UPDATED 23:08 EDT / AUGUST 28 2018

INFRA

Facebook hits its green energy goal for data centers a year ahead of schedule

Embattled social media giant Facebook Inc. finally has some positive news to report. The company said Tuesday it has met its goal of using renewable energy sources to supply at least 50 percent of its data center energy a year ahead of schedule.

The company, which has for months been beset with scandals centered on privacy concerns, election-meddling and fake news, added that it’s now aiming to have all of its data centers across the world powered by 100 percent renewable energy by 2020.

Facebook set its original 50 percent goal back in 2015, saying it was looking to switch to energy sources such as wind and solar power. The company now says it has signed contracts for more than 3 gigawatts of power generated from renewable energy sources, including more than 2,500 megawatts’ worth of deals signed in the last year.

The company said in a blog post that it has worked to enable access to renewable energy resources for other organizations by “building infrastructure, opening projects to other buyers or establishing green tariffs,” allowing customers to buy renewable energy from their local utilities.

Facebook intends to continue these efforts by securing more renewable energy sources to power its data centers. It also says it wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its facilities by a further 75 percent by 2020.

The company’s efforts have won praise from environmental groups. Gary Cook of Greenpeace told the BusinessGreen website that Facebook has reaffirmed its place among business leaders to be coal-free and 100 percent renewable-energy-powered.

“If we are to stay within the 1.5-degree threshold that scientists say is crucial to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need many more companies stepping up to adopt aggressive renewable energy and greenhouse gas reduction goals,” Cook said.

Facebook’s progress has been helped by its focus on redesigning the components of its data centers with the aim of increasing its energy efficiency. The efforts have included new server designs that are more power-efficient, and also new cooling technologies such as its StatePoint Liquid Cooling system for data centers in arid climates, which boosts efficiency by creating cold water instead of cold air.

It should be noted that Facebook isn’t the only “hyperscale” data center operator to make progress in its commitment to energy efficiency. For example, Amazon Web Services Inc. said in January that it too had achieved 50 percent renewable energy data center usage.

“It turns out the ‘cloud’ is not so green as the real-world cloud, depending on the carbon footprint that is created when generating the enormous power needed to run the data centers behind the cloud,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “So it’s good to see various infrastructure-as-a-service vendors making it a strategy to use renewable energy and become more sustainable. Today it is Facebook’s turn.”

The hyperscale data center operators’ efforts are all the more impressive given the way they’re constantly growing their infrastructure. A recent report by the Uptime Institute noted that data center operators are handling increasingly larger and more complex workloads. Even so, the standard metric used to measure data center efficiency, called “power usage effectiveness,” reached a record low 1.58 rating last year, the institute said.

Image: PIRO4D/Pixabay

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