centers are using. Energy  demand symbols are not drawn to scale and are meant  to offer a relative indication. For more information on the  energy footprints of each hosting company, see “Company  Scores Explained” starting on page 44.   Clicking Clean:  How Companies  are Creating the  Green Internet  Section Green Internet  Leaders and  Best Practices  II. Energy Efficiency & Mitigation  Greenhouse Gas Mitigation:  eBay Unplugs From a Dirty Grid  The electricity grid surrounding eBay’s Topaz data center  in Utah is one of the dirtiest in the United States, with  over 60% of the electricity still coming from coal-fired  generation.47 To address its outsized carbon footprint for  Topaz, eBay has chosen to effectively “unplug” its facility  from the local grid as its primary power source, relying  instead upon on-site fuel cells powered by natural gas  for 75% of its electricity needs, and using the grid only as  backup power in case of fuel cell failure.48 In addition, eBay  is currently financing a combined heat and power project  at a nearby facility, which it uses to offset the carbon  emissions produced by the natural gas powered fuel cells.  While fuel cells powered by natural gas are not renewable,  eBay’s innovative approach highlights the potential to use  distributed generation to power the cloud in certain areas,  rather than driving further utility investment in centralized  fossil fuel generation.  Honorable Mention: IBM, for repeated strong performance  on emissions reduction goals, and its patent for shifting  cloud computing demands on a distributed network to  meet environmental impact criteria.I. Energy Transparency  Energy Performance Transparency:  Facebook opens its books  Facebook dramatically improved its energy transparency  just a few months after it became a publicly traded  company in 2012, and now provides one of the most  accessible snapshots of its energy footprint in the sector.  Facebook now annually publishes its energy and carbon  footprint across its entire operations, and has also added  facility-specific performance dashboards45 to provide  nearly real-time reporting of the Power Usage Effectiveness  (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) of its data  centers. Facebook recently open-sourced the code for  those dashboards.46 While many companies remain  reluctant to provide facility-level information, Facebook  sets a high bar for others to meet by allowing its users to  follow the platform’s progress toward becoming 100%  renewably powered.    Energy Efficiency:  Open Compute Project  shows potential of collective  action (Multiple Companies)  Launched initially by Facebook in 2011, the Open  Compute Project (OCP) seeks to replicate the success  of the open-source software model in data center and  server design.50 OCP aims to spur improvements in energy  efficiency across the sector, which is critical to building an  internet that can be renewably powered. With participating  companies sharing their hardware designs, OCP could  disrupt the status quo among server manufacturers, a key  sector vendor, allowing best practices to drive the market  more quickly. While OCP’s impacts are still emerging, the  project shows the potential of collective action in tackling  the sector’s energy footprint.  OCP provides one model for how internet companies  could approach another key vendor, electric utilities, to  accelerate the deployment of renewable energy. Such a  collective approach could have a truly disruptive effect  on the status quo in the utility sector, which is stubbornly  clinging to outdated models of centralized, polluting power  plants. That type of effort would ultimately help both the  internet and utility sectors accelerate their transition to  sustainable business models based on renewable energy.  III. Siting Policy & Commitment to  Renewable Energy  Commitment to Renewable Energy: Rackspace,  Salesforce, and Box Show That Renters Can Buy  Renewable Too  Three rapidly growing cloud companies, Rackspace,  Salesforce and Box, all adopted 100% renewable energy  policies in 2013.51,52,53 These commitments show that the  desire and motivation to build a green internet is not limited  to big public brands or those that own and operate their  own data centers. While internet companies enjoy a more  limited set of options to meaningfully procure renewable  energy when they do not own their facilities, commitments  by such prominent and fast-growing cloud brands create  important pressure on colocation companies to offer their  best customers real options for green hosting.  The launch of companies such as GreenQloud and Green  Mountain, data center operators in Iceland and Norway  respectively, are evidence of the rising demand for cleaner  options in the colocation sector. Rackspace’s sustainability  director described why they set the ambitious 100 %  renewable goal at a Greenpeace forum in November,  saying: “Our customers simply expect green energy.”  