Greenpeace USA | What we do | Contact us | Donate
THE WITNESS
© Karuna Ang / Greenpeace
“400 ppm” is buzzing in the air like the impending ruckus of cicadas.
The immediate reaction to the news that the amount of atmospheric carbon surpassed the dreaded 400 parts per million milestone is to hang your head and sigh. (It’s okay if you’ve done that. I did too). It feels like you’re still running when the race is already over. Continue reading
Greenpeace's 5kw solar roof top project at its warehouse in Beijing. The project will be grid connected.
At 10:48 am on 17 April in Beijing, Greenpeace made a bit of history: we joined the first batch of around 50 rooftop solar PV projects that connected to the grid in China.
And to our surprise, we learned that our modest five-kilowatt solar system is actually the biggest rooftop solar power project currently in Beijing.
Our “system” is 65 square meters of solar panels at the new GP China warehouse in Shunyi, on the outskirts of Beijing. At full capacity on a day with clear weather, these panels will generate around 25 kWh of electricity. To give you a sense of scale, an average urban Chinese family consumes less than 10 kWh per day. Continue reading
Crossposted from the Institute of Southern Studies
A bill that would have ended North Carolina’s renewable energy program was voted down this week by a state House committee in a bipartisan vote by a surprisingly wide margin. Continue reading
Can the same people who brought us search engines, Internet-powered smart phones, and the cloud also help us save the planet from climate change?
At Greenpeace, we think so, which is why we’ve been pushing the technology sector to provide the energy solutions that can help address climate change as a part of our Cool IT campaign since 2009. Continue reading
The race to be the cleanest and greenest in our virtual world is definitely on. Facebook announced today that it is building another data center, a big one, this time in the windy state of Iowa, which currently leads the nation in electricity generated from wind with an eye-popping 25 percent! Continue reading
From solar-powered emails to recycled cities, there are plenty of reasons to feel hopeful for our planet this Earth Day. Although protecting our forests, oceans and air is an endless job, we can also step back and appreciate all the really cool stuff going on all over the world thanks to people coming together and finding a better way. Big or small, these reasons all point to progress that is actually working. Continue reading
Thanks to some pressure from Google, the largest utility company in the U.S., Duke Energy, now plans to offer renewable energy to its major customers. This will allow Google, who also announced plans today to double the size of one if its largest data centers, an option to power its cloud with clean energy. Continue reading
The Center for Media and Democracy has released a new report on the State Policy Network, a web of interconnected groups that attack climate change science and oppose support for renewable energy. The new guide details the $80 million that right-wing billionaires and corporations are spending each year to fuel Tracie Sharp’s State Policy Network (SPN) and its 59 state “think tank” members. Continue reading
© Tim Shaffer / Greenpeace
Last week, the largest producer of power in the United States took a radical step to acknowledge a basic fact: the solar energy revolution has finally reached the United States, and it cannot be stopped. Continue reading
Apple announces commitment to power data centers with 100% renewable energy
There’s more good news to report from the clean energy revolution that’s spreading like wildfire among the biggest technology companies in the world: Apple released an environmental report today showing that it has made real progress in its effort to power the iCloud with renewable energy, and not coal.
Apple is growing its facilities that store your music, photos and videos at a rapid pace, and those buildings, called data centers, use massive amounts of electricity. Because of pressure from hundreds of thousands of Greenpeace supporters and Apple customers, Apple committed last year to providing 100 % of the power to those data centers with renewable energy. Greenpeace released a report in July mapping out the pathway Apple should take to meet its ambitious goals.
Today, Apple’s report disclosed some new details about how it has made real progress in many of the ways that we laid out then:
Of course, there’s still plenty of work left for Apple to do. As it keeps growing the cloud, Apple still has major roadblocks to genuinely meeting its 100 % clean energy commitment in North Carolina, where renewable energy policies are under siege and electric utility Duke Energy is intent on blocking wind and solar energy from entering the grid.
Apple Data Center in Maiden, NC. March, 2012. © Jason Miczek / Greenpeace
Duke Energy is Apple’s only option for buying electricity in North Carolina, and it makes electricity primarily from dirty sources of energy that cause global warming, like burning coal and gas, as well as dangerous nuclear power plants. Duke has shown no signs of changing, and organizations allied with Duke like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are trying to change state laws to make it even harder for forward-thinking companies like Apple to buy clean energy there.
To show how it can help remove those roadblocks in North Carolina, Apple has an opportunity to work together with Google, accepting its challenge to the sector to develop a consortium among IT companies to help green the grid. Apple, Google, and Facebook working together in North Carolina would be a potent force in asking Duke Energy and state government officials to help bring more renewable energy on the grid in North Carolina for everyone.
We’ll keep urging Apple to do those things, just as we’ll keep pushing other, slower technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft to follow the good example that companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce – and now more every day, Apple – are setting by their adoption of renewable energy.
