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Greenpeace has developed its in-house datacentre expertise, as this report clearly demonstrates. The organisation has attracted criticism before for not being sufficiently informed, but now it appears to more convincing.
However, it makes a number of assertions, and omissions, datacenter industry insiders will no doubt take issue with:
The core of the latest report is a Cloud Energy Report Card, which assesses the chosen datacenter operators on a variety of factors, including use of clean energy, coal intensity, general transparency around energy efficiency and siting of infrastructure.
Greenpeace drew some criticism for its approach in the original report because some suppliers (most notably Apple and Facebook) disputed the methodology and the numbers it was based on. Greenpeace’s response, then and now, is that there is a lack of transparency that it concludes is evidence of suppliers holding back data.
While this may be true in a limited number of cases, the complexity of accurately capturing energy-related data is also a significant factor. The report rightly criticises metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE, but thousands of man hours of effort by organisations such as the Green Grid have failed to deliver an acceptable replacement.
The number, and type, of companies covered was an issue with the previous report, and remains an issue with this update. Greenpeace has added four more suppliers to the 10 covered in the first report. Yet critics may argue that in terms of datacentre real estate, some significant companies have been left out.
These include a number of multi-tenant datacenter providers and telecom companies (AT&T, for example) that own and operate numerous facilities but don’t attract attention (and headlines) in the same way as an Apple or Facebook. (Greenpeace may argue that the report is primarily concerned with suppliers offering cloud services).
Greenpeace makes little mention of datacenter energy-efficiency initiatives. Greenpeace admits its main focus is energy choices, which ignores the important
contribution of energy efficiency in cutting carbon.
The report does reference the Green Grid’s Carbon Usage Effectiveness metric, but criticises its low adoption rate. Akamai is the only company out of the 14 analyzed in the report using the CUE metric fully, according to Greenpeace. However, the report does not make any substantial reference to other energy-efficiency initiatives such as the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers, the US Energy Star rating system for datacenters, and other international efforts.
The UK is not included in the list of countries profiled in the report. Greenpeace admits this is due to time and resource. However, the UK is important given the developments around the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, one of the first direct taxes on datacenters, which may now be scrapped.
Greenpeace does commend the development of technologies such as free air cooling to lower the cooling-related energy requirements. But it makes little reference to ongoing efforts to encourage datacenter operators to increase the operating temperatures of their facilities and dramatically cut the energy used for cooling.
Suppliers such as Dell have made some efforts in this area, but there is a need for more industry cooperation around the issue. A recent update to the EU Code of Conduct encourages IT suppliers to be more transparent about the performance of their equipment at higher temperatures, but organisations such as Greenpeace could potentially lend their weight to the issue.
Greenpeace is right to highlight that when it comes to carbon intensity, the type of energy used by a datacenter is as important as how efficiently it is used. It is also important that the datacenter industry faces external scrutiny – providing that those doing the scrutinising understand the issues sufficiently. But Greenpeace sometimes appears to be thinking in terms of headlines, and shock value, rather than empathising with the real energy and carbon challenges faced by datacenter operators. That said, Greenpeace is definitely making efforts to engage as well as cajole, but will need to increase these efforts if it is to effect real change.
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