How green is Amazon's cloud computing?
KAIVPS.COM On December 9, it was reported that in recent weeks, Amazon Internet Services had been questioned by some radical customers, who called on Amazon to be more transparent in the process of using renewable energy.
In this regard, Amazon would not disclose more details about the power source of its huge cloud computing infrastructure. The company believes that using cloud computing is more efficient and energy-saving than customers operating their own data centers.
But the whole discussion raised a question: How green is Amazon's cloud computing?
At the beginning of June, from HootSuite, Customers of 19 Amazon companies, including Change.org and Tumblr, wrote to Andy Yasi, senior vice president of Amazon, asking him to make efforts to improve the transparency of using clean energy.
This letter is in response to a report from the environmentalist group Greenpeace, in which the report separately points out the problems of Amazon Web Services, saying that no company can help high-tech companies to use renewable energy more than Amazon. The company's cloud platform hosts so many popular websites that Amazon needs to take any measures to improve efficiency in order to benefit many other companies.
The report points out that "Amazon Web Services, as one of people's favorite websites, mainly uses non clean energy". Specifically, Amazon's data center in Virginia, the eastern region of the United States, uses about one third of the electricity used by 60% of its servers from coal-fired power generation, one third from nuclear appliances, one fifth from natural gas, and only uses 2% renewable energy.
In response, Amazon recently announced that it would build an 80 megawatt solar farm in Virginia. The company's executives once again defended this issue, and released data saying that 25% of its cloud computing platforms run renewable energy. The goal in 2016 is to use 40% renewable energy, and the ultimate goal is to use 100% renewable energy.
Greenpeace says that is not enough. The report pointed out that "it is still impossible. Amazon's customers or the public cannot make any progress towards this goal because the company refuses to disclose any of its energy data."
Amazon executives believe that it is a simple fact that so many customers use the company's cloud platform to save energy. Even with fossil fuels, Amazon's cloud computing facilities are more efficient than its customers' data centers. James Hamilton, an outstanding engineer of Amazon, agreed in a blog post.
Amazon said that customers running in Amazon cloud computing had 77% fewer servers and 84% less energy consumption of workloads than their own data centers. Amazon evangelist Jeff Barr said in his blog post that the carbon emissions of customers using Amazon cloud computing were reduced by 84%.
In addition, the company has adopted its so-called "carbon neutral" approach in Oregon in the western United States, Frankfurt in the European Union, and GovCloud in the United States. The company has purchased carbon credit lines for green projects of the fund. Amazon also built a 150 megawatt wind farm in Indiana.
Amazon is not the only company that has become more environmentally friendly in its work. Its competitor, Google, was rated as Grade B in the report of Greenpeace, while Amazon only got Grade D. Google is also committed to using 100% renewable energy, although it has no specific timetable. However, Google said that about 35% of its business currently uses green energy.
Microsoft said that its rating was between Google and Amazon, and it received a C rating from Greenpeace. The company has been committed to achieving 100% carbon neutrality.
"We know that adopting 100% renewable energy is an ambitious goal, which cannot be achieved overnight." Amazon responded to its customers, "In the process of pursuing this goal, we will give some steps, which will make us confident in our commitment to renewable energy." At present, Amazon is facing greater pressure to adopt green energy than ever before.
