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Apple: Greenpeace's Cloud Critique Driven By Bogus Numbers
miller60 writes "Apple says Greenpeace has wildly overestimated the amount of power it uses in its data center in North Carolina, and used that bad math to give the company a low grade on sustainability. Apple says it uses 20 megawatts of power at its iDataCenter, a fraction of Greenpeace's estimate of 100 megawatts in a new report on energy use by cloud computing providers. Apple says that its huge solar array and biogas-powered fuel cell will supply 60 percent of the facility's power, not the 10 percent claimed by Greenpeace."
No, wait...
This was a subtle ploy by data center competitors to use Greenpeace to get Apple to reveal their power consumption strategies... And it worked!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Greenpeace: blah blah blah blah bad bad bad
Apple: blah blah blah blah good good good
The truth? Probably somewhere in the middle.
Silence is a state of mime.
What will Apple do without the Steve Jobs reality distortion field in this situation?
I know my experience with meeting Greenpace activists in
Toronto in the 1980's -- all excited by Fuel Cell Technology
could not comprehend that the Hydrogen Economy relied
on having abundant Nuclear Energy. They were not the
brightest lot on the block.
They also did not seem to understand that Wind Turbines
are great bird whackers and kill more birds per year than
lit up skyscrappers in Toronto.
They also did not understand that the fabrication of solar
cells required extremely toxic chemicals such as Selinium
and also required large tracts of land (thus cut down the trees
or plow under farmland) to power entire cities.
From these people I met, if they were representative, I would
be surprised that they could calculate any energy efficiencies.
Like I said, they were not the brightest lot on the block.
LoL
Why let Greenpeace push anyone around? Did anyone vote for them? They don't act on my behalf. Losers, again if your going to go for the green religion, why am I reading your posts? Give up the electronics and stop posting or shut up.
Anyone else starting to think that Greenpeace is a stealth right wing disinformation op designed to drive public perception and discredit more rational conservation and environmental goals?
Seriously, Greenpeace's antics do more to help than harm to the interests big polluters.
Excelsior!
Is this the same Apple that refuses to fix broken GPU's that it knows were broken in its top price hardware? Is this the same Apple that refuses to give the full two years warranty mandated by European law, despite charging a significant higher Euro price for its products supposedly to cover these costs?
The problem with being a lying scumbag of a company, is that I stop believing EVERYTHING you say. Apple lies, it is a marketing company first and foremost and marketing is lying. See the whole deal with Foxcon, there they have been proven to lie or twist the truth till it screams in agony at every turn.
No doubt this will be something like, our solar panel provides 60% of the power, at our datacenters, mini-bar. Or they measured it before all the servers were turned on.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
These Greenpeace types are the same people who've prevented us from developing and deploying newer, safer nuclear power plants to replace the less safe older ones which are forced to keep running--and which could replace polluting coal plants and help us immensely in the transition away from the fossil fuels they themselves also decry. They're the same folks who stirred up opposition to Yucca Mountain, yet use the lack of such a facility as a talking point against nuclear. They're the same folks who also fight hydro and anything else with "environmental impact" (i.e., changing anything at all about a local environment). Until they're willing to back some realistic alternatives to current power generation--other than living like Luddite hippies--I tune these idiots out. Solar and wind currently supply only about 1% of our national power generation needs, and there's no chance they'll ever supply it all. Until the Greenpeace types back something useful to our situation, they're the same ones keeping us stuck on fossil fuels. Fuck 'em.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Greenpeace: blah blah blah blah bad bad bad
Apple: blah blah blah blah good good good
The truth? Probably somewhere in the middle.
Hi. I'm an MBA. And you are 100% correct with your sarcastic interpretation ()Oh, shit! I'm on Linux and my spell check for Firefox deosn't work.)
Anyway, to make a long story short. I can prove with FASAB accounting that they are correct. And that Apple is correct.
Or vice versa.
The old addage - figures don't lie but liars can figure.
To be fair, at least greenpeace and apple arrive at the same numbers for the power generated by the wind and solar power plants.
10%*100MW = 10MW = 60%*20MW.
So the only difference is the total power consumption, which you have to guess anyway if you are not Apple.
Apple's servers may or may not use an excess amount of power, but this seems to me like environmentalists attacking a detail when they should be attacking the bigger picture. How about laptops we throw out every three years? The ten billion trees that business kills each year in paperwork? All the land consumed by urban blight, that could be open forest? Compared to that, some data center is not really a big deal.
Unless somebody is sitting on something as clever as it is secret, it seems highly unlikely that Apple's efficiency per unit data crunched is all that different from any of the other large cloud types. There are certainly better and worse designs, but anybody who doesn't want to bleed money is likely to be in roughly the same ballpark, and using the same silicon, and bound by the same basic energy conversion efficiency constraints.
Given that, it seems unlikely that there could be a fivefold disagreement about how much power is being used, unless somebody is deeply incompetent, or there are two markedly different estimates of how big Apple's operation is.
My sister used to work as a secretary for Greenpeace Netherlands, some 20 years ago. She was appalled at the spending sprees of the then director who would go fancy dining with friends on the Greenpeace credit card. She quit.
Greenpeace statements have the same relation to truth as the speeches of Joseph Goebbels or the Pravda newspaper from the Soviet era.
