PALO ALTO (California): A handful of Greenpeace activists gathered outside the Facebook headquarters here on Wednesday, calling on the social network to "unfriend" coal energy for powering datacentres and other operations.Members of the international environmental group set up a large computer screen to display comments streaming in from around the world in response to a Facebook post urging the firm to join an energy revolution.
"We want them to 'unfriend' coal and 'like' green energy," said Greenpeace spokesman Daniel Kessler, who estimated that a dozen volunteers greeted Facebook employees as they arrived the startup's campus in the Silicon Valley city."We think a lot of Facebook employees will be on our side, so we are trying to recruit them."Facebook last week unveiled greener, cheaper datacentres to more efficiently power online services.
The social networking star custom-designed the hardware, power supply, and architecture of a new US datacentre that is 38% more power efficient and costs 24% less than the industry average.Schematics and designs for Facebook's revolutionary datacentre in the Oregon city of Prineville were made available to the world as part of an Open Compute Project announced by founder Mark Zuckerberg.Facebook has been in ongoing talks with Greenpeace, meeting with the environmental group as recently as Tuesday in San Francisco, and asked it last week to help promote the Open Compute Project. "We continue to find this kind of engagement valuable and look forward (to) working with Greenpeace and others to address key environmental issues, including energy efficiency and renewable energy," Facebook said.
