Environmental activists will definitely give Facebook tons of "Like" as the social media company is all set to open its datacenter in Altoona, Iowa that will run fully on renewable energy. The datacenter will depend on wind power when it becomes operational come 2015 the company announced.
The datacenter of the social network will be powered by MidAmerican Energy that has a wind project in full-swing in Wellsburg, Iowa. Facebook has another data center in Lulea, Sweden that also operates purely on hydro power.
"We first started working on this project with RPM Access, a local wind project developer, as we were finalizing our decision to locate in Iowa. Earlier this spring, we transferred our rights to the development to MidAmerican Energy, our local utility, to build, own, and operate it," said datacenter energy manager Vincent Van Son through Facebook's Newsroom.
"Construction is under way, and once it's completed in 2014, the project will add up to 138 MW of new renewable wind capacity to the grid in Iowa - more than what our data center is likely to require for the foreseeable future. And since our Altoona data center will be based on the latest Open Compute Project designs, we expect that it will join our data centers in Oregon, North Carolina, and Sweden as some of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world," he added.
Groups like Greenpeace have been criticizing big technology companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook as carbon polluters and pushing the firms to be more conscious in helping the environment.
However, following Facebook's announcement, Greenpeace praised its efforts in using renewable energy.
"The changes I'm seeing from the companies in the room here are giving me big hope. You have a big part of the sector that's still focused on growing as fast as they can, and not necessarily looking at how they are growing," said Greenpeace IT policy analyst Gary Cook.
Other companies such as Google and Apple are also taking concrete steps to be greener. Apple's datacenter are said to be powered 100 percent by renewable energy although the company's operation partly depends on nuclear energy and coal. Google, on its part, is looking for means to find cleaner energy sources by working with regulators.
