FollowFacebook’s data centers are huge and require a lot of electricity to operate. But recently, the social network giant has installed enough solar panels at its data center in Prineville, Oregon to generate over 100,000 kilowatts of power, generating roughly 200,000 kilowatt hours a year. This was largely in response to calls from Greenpeace International for Facebook to “go green” and stop relying on coal power to provide enough electricity to its 300,000 square foot data center.
But since it requires about 7 acres of solar panels to produce just one megawatt of power, this move has a lot of people wondering if Facebook just wanted to appease the environmental agency. It has been estimated that the new data center in Oregon will require over 30 megawatts of power in order to function, so this new solar panel agenda will barely even scratch the surface. Facebook itself has stated that the solar panels will mainly provide power for offices and less power intensive areas of the data center, but the main components in a data center that eat up power are the servers. These servers will still be powered from the grid, which gets its electricity from coal plants, and this has Greenpeace International still up in arms.
Google has also set up a few solar arrays to power its data centers, but just like Facebook, their servers are not powered by the sun, since they require much more energy. It’s incredible to think that a company would need so much power to run their facility when they really don’t manufacture anything.
But when you have over 750 million users who are all uploading videos, pictures and audio to their website every day, it requires a lot of power to keep the site up and running.
Although Facebook has stated that they are looking into making more improvements to use renewable energy to power this data center and future plants as well, the tiny impact that these solar panels will have makes you wonder if they are doing enough to make the efforts worth it.
Thousands of Facebook users have contacted the social media powerhouse to ask them to “go greener” than they already have.
But when a company has to worry about the bottom line and how much these things will cost, it’s easy to see why many of them gladly use the relatively cheap electricity that comes from coal, rather than paying the large amount of money required to get such little in return
Source: islandcrisis