Renewable Energy Commitment & Siting Policy:  Facebook harnesses Iowa’s wind  Facebook adopted a strong preference for renewable  energy supply in its data center siting policy in 2011 to  support its long-term commitment to make the platform  100% powered by renewable energy. The company  showed the power of that siting policy in April, 2013,  when it announced plans to build its fourth data center in  Iowa, choosing the state over neighboring Nebraska in  part because Iowa had better policies and a more willing  utility to help Facebook meet its renewable goals. Just two  Google increases  transparency on its data  center energy use  Google releases information  on exactly how much energy  it takes to provide searches,  email, youtube videos and  all other Google services, as  well as its energy mix.  Facebook to renewable  energy siting policy for  data centers  Facebook commits to a  siting policy with a stated  preference to locate data  centers in areas with  renewable energy available,  bringing to a close the 20-  month Greenpeace Unfriend  Coal campaign.  Apple commits to  100 % renewable  energy for iCloud  Apple announces a doubling  of its solar installation at its  North Carolina data center,  along with a commitment  that all of its data centers  will be powered by 100 %  renewable energy.    Green Internet  Leaders and  Best Practices  In North Carolina, Apple’s large-scale solar investment,  made economically feasible in part by its ability to leverage  tax incentives against other parts of its business, helped  propel North Carolina to third place in 2013 among US  states in solar growth.58 Apple’s solar installations, in  combination with pressure for better energy options that  it applied along with data center neighbors Facebook and  Google, led Duke Energy to offer a new tier of renewable  electricity service. Duke’s new Green Source Rider  program is geared to prevent losing additional business to  increased solar investments from customers like Apple.In Nevada, Apple’s solar installation broke new ground for  renewable energy from the local utility, NV Energy, which  agreed to work in partnership with Apple to co-develop a  solar project and adopt a Green Energy rate tariff. That tariff  opened the door for other companies to explore renewable  energy options, showing the catalytic power that data  center operators can have when they push for more  renewable energy.  Google Greens the Grid with Renewable Purchases  at Unprecedented Scale  Google has continued to lead the charge among major  IT brands by signing five long-term power purchase  agreements (PPAs) for renewable energy,60 helping to  green the grid for its data centers in Iowa,61 Oklahoma,and Finland63 to date. Google has also worked to expand  its options for green electricity in Oklahoma to include  buying directly from the utility, resulting in the utility making  its first ever renewable energy investment.64 In addition to  greening its data centers, Google has invested over $1  billion in 15 renewable energy projects, such as the world’s  largest solar plant in Southern California, collectively good  for 2 GW of clean power.weeks after Facebook’s announcement, MidAmerican  Energy, the local utility in Iowa, announced plans to invest  $1.9 billion to increase its wind generation by 1,050MW.  That plan simultaneously marked the largest investment  in Iowa’s history54 and the world’s largest order of wind  turbines.Facebook has since announced it has an agreementwith MidAmerican to purchase energy from a new wind  project nearby its data center to allow it to fully power the  facility with renewable energy, but its desire for renewable  energy clearly had a much larger catalytic role in Iowa – and  potentially in Nebraska as well. Facebook’s decision to  spurn Nebraska has spurred debate in that state legislature  to strengthen policies to support renewable energy  investment, so that Nebraska can be more competitive for  future data center business.IV. Renewable Energy  Deployment & Advocacy  A) Renewable Energy Deployment  Apple applies innovation to on-site solar in Nevada  and North Carolina  Apple has done the most of any data center operator to  make its part of the internet green through the on-site  installation of renewable energy, particularly solar power.  For both its Maiden, North Carolina and Reno, Nevada  data centers, Apple is deploying large solar farms on site  or at nearby locations to provide a significant amount of  new renewable energy to meet its data center electricity  needs and fulfill its goal to be 100% renewably powered  and coal-free.  eBay quits the coal grid  for its Utah data center  eBay installs fuel cells  for its Utah data center,  setting them up in a way  that allows the facility to  run independently from  the electricity grid, which  is heavily powered by coal  there.  