Facebook, Apple, Google, Rackspace, and most of the other major players in the cloud computing world have made a show in recent years of moving their data centers to renewable energy. Why hasn’t Amazon followed suit?

During the nascent years of cloud computing, it was easy enough to pretend that the cloud was a kind of magical force: an invisible dimension that stores and processes all of the data we move around the Internet every day. As cloud computing exploded in popularity over the past decade, however, it quickly became clear to the public that there is no magical force. There are only large, hulking data centers that suck up energy as they store the ever-growing pile of emails, files, and websites that humans generate.

They’re not making this a priority. They’re generally focusing on efficiency.

Many of the world’s largest Internet companies–who are also the biggest data center users–take the data center energy problem seriously, as they should. As the New York Times pointed out last year in a series on data center energy use, data centers used 2% of all electricity in the U.S. in 2010, and that number will only continue to rise.

There are two ways to tackle data center energy use: the first is to implement energy efficiency measures. The other way is to place the data centers in locations where power companies mainly dole out clean energy. And if that doesn’t work, companies can lobby utilities to make changes for them.

For five years, Greenpeace has put out its Cool IT Leaderboard: a look at the companies that have produced the best (and worst) IT-related energy solutions. This is the most recent version (see image at right).





Most of the biggest data center users out there–Apple, Facebook, Google–are doing a reasonably good job in using renewables. Not Amazon.

Overall, Amazon Web Services (AWS) gets just 13.5% of its electricity used for cloud computing from renewable sources. Approximately 70% of all servers in AWS’s cloud are in Virginia, where 75% of its electricity comes from coal and nuclear power, and just 4% comes from renewable sources. Customers that want more renewably powered cloud services, AWS explains on its website, will have to look outside of Virginia: