Since 2010, Greenpeace has been calling on major internet companies to power their data centers on renewable energy. Since then, there has been a real race to adopt renewable energy.
On January 10, Greenpeace released the report ‘Clicking Clean: Who is winning the race to built a green internet? This is their fifth report to benchmark the IT industry’s effort to adopt renewable energy to power their data centers.
Since Greenpeace started benchmarking in 2010, 19 companies have made 100% renewable energy commitments. In total, more than 6GW of renewable energy has been added to the global grid, which is enough to power more than 4 million homes. In the report, many top Asian firms were included: Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Naver, Samsung SDS, ASUS, and others. The report shows that video streaming is a major driver of energy consumption. It is expected that roughly 80% of internet traffic will be from streaming videos by 2020.
Greenpeace has launched a new campaign calling on Netflix to switch to renewable energy. The report and the Netflix campaign got already a lot of media coverage in the US and around the world. Here are few: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, San Jose Mercury News, Fortune, Quartz.
Read more about the campaign and the report here.