Facebook publishes  its energy and carbon  footprint data for first  time  Facebook publishes  its 2011 energy and  carbon footprint data and  announced a 2015 goal  of powering 25% of the  platform with renewable  energy.  Rackspace commits to  100 % renewable energy  Rackspace commits to a  goal of powering its data  centers with 100 % clean  energy.  Salesforce commits to  100 % renewable energy  Salesforce becomes the  fifth company to commit to  powering its cloud with 100  % clean energy.    In purchasing and investing in renewable energy at scale,  Google is also developing options that can be seized  by others. Google’s earlier PPA in Iowa contributed to  MidAmerican’s decision to dramatically expand its wind  generation capacity and enter into an agreement to provide  Facebook wind energy directly.  B. Advocacy  Apple, Google, Facebook try to make NC into a  Clean Data Triangle  North Carolina has been a hot spot for data center  expansion (see “Where the Cloud Touches the Ground”,  p 40), featuring major facilities operated by three of the  largest internet brands, Apple, Facebook and Google. The  dirty energy mix offered by utility Duke Energy to these  large electricity customers prompted a North Carolina  newspaper in 2011 to ask whether the companies were  creating a “Dirty Data Triangle.”Since then, all three of the companies have developed  long-term commitments to be 100% renewably powered.  The companies successfully teamed up with others to  compel Duke Energy, the nation’s largest utility and one  of its biggest emitters of global warming pollution, to offer  renewable energy to its major customers through a special  “Green Source Rider.”67 While not perfect, the program  represents an important shift in North Carolina, particularly  coming from a utility that has sold only a one-size-fits-all  dirty energy offering for decades. Google, Facebook and  Apple’s leadership shows how innovative companies can  disrupt the status quo, and how the online world can drive  green behavior in the offline world, even wrestling changes  from recalcitrant utilities, when IT leaders work together.  Apple report reveals  its path to 100%  renewable energy  Apple releases an  environmental report  disclosing how it would  reach 100 % renewable  energy for its data centers  allowing customers to have  faith that Apple is meeting its  ambitions with real action.  Apple, Facebook,  Google Team Up to Push  Nation’s Largest Utility  to Renewable Energy  Offering  Apple, Facebook and  Google team up to compel  their electric utility in North  Carolina, Duke Energy, to  offer a new breakthrough  renewable energy program.  Apple chooses solar for  Nevada data center  Apple announces it will work  with the local utility to power  its data center near Reno,  NV with 100 % solar and  geothermal power.  Microsoft makes its first  large-scale purchase  of renewable energy to  power a data center  Microsoft purchases wind  energy in Texas to power its  data center there, marking  its first ever large-scale  purchase of renewable  energy.    A Stain on IT clean energy efforts: ALEC  Some of the same companies using innovative  strategies to power the internet with renewable  energy are undermining those very efforts via their  political support for organizations which are actively  committed to sabotaging the clean energy revolution  and efforts to address climate change.  The most troubling of these political affiliations  is the membership by many IT companies in the  American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a  group that allows member corporations to pay to  ghostwrite model legislation for mostly right-wing  state legislators around the country. ALEC members  evaluated in this report  Google  • Facebook  • Microsoft  • Yahoo!  • eBay  • Verizon Terremark  ALEC is actively collaborating with many of the  nation’s worst polluters to kill clean energy and climate  policies around the country. In 2013, ALEC pushed  model legislation to repeal renewable energy portfolio  standards in over a dozen states, failing across the  board.The group’s 2014 agenda includes continued assaults  on renewable energy laws, plus a new effort to  attack net metering policies,72 which encourage the  growth of decentralized solar energy by allowing solar  customers to be fairly compensated for extra electricity  they sell back to the grid. ALEC is also targeting the  Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to limit global  warming pollution from coal-fired power plants.In addition to their membership in ALEC, Google and  Facebook also attracted criticism in 2013 for offering  political contributions to the Competitive Enterprise  Institute, a conservative think tank funded by fossil fuel  interests with a history of denying the reality of climate  change.Box becomes sixth  company to commit to  100 % renewable energy  Box becomes the sixth  and latest company to join  the growing club of global  technology firms who have  committed to powering their  cloud computing operations  with 100 % renewable  energy.  