Amazon Web Services is known for being highly secretive about its data centre infrastructure, and the company was once again labelled as one of the least transparent when it comes to its energy footprint, according to Greenpeace.
The non-government environmental organisation has published its latest report, Clicking Clean: Who is Winning the Race to Build a Green Internet?, in which it analyses the energy footprints of large data centre operators, websites and applications.
Although AWS has taken additional public steps toward making its cloud renewably powered – including signing three renewable energy projects in the past year – a Greenpeace analysis of recent investments indicated AWS’ overall clean energy index percentage had fell sharply since the NGO's last report.
Greenpeace USA senior IT analyst Gary Cook said: "Amazon continues to talk a good game on renewables but is keeping its customers in the dark on its energy decisions. This is concerning, particularly as Amazon expands into markets served by dirty energy."
AWS told CRN that it had made a commitment in November 2014 to achieve 100 percent renewable energy and it has made progress in the past two years.
"By April 2015 we hit 25 percent renewable, closed 2016 at 45 percent renewable, and have set a goal to reach 50 percent by the end of 2017. AWS has to date enabled 10 renewable energy projects in the United States that will deliver a grand total of 2.6 million MWh of energy annually onto the electric grid powering AWS data centres and four of these projects are already online," an AWS spokesperson said.
"That said, we are nowhere near done. We will continue to make progress toward our 100 percent goal and have many exciting initiatives planned," added.
Among the tier-one vendors, Oracle languished at the bottom of the Greenpeace report. Its recent expansion in Virginia and Chicago, in a cloud race to compete with AWS, relies almost exclusively on dirty sources of electricity, according to the report.
In the 2015 report, Oracle was reported as using 50 percent coal and 11 percent of nuclear energy. The 2017 report showed that its coal use had slowed down to 36 percent, however, it is now using 25 percent of nuclear energy. Oracle declined CRN's request for comment.
In 2012, data centres accounted for 15 percent of energy consumption in IT, and networks accounted for 20 percent. According to the study Emerging Trends in Electricity Consumption for Consumer ICT from 2013 by Peter Corcoran and Andres Andrae, the prediction was that by 2017 data centres would represent 21 percent and networks, 29 percent. Devices would fall 13 percent, from 47 to 34.
If the IT sector was a country, its 1817 billion kWh electricity consumption would rank third – behind only China (5523 billion kWh) and the US (3832 billion kWh), according to Greenpeace.
Next: How companies scored
Greenpeace gave Apple, Facebook and Google top marks among the companies listed, with each scoring an 'A' on the company scorecard, which analysed energy type (clean, natural gas, nuclear and coal) and company engagement, such as transparency, commitment and advocacy.
Google was the first to sign a wind energy power purchase agreement in 2010. It was not until Facebook committed to be 100 percent renewable powered in 2011 that Google and Apple started to effectively taking action in 2012.
Alibaba, Oracle and Samsung each scored a 'D' for their high use of either coal or nuclear energy.
On the colocation and CDN company scorecard, only US-based colocation, telecommunications and cloud services provider Switch had an 'A'. Switch owns nine data centres in the US, has two under construction and another eight planned.
Still in colocation and CDN, Equinix and Akamai followed, each landing a 'B'. Acer, Asus and LG were some of the names with 'D' or 'F' ratings.
Among the video streaming category, Youtube was the only company to receive an 'A' with 56 percent of its energy from clean sources.
Netflix and Vimeo each scored a 'D'. While Vimeo uses 47 percent of clean energy, it failed in commitment, efficiency and mitigation and advocacy.
"Like Apple, Facebook, and Google, Netflix is one of the biggest drivers of the online world and has a critical say in how it is powered. Netflix must embrace the responsibility to make sure its growth is powered by renewables, not fossil fuels and it must show its leadership here,” Cook added.
Netflix did not reply to CRN's request for comment.
In the social media category, Facebook and Instagram both received an 'A' and LinkedIn a 'B' – but most companies listed landed an 'F', including Reddit and Twitter. Amazon.com got a 'C' for its e-commerce, and Amazon Prime also got a 'C' for video streaming.
The report provided an estimate of the percentage of clean energy supply for each company. This was calculated based on estimates of power capacity and resource mix of the facilities including natural gas, nuclear and coal.
Based on this, AWS, Digital Realty, Equinix, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace registered only a 12 percent use of clean energy in its Australian facilities.
This was the first report that included Asian companies such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. The region is running well behind the US market largely due to fewer clean energy options from monopoly utilities.
The full report can be accessed here.
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