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facebook to share “green” tech with competitors
photo by Bruno D Rodrigues (davipt on Flickr CC)
Greenpeace has been giving facebook a tough time regarding social networking giant’s reliance on fossil fuels to power its massive servers. Back in February 2010 facebook announced that it would build a new, more efficient, datacenter. Sounds, great, right? Problem is they chose to build it in a location where it will be powered by coal-burning electricity plants. So Greenpeace launched the “Unfriend Coal” campaign, which ironically has its own facebook page.
Now, in an effort to share its energy efficiency innovations – without directly addressing the coal issue – facebook has decided to be truly open source and share their power-saving tech with other companies free of charge.
From an article in the Guardian:
The Open Compute Project (OCP) will allow the wider IT industry to access the design secrets behind the social network’s new data centre in Prineville, Oregon, which the company says uses 38 per cent less power than existing server farms.
facebook claims that switching 25% of datacenters in the US to their new designs would save enough energy to power 160,000 homes.
I guess that’s worth a “like”.
For more on the challenges, effort and failures of tech firms to address their environmental footprints check out the following report from France24.
Tags: coal, energy, Facebook, Greenpeace, power, tech, unfriend
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