Apple begins powering  manufacturing with  renewable energy too  Apple announces it will start  building high-tech glass  for its products in Arizona  at a facility that will be 1% powered by solar and  geothermal energy.  Facebook powers new  Iowa data center with 1% wind energy  Facebook announces that it  will use 100% wind energy  to power its data center in  Iowa.    Section Where the  Cloud Touches  the Ground  Data center operators have followed each  other to different regions, forming data center  hubs that create concentrated pockets of high  electricity demand. Those data center hot spots  push utilities to build new electricity generation  that can harm both the local environment and  the broader climate if fueled by gas or coalfired  power plants. The clusters could also  drive utilities to invest in clean energy if the data  center operators demand it. Three regions in the  US which feature explosive data center growth  are North Carolina, the Pacific Northwest, and  Virginia.    Data Centers in the US  The US has more data centers than any other country. Below, some  of the regions that have been data center hot spots, their energy  mixes, and projected growth of renewable energy.  North Carolina  North Carolina has become a hot spot for data centers in  recent years, led by the high-profile entrances of Google,  Facebook and Apple into the state. Others have joined  them, including Walt Disney, AT&T, Wipro, Bed, Bath &  Beyond and others.As a result, data center electricity demand nearly tripled in  North Carolina from 2010 to 2012, according to data filed  by the local utility there, Duke Energy. Since Duke enjoys  a virtual monopoly on electricity sales in the state, its load  has grown considerably due to this data center investment  – and that load is powered by one of the dirtiest energy  mixes in the country. Duke generated 57 % of its electricity  in 2013 from nuclear power plants, 38% from coal, and 4  % from gas.78 A mere 0.1 % of their electricity came from  renewable sources like wind and solar power.79 Duke has  shown little ambition to get cleaner – its resource planning  documents show that in 2028, it still intends to generate  only 3 % of its energy from renewable sources.Internet companies’ growth in North Carolina gives them  a great deal of leverage over Duke – an official from the  utility once said that a data center “may be the most ideal  customer we could have.” Pacific Northwest  Oregon and Washington’s large data centers demanded  400 MW of electricity in 2012 and grew by almost 40 %  to 550 MW in 2013. A report from the Northwest Power  and Conservation Council estimated that data center  demand for the region could get “potentially as large as the  past aluminum industry in the region with loads in excess  ~2500 MWa”.Amazon’s data centers in Boardman, OR have grown so  quickly that it appears to have almost single-handedly  pushed its electricity provider, the Umatilla Electric  Cooperative, to a large enough size that it now is bound  by a state law to generate more renewable energy.Umatilla sought to avoid having to comply with the state’s  renewable energy requirement, financing a statewide ballot  initiative to redefine renewable energy to include 60-yearold  dams.84 Amazon has been content to let Umatilla do  just that, exerting none of its leverage as one of Umatilla’s  biggest customers to pressure the utility to call off its  assault on the law. In early 2014, Umatilla successfully  bullied its way into attaining a legislative loophole that  would allow it to comply with the law without investing in  wind and solar energy.Amazon’s course of inaction stands in stark contrast to  Apple, Google, Facebook and Rackspace, which operate  or are building data centers in Oregon, and are demanding  that their utilities provide more, not less, renewable energy.  In response, some utilities are asking the state for the ability  to provide more renewable energy to their data center  customers.  Virginia  Northern Virginia contains one of the most concentrated  epicenters of data centers in the world – it is a key location  in the internet’s infrastructure. Amazon operates multiple  data centers in the region, but is far from the only company  there. Much of the internet’s traffic is routed through this  area, and large amounts of federal government data are  stored in the region’s data centers as well.  