Submitted: The Two Sides Team August 7, 2012

Facebook today revealed for the first time information about its carbon footprint, citing the “power of openness.”

August 1, 2012

by Joel Makower – GreenBiz Group

Facebook today revealed for the first time information about its carbon footprint,
citing the “power of openness.” The data, covering the energy use for
its data centers and global offices, reflects both the company’s efforts
to reduce energy use and increase renewable energy consumption, as well
as the challenges it faces to steadily improve those efforts.

“We’re releasing this data because we believe in the power of
openness, and because we hope that adding another data point to our
collective understanding of our industry’s environmental impact will
help us all keep improving,” the company said in a statement.

At first glance it’s a happy story. The company said that last year,
its data centers and operations used 532 million kilowatt hours of
energy, emitting 285,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. By
contrast, Google revealed last year
that its carbon footprint equaled nearly 1.5 million metric tons, more
than five times Facebook’s. (Google’s “energy czar” at the time was Bill
Weihl, who now serves as Facebook’s “sustainability guru.”)

For the typical Facebook user, a year’s worth of liking and posting
consumes just 269 grams of carbon equivalent — “roughly the same carbon
footprint as one medium latte,” the company pointed out. “Or three large
bananas. Or a couple of glasses of wine.” To put that in perspective, a
typical U.S. household’s annual carbon footprint is about 48 tons, according to the Cool Climate Network at the University of California, Berkeley. Suffice to say, that’s a helluva lot of lattes.

But Facebook is quick to note that “as a fast-growing company our
carbon footprint and energy mix may get worse before they get better.”
That’s due primarily to the challenges of sourcing sufficient clean
power where the company sites its data centers. Facebook’s goal is to
source 25 percent of its power from clean-energy sources by 2015, which
is only a tad better than the 23 percent of “clean and renewable” energy
the company now uses. Still, according to Facebook, achieving 25
percent “is going to be a stretch for us, and we’re still figuring out
exactly what it will take to get there.”

Facebook’s energy mix will start to improve in 2014, when it opens a massive data center in Lulea, Sweden,
about 60 miles from the Arctic Circle, located near hydropower stations
on a river that generates twice as much electricity as the Hoover Dam.
Facebook’s newest data center, in Forest City, North Carolina, opened in April and is claimed to be one of the most energy efficient in the world. Facebook’s Prineville data center in Washington State was built to use only free coolng.

The company has committed to “including a renewable energy component
to every new data center we build so we can learn more about what such
investments mean for Facebook.”

Facebook has been facing activist pressures to improve and report its carbon emissions. Last year, Greenpeace launched a campaign to swear off power from coal-fired power plants. The activist group launched an Unfriend Coal
campaign to enlist Facebook’s nearly 1 billion members to pressure the
social media company. Today, Greenpeace lauded Facebook, calling it “an
important benchmark for the company to fulfill its goal to be fully
powered by clean and renewable energy.”

“Facebook has also pledged to push the utilities currently selling it
dirty energy to move toward cleaner sources; that is the kind of
leadership that IT companies will need to embrace in order to build a
clean cloud,” Greenpeace said in a release.

Facebook’s announcement today is likely to be part of a growing
drumbeat of green initiatives coming from the high-profile social media
company. Weihl’s arrival — the company’s first sustainability executive —
its newfound status as a public company, and its rapid growth has put
increased pressure on the company to improve its environmental
performance as well as increase its transparency. As with most
data-intensive companies, energy use from data centers will continue to
represent a significant share of its operating costs.

There are also signs the company will be leveraging its huge user
base to develop and deploy services to help consumers reduce their
energy use. Already, the company has partnered with Opower and NRDC to
launch an application designed to empower people to consume energy more
efficiently. Expect to see more such efforts, as the company sets out
to leverage the “great opportunity in the power of our platform and the
more than 950 million people who use Facebook” to address environmental
challenges.

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