Greenpeace ups their assault on Facebook’s dirty data centers

You may not think about it while you’re checking your wall or uploading photos from your weekend bash, but it takes a lot of juice to keep Facebook up and running. The social networking site needs a lot of cloud-based computing power to keep more than 500 million active users occupied at work and sadly many of these machines are powered by coal based electricity. Greenpeace is upping their campaign against Facebook’s methods and have asked them to dump dirty electricity by Earth Day.

Their theory is simple, if a giant firm like Facebook can demand clean energy other IT companies will follow suit. The main focus of their campaign are two data centers located in Oregon and North Carolina; each center takes up about 300,000 square feet and 62% of their power comes from burning coal. Coal not only has a nasty effect on the environment but it also compromises your health. According to a report from the UN, coal contributes to 24,000 premature deaths in the US each year.

Greenpeace has a history of using childish stunts (and William Shatner) to get the word out, but the Facebook campaign they started in 2010 is certainly more grown-up. They latched onto the power of the social networking site and got almost 100,000 users to sign up for a page that urges the company to “Unfriend Coal” by implementing the following practices:

• Increase the use of clean energy to make Facebook coal free
• Develop a plan to make Facebook coal free by 2021
• Educate your users about how Facebook powers its services and its carbon footprint
• Advocate for clean energy at a local, national and international level

Last week, Greenpeace upped their game and started running ads that targeted Facebook’s own employees with an “Unfriend Coal” TV ad that ran in Palo Alto, California, where the company’s headquarters are located.

Greenpeace has slated April 21, 2011 as the kickoff of their Green:Net series with a special focus on their “Facebook: Unfriend Coal” campaign. Even if Facebook doesn’t cave before then, the eco-minded group will be holding discussions on how other companies like Apple are using green energy to juice up their cloud computer systems.

As energy prices rise it may be a very smart move for Facebook to invest in green energy. For instance, Google spends about $38 million a year just to power their data centers. To offset some of that cost they’ve invested in a wind farm project in Iowa which may give them dirt cheap energy rates in the future. In the UK, HP decided to build a data center that was cooled by the cold winds of the North Sea instead of a using pollutant spewing air conditioners; the technology will save them $5.6 million a year in energy costs for a 43,055 sq. ft. facility.