Dominion, the utility in Virginia, services these data centers  with electricity. Its web site shows that data centers  demanded over 500 MW of electricity in 2012, a quantity  it expects to double by 2017. Unfortunately, Dominion’s  generation mix is comprised of almost entirely dirty  energy sources.87 Burning coal generates 38 % of the  state’s power; nuclear power plants generate 42 %; gas  generates 17 %. Renewable energy generates only 2 %  of the company’s power.88 Dominion’s long-term plan that  it submitted to regulators shows that it does not intended  on making any significant increase in its investment in  renewable energy over the next 15 years.  Clean energy index methodology (Column 2)  Greenpeace has established the Clean Energy Index as a  response to the lack of useful metrics and publicly available  data to evaluate and compare the energy footprints of  major cloud providers and their respective data centers.  This lack of data is not due to the fact that data does  not exist. However, most companies remain unwilling  to provide even the most basic information about both  the amount and source of their growing electricity  consumption. Despite a proliferation of metrics created by  the industry (such as PUE) that attempt to quantify how  green a data center is as measured by energy efficiency,  very few companies report under newer metrics (such as  Green Energy Coefficient, GEC) that could shed any light  on the basic question: how much dirty energy is being  used, and which companies are choosing clean energy to  power the cloud?  The Clean Energy Index attempts to provide a basic  answer to this question, based on what can be gleaned  from the limited information available, and focusing on  recent investments of select brands and the current clean  energy supply associated with each investment.  Starting with an initial set of some of the largest cloud  providers, Greenpeace has attempted to identify two main  inputs from a representative sample of their most recent  (five years or less) infrastructure investments.  Those inputs are:  (1) Estimated size of electricity demand of each facility (in  megawatts);  (2) Amount of renewable electricity being used to power it  (by percentage).  This information is then used to approximate, initially on a  facility level, the number of megawatts of clean energy the  facility will consume. Having calculated a facility-level Clean  Energy Index for a representative sample of data centers,  Greenpeace derives a company average of clean energy  percentage across its facilities.  In compiling the information included in this report,  Greenpeace contacted all companies featured here and  asked for information regarding their data center facilities,  and for information on their infrastructure siting and  mitigation efforts. Greenpeace made estimates of data  center power demand available to companies for comment  in advance of publication, and issues raised by the  companies are highlighted in footnotes on the scorecard.  The above inputs are from the following sources:  • Submissions by companies directly to Greenpeace  • Public submissions by companies to reporting entities or  stakeholder publications  • As defined by company when announcing investments  • As reported by the media (in stories on the investments or  construction of facilities, etc.)  • Electricity demand is derived by taking the announced  size of investment and deriving total number of MW, using  industry average cost per IT load ($15million US dollars  per MW) multiplied by publicly available PUE for facility or,  if not available, 1.5 for new facilities.  • If not reported by the company, the generation mix of the  electricity is taken from one of the following sources, as  available, in declining order of preference:  • The most recent published generation mix of the local  utility  • In the U.S., the 2010 eGrid State level generation mix  (9th Edition) as reported by US EPA, or if not applicable,  reported subregional eGrid generation mix  • Outside the US, the European Commission and  International Energy Agency 2009 Statistics  Important Note: This analysis does not attempt to  represent itself as a comprehensive snapshot of how much  clean energy is being consumed on a company-wide level.  Only the companies can properly provide that.  Greenpeace would welcome the opportunity to incorporate  more detailed data to inform our analysis, as that would  likely provide a more complete and refined picture of cloud  providers’ energy use. As companies provide better data,  Greenpeace will incorporate this into our evaluation and  encourage other companies to follow.  For those companies that have adopted 100% renewable  energy targets and also provide facility-level energy details,  Greenpeace uses current consumption and renewable  procurement data provided by the company instead of  ultimate facility capacity.