Facebook this week announced that it now has more than 500 million registered users, a population that is equivalent with the entire population of our planet in the year 1500. To support those users, Facebook needs power, lots of power. And Greenpeace does not think that Facebook should be using power from coal-fired power plants.
You could have seen this one coming. Even if Facebook is just over six years old, its sheer size asks for the responsibility we expect from any mature company. Have you ever wondered how those datacenters that support 500 million users powered?
500 million is a difficult number to grasp. It is the estimated world population in the year 1500. If Facebook users represented a country, it would be the world’s third largest country behind China and India today, exceeding the population of North America (377 million) and 15 times the population of Oceania.
500 million miles is the approximate distance between Earth and Jupiter. The Earth’s surface area is about 510 million square kilometers. The Canadian Mint produced about 500 million pennies last year, which, stacked on top of each other, would reach a height of 444 miles. Placed next to each other, those pennies would stretch to a length of about 5920 miles, the approximate flight distance between San Francisco and Moscow. If you had $500 million, you could buy 15,200 Nissan Leaf electric cars. If you were standing right next to 499,999,999 million other people in a tight pattern, those people would cover a surface area of 195 square miles, which is about equivalent to the land mass of the British Virgin Islands or the city of Tucson, Arizona.
It should not be too surprising that Facebook, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg really described as a global outreach program, would question the massive power supply that is required to keep Facebook up an running. For example, Facebook said that it is now storing about 50 billion photos that require somewhere between 500 and 800 TB of storage space alone, it supports 100 billion hits per day and has 130 TB of logs every day with 2 trillion objects being cached.
Greenpeace is now questioning Facebook’s power policy via a group that has already 400,000 supporters on Facebook.
“Facebook, which is rumored to have created a new energy policy, confronts the same choices and challenges that other large cloud computing companies have in building their data centers,” Greepeace said. “While other companies have chosen Oregon as a good choice given the abundant hydropower, it is expected to become more expensive by the time Facebook’s data center is online. Facebook has chosen instead to go with PacifiCorp, a power company that gets the majority of its power from coal-fired power stations.” Facebook committed to PacifiCorp as a power supplier back in January of this year.
“The only truly green data center are the types that don’t use coal,” said Gary Cook, Greenpeace International policy analyst. “Yahoo, for instance, built a data center near Buffalo, New York, that is powered by hydroelectric power, decreasing the data center’s carbon footprint. “Facebook and all IT companies must use their power and influence to site their data centers where renewable power is available and continue to push for policies that will move the US past coal.”
Greenpeace noted that Facebook has responded to the criticism by “pointing to its highly energy efficient design standards and equipment specification.” But Greenpeace questions the massive amounts of energy Facebook needs to power its datacenters. “The last thing we need for them to be doing is building them in places where they are increasing demand for dirty coal fired power. If your Facebook page is being powered by coal, then it’s contributing to climate change,” said Cook.
Greenpeace recently estimated that, by the year 2020, datacenters and telecom infrastructure that are powering cloud computing will require close to 2 billion KW/h of energy production, up from 623 million today. By 2020, server farms and datacenter would be responsible for about 257 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year, if the current trend holds, up from 116 metric tons today. The world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions caused by the IT and communications industry (ICT) today are estimated at 830 metric tons, which is expected to climb to 1430 metric tons in 2020. The share of server and data farms is expected to rise from 14 to 18%, PCs and devices will climb from 49 to 57% and telecoms/infrastructure will fall from 37% to 25%.
Greenpeace noted that mobile phone ownership will almost double between 2007 and 2020 to nearly 5 billion accounts, but emissions will only grow by 4%. Broadband uptake will treble to almost 900 million accounts over the same period, with emissions doubling over the entire telecoms infrastructure. PC ownership will quadruple between 2007 and 2020 to 4 billion devices, and emissions will double over the same period, with laptops overtaking desktops as the main source of global ICT emissions (22%).
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