In a new report titled “Apple’s clean energy plans still cloudy despite coal-free pledge,” Greenpeace is putting biogas-fueled fire under the feet of Apple to live up to its vow to go coal-free for its cloud data centers — but the environmental advocacy group goes on to give Apple its first passing grades: Cs in “Renewables and Advocacy” and “Energy Efficiency and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation.”

However, this student needs to work harder in summer school on other areas — coal and nuclear — Greenpeace notes in its report.

“Despite a welcome commitment by Apple in May that its data centers will be coal-free and powered by 100% renewable energy, the analysis reveals that Apple still lacks a plan that outlines a realistic path to eliminate its reliance on coal to power its iCloud,” writes Greenpeace in its latest green data center report. “This latest analysis updates the scores to account for Apple’s new announcements and found that Apple’s plans to make its three existing data centers ‘coal-free’ are still far from complete.”

Greenpeace International’s Senior IT Analyst, Gary Cook, said in a statement on Thursday, “Apple has the potential to set a new bar with its coal-free iCloud commitment, but its plans to reach this goal are still mostly talk and not enough walk.”

[See also on Cloudline: Greenpeace Cloud Protest — Do Amazon, Microsoft Deserve the Doghouse?]

The report noted, however:

Apple’s clean energy score improved to 22.6% from 15.3%, and its grades in the “Renewables and Advocacy” and “Energy Efficiency and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation” categories correspondingly improved to Cs from Ds. However, Apple received a D for its “Energy Transparency” and a D in the “Infrastructure Siting” category. Apple’s coal and nuclear energy scores decreased, but could go down more if Apple were to reveal viable plans for how it will power its rapidly expanding data centers without the use of coal. It now uses 33.5% coal energy to power its cloud, down from 55.1% in April, and 11.6% nuclear energy, down from 27.8 in April. (2)

While it’s never easy being green, with its insistence on dropping coal is Greenpeace pushing too hard, or this a fair report card?