Facebook, Greenpeace at odds about energy

After an emotional breakup with the timber industry, Prineville, Ore., was thrilled to get friended by Facebook.

The social networking site chose the high-desert timber town of 10,000 to take advantage of its cool nights and dry air in hopes of making its first-ever data center an energy efficiency landmark.

But the concept failed to impress Greenpeace.

In a report posted on the Internet last month, the environmental group praised Google and Yahoo for tapping hydro power – but challenged Facebook for building in coal country.

The feud shows how hard it can be for the computing industry to reduce its environmental footprint meaningfully. It can add to its green glow through energy efficiency, but Greenpeace argues that IT companies should care more about where the power comes from.

As the nation works to green up the grid to combat global warming, data centers are demanding more energy than ever. A 2007 Environmental Protection Agency report estimated that from 2000 to 2006 data centers doubled their consumption to 61 billion kilowatt hours. That’s 1.5 percent of the grid and enough for 5.8 million households.

“If you want to really be responsible for your carbon footprint, you should be trying to provision your electricity supply with renewable energy as much as possible,” said Greenpeace climate policy analyst Gary Cook.

In what might be considered adding insult to injury, Greenpeace even created a special Facebook page with a smokestack logo to say the data center would be a greenhouse gas hog.

But the complex equation that goes into how much something costs still counts, said Ken Patchett, who was hired away from Google to run Facebook’s data center in Prineville.

“At the end of the day, Facebook is like any other major competitive business,” he said. “We do have to manage to our bottom line.”

Facebook, Yahoo, Google and others have become fans of the Northwest as they build more warehouses filled with computers to store data.

It is close to undersea cables with direct links to growing markets in Asia. Power costs are low and stable. High-speed bandwidth is as close as the nearest railroad line. The climate makes it cheaper to keep computers cool. Communities like Prineville, struggling to reinvent their economies, give generous tax incentives.

Facebook said in choosing Prineville, the energy-saving features allowed by the climate outweighed the source of the electricity and that the utility PacifiCorp is greening up its power sources, expanding wind power to 2,000 megawatts by 2013. It currently gets 58 percent of its power from coal and only 21 percent from renewables.

PacifiCorp offers a green power option, but it costs more. Facebook has not signed a contract yet and is not saying if it will go for the “Blue Sky” option.

In most data centers, cooling the servers takes nearly as much electricity as running the servers. Facebook hopes its new cooling system will take only 15 percent as much power as the computers. Facebook is also shooting for a gold rating from the green building standard known as LEED.

The climate is important. Even in summer, nights are cool. The center can take in outside air for free. When temperatures rise, a high-tech swamp cooler blows dry air over water, and the evaporation lowers temperatures. In winter, hot air from the servers is blown into office space.

“The way we are managing it provides for a lower carbon footprint as well as a lower monthly bill for power,” Patchett said.

Eager for new industry, Prineville has watched its sawmills wink out as logging declined over the years. Then came the recession, leaving ghost subdivisions around town and Crook County with the worst unemployment in Oregon, a seasonally adjusted 14.9 percent.

People are hungry for jobs that will keep young people from moving away, and the 200 construction jobs and 35 permanent jobs at the data center are a step in the right direction, said Greg Lambert, owner of Mid Oregon Personnel Services.

“Most people kind of view Greenpeace as kind of a fly on the butt of an ox,” said Lambert.