The effort to build a world powered by clean energy needs champions in every arena of our economy: activists on the streets, politicians in government, engineers in labs, and corporate leaders in boardrooms. Continue reading
Tag Archives: microsoft
Clippy’s back with a message for Microsoft: Give us a clean cloud
Remember Clippy? You know, that little paper clip that always popped up at the most annoying times when you were trying to write something in older versions of Microsoft Word?
Well, Clippy’s back, and poised to pop up at Microsoft stores around the country with a message for his makers.
Clippy’s advice: If Microsoft wants the new Windows 8 and Surface tablet to be modern, innovative products that appeal to young customers, they need to power their cloud with 21st-century clean energy.
Google shows off its data centers, powered increasingly by clean energy
Ever wondered what the Internet looks like? If so, you’re in luck: Google has drawn back the curtains of its data centers, the facilities that compute and store all of our gmail, youtube videos, and searches.
Google’s data center in Hamina, Finland by Connie Zhou
Google’s photos are beautiful. They express the amazing legacy of innovation that technology companies have built in data storage, a legacy we’re hoping they can apply to clean energy. They also convey the massive scale of the data that we’re increasingly sending to the cloud. For three years, Greenpeace has been drawing attention to the fact that all that data requires a massive amount of electricity, but also that companies have the potential to make sure that energy comes from clean sources. Continue reading
In search of a greener cloud: Google vs Microsoft
Microsoft wants the world to think it has its groove back – that it’s moved beyond the ignominy of the Mac vs. PC Apple ads, Windows 95 and Clippy, the helpful mascot everyone loved so much. Microsoft is looking to the cloud to change its old-fashioned perception, starting with its cloud-centric Windows 8 due out later this month. Microsoft has also made a lot of claims about how clean and green the cloud is, but is the Microsoft cloud still attached to a past energy era? We’ll try to answer that question in this article, and others to come, by comparing Microsoft to Google, one of its main competitors. Continue reading
New York Times shines spotlight on the Internet’s impact on the environment
Data centers like this run off dirty diesel generators
On Sunday, the New York Times launched a new series called “The Cloud Factories” that examines the massive data centers that store the data that makes up the internet, and the effects they have on the environment. Continue reading