Greenpeace Lambasts AWS on Cloud Data Center Energy (Again)
On the business side, most organizations that use Amazon Web Services have a favorable opinion of the world’s largest cloud provider.
Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy organization, just can’t find much that it likes about the cloud giant AWS. Cloudwedge has extensively covered AWS’s battle to satify Greenpeace’s concerns. We’ve penned articles such as Greenpeace Unimpressed w/ AWS Renewable Energy Pledge and AWS’s Datacenters Receiving Criticism from Greenpeace, just to a name a few.
With that said, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Greenpeace has once again lambasted AWS for the methods that it uses to generate electricity for its data centers. In the report entitled 2015: Clicking Green, Greenpeace issues a scorecard that helps decipher which big tech organizations are adhering to the best practices when it comes to powering their data centers.
Under the AWS entry, Amazon receives a clean energy index score of 23%. Greenpeace claims that 21% of AWS’s energy is derived from natural gas, 27% is derived from coal and 26% originating from nuclear sources. Greenpeace gives AWS an F in energy transparency.
The report goes on to say, “Amazon’s adoption of a 100% renewable energy goal, while potentially significant, lacks basic transparency and, unlike similar commitments from Apple, Facebook or Google, does not yet appear to be guiding Amazon’s investment decisions toward renewable energy and away from coal.”
Geekwire says that AWS provided a response to Greenpeace’s report by saying, “It’s unfortunate that Greenpeace’s report is inaccurate and misguided again.” The AWS spokesperson goes on to write, “We’ve told Greenpeace it’s wrong, but they chose to publish it anyway. We continue to publish data about our actual energy mix and new developments toward achieving our long term goal of 100% renewable on our Sustainable Energy webpage.”
What do you think about the green energy battle between AWS and Greenpeace? Tell us in the comment section below.
