Despite Apple undertaking endeavors like constructing one of the country’s largest solar arrays and expanding its North Carolina data centers the environmentalist group Greenpeace just released a report named “How Clean is Your Cloud” which claims that Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are allegedly powering their growing 21st century clouds with dirty 19th century coal energy. Greenpeace has pushed customers of the major technological brands to read the 50-page report and to sound out the companies to make a change as to what powers the cloud.
A statement from Greenpeace says, “If Apple is really interested in having the “high percentage” of renewable energy it claims to want for the iCloud, it will have to look beyond the initial steps for on-site generation and use its tremendous cash reserves to invest in or purchase renewable energy and also to put pressure on Duke Energy to provide cleaner energy.”
Apple acknowledged the situation and released a reply via NPR which said, “Our data center in North Carolina will draw about 20 megawatts at full capacity and we are on track to supply more than 60% of that power on-site from renewable sources including a solar farm and fuel cell installation which will each be the largest of their kind in the country. We believe this industry leading project will make Maiden (Apple’s data center) the greenest data center ever built, and it will be joined next year by our new facility.”
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