Background - September 16, 2010
Greenpeace is working to phase out the use of fossil fuels across the globe, including within its own operations.
Greenpeace International has modeled an Energy Revolution Scenario that demonstrates how we can phase out fossil fuels, thereby cutting carbon pollution, stopping climate change, and creating new green jobs. To help move us toward a day when we have achieved a peak and decline in global emissions, Greenpeace is campaigning to get the IT sector to join us in this crucial effort.
IT companies, always at the vanguard, are uniquely situated to drive changes in government policy and market conditions that will increase the deployment of renewable energy and decrease carbon pollution.
Greenpeace does not own its own data centres, but rents capacity. Greenpeace's International's largest internal data use is based in Amsterdam at a location operated by Global Switch. Global Switch Amsterdam facility purchases renewable energy using Renewable Energy Credits. RECs have limited impact on driving new renewables investment. Greenpeace International has initiated a project to move its Amsterdam-based servers to a data center provider that purchases renewable energy directly from a power utility that invests only in new renewable energy generation.
Unless Global Switch improves its renewable energy purchasing policy, Greenpeace's Amsterdam servers will be in a new renewable powered facility by the first quarter of 2013.
Greenpeace has adopted a global policy to ensure that every national office also relies on renewable energy for its cloud services. Greenpeace US operations include about 30 servers housed in its Washington D.C. office, which is supported by wind power purchased from West Virginia. Currently some Greenpeace US servers are housed in an NTT data centre in Virginia powered primarily by coal and nuclear power. Greenpeace US is in the process of evaluating alternative locations for these servers that will allow them to be fully powered by renewable energy.
Greenpeace is always seeking to lighten our footprint as an organization, and more importantly, we spend our time advocating for transformational policy solutions that will move our energy demand to renewable sources of energy.
While we make every effort to secure the greenest IT services in our procurement decisions, as a relatively small customer we do not have the purchasing power large IT companies have when making procurement decisions. Our own demand and corresponding ability to shape the market through our energy procurement is quite small, particularly in comparison to companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and other major IT brands whose investments are driving significant new demand in electricity.