It’s certainly not turning out to be Apple’s week – just a day after the news broke that its iPhones and iPads were secretly storing location info, Greenpeace has produced a damning document declaring them to be the ‘least green’ tech company.
Bottom of a dirty pile
The Greenpeace study puts Apple right at bottom of its green league table due to the company using hugely polluting coal to power the sites that host its banks of servers.
Greenpeace’s report, ‘How Dirty is Your Data?’ shows that Apple’s new North Carolina facility will triple its electricity consumption, guzzling up the equivalent electricity demand of 80,000 average US homes.
Power to the facility is being supplied by a company called Duke Energy, whose power stations use a mix of 62% coal and 32% nuclear power.
Gary Cook, Greenpeace’s IT policy analyst and lead author of the report, said: “Consumers want to know that when they upload a video or change their Facebook status that they are not contributing to global warming or future Fukushimas.”
Meanwhile, while Apple are busy burning coal, Google have just invested $100 million in giant wind farm.
Google today said that it will invest about $100 million in the very large Shepherd’s Flat wind project in Oregon, its second direct investment in renewable energy in two weeks.
Shepherds Flat is projected to be the largest wind farm in the world, able to generate 845 megawatts and supply enough energy for 235,000 average U.S. homes when it is online next year…
Last week, Google said it invested $186 million in the Ivanpah solar power plant project now under construction, which is its largest stake in a renewable-energy venture.
Maybe it’s time for you to “think different” eh, Apple?
[Via]
