Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Green internet

With much of our lives moving online, we need to become more conscientious of how our clicks are powered. While some leaders already consume only renewable energy sources to provide their services, others are stuck in the dirty world of fossil fuels. Greenpeace has issued a report analysing the current state of the internet and calls out several green internet innovators such as Google green, Apple's Environmental Responsibility or recently Facebook. This has not always been the case and Greenpeace has run targeted campaigns to pressure these players into becoming more responsible of their power-related emission footprint. You can take action to move more internet players into this direction. As the report states "Six major cloud brands – Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce – have committed to a goal of powering data centers with 100 % renewable energy and are providing the early signs of the promise and potential impact of a renewably powered internet."

We can also see this in the world of enterprise applications. SAP has announced to power all their data centers and offices with 100% renewable energy. And of course, Workday has been doing this since 2008 and going forward as a 100% green power purchaser! Going forward Workday is using a blend of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) and Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) to achieve carbon neutrality for our power consumption.

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