Nerd fight!!!
a pissing match between two groups of loud hippies nobody wants to hear. How quaint.
Greenpeace also said Elon Musk is full of shit about 300 miles Teslas and being able to launch satellites on the cheap.
unless they are already brainwashed by them (expamle owning a iPod/phone/pad). I wouldn't go with the info Greenpeace gave out either though. I would bet the #s are actully inbetween both statements. you can do the math in your head (or in Excel if you want) power supply on a desktop machine in 2010+ is normally 400watts and up. what wasnt factored into both of their # was the monitors, lights, fans, cooling for the data center.. they both based their #s on just the PCs it seems.
Computing, HPC computing, and data center housing are the most Green industries on the planet.
Every year, every generation, every iteration of hardware is faster than the last. Every new product does more computations than the last, often with the same or less power.
EVERY company that has anything to do with computing has a direct interest in reducing power consumption. It drives lower power bills, longer battery lifves, or materials saved due to smaller thermal envelopes, and increased capabilities.
The power cost per computation shrinks at a shocking rate, with gains not seen in any other industry, ever.
Green peace, if anything, should be up in arms about the industries that thirst for computational power and computer resources. That party would be programmers. They drive the consumption of resources, not the hardware makers or the data warehouse managers.
Imo, they're idiots and the thing is, thinks are becoming more environmentally friendly. There is no need for a group like greenpeace and I think they know it so they have to make up stuff to get attention and hopefully donations.
I think Greenpeace is missing the environmental benifit of the Cloud.
When I want to deploy my website, I can either purchase a SAN and a half dozen servers plus network gear to run it, or I can deploy to Amazon or some other cloud provider where I'm running on the same shared hardware as many other customers.
...who really gives a shit about what Greenpeace thinks?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Greenpeace "assumed" that there was a rule of thumb power-used/cost-of-facility metric. Which they probably made up, but they came up with 1MW/$15 million. (Full report PDF here ) Now, not only is that number kinda smelly in and of itself, but they also include the entire $1 billion Apple is spending, which seems to include the cost of their big solar array and fuel cell farm. There could be all kinds of overhead costs in there that don't compare to other facilities, like putting in roads, plans for expansion, surveying, etc.
Apple's servers aren't any more efficient than anyone else's. It's just Greenpeace making stuff up.
All the frothing against environmentalists in this thread aside, GP does have an interesting response to Apple's denial...
While it is good to see Apple acknowledge it should reveal more details of the energy consumption of its data centers, the information they released today does not add up with what they have reported to be the size of the investment and physical size of the data center. When Apple announced they were building a data center in North Carolina, they announced a commitment to invest $1 Billion (USD) over 10 years. For a number of the facilities in the “How Clean is Your Cloud?” report, we made estimates of power demand using fairly conservative industry benchmarks for data center investments: 1MW of power demand from servers for every $15 million, though the number is often closer to $8 Million for many companies. Thus, a $1B investment should net Apple 66MW of computer power demand. Assuming a fairly standard energy efficiency factor for new data centers for non-computer energy demand of 50% gives you a 100MW data center. While Apple is well known for making more expensive consumer products, if Apple’s plans for the $ 1Billion investment only generates 20MW in power demand, that would be taking the “Apple premium” to a whole new level.
Size Matters
The size of the facility at 500,000 sq foot would also indicate a much larger power demand. Amazon’s chief web engineer recently conservatively estimated that based just on the size of the facility, the iDatacenter would consume at least 78MW, and speculated that it is probably higher.
We made these estimates because companies like Apple and Amazon have not disclosed details of how much energy data centers use now and will in the future. We provided Apple with our data prior to releasing the “How Clean is Your Cloud?” report, and while they did not agree with our estimate, they declined to provide specific information on their energy demand.
My short summary of the argument is that in this case Apple is trying to use secrecy to avoid public scrutiny, and Greenpeace has done their due diligence. Frankly, if Apple won't communicate with an enviro group as large as Greenpeace on matters of waste and power consumption, then it is Apple's attitude and business model that I have to question.
If companies don't like estimates by Greenpeace, perhaps they should reveal official numbers backed up by data. A single statement from Apple off-handedly spouting a number doesn't it make it any truer than Greenpeace estimating the cost. Sorry, I just don't believe unverified numbers from the likes of Apple. Google's response: Urs Hoelzle Google’s Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure - "The company welcomed the Greenpeace report and believed that it would intensify the industry’s focus on renewable energy." Adding: "We’ve put a significant time and resources into making Google as energy efficient as possible, using renewable energy, and investing in the sector. We welcome reports like this, as they bring additional attention to these important issues for the industry.
Greenpeace ... lying? No! It can't be! I'm shocked, I tell you - shocked!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
+5 funny
It's always interesting to see the American reaction to a Greenpeace story. We have comments criticising them for being such a massive organisation, "raking in over a quarter of a billions a year worldwide"! And explaining that it's because of Greenpeace that the nuclear industry in the USA has been stifled.
I do wonder how it is that an organisation that "rakes in" about 1% *annually* of what Apple raked in last *quarter* is somehow bullying Apple? Poor little Apple.
And this same organisation, who again pull in less than 0.5% of just Valero's turnover, are dictating US energy policy? How did that happen? Presumably it has something to do with the huge number of Green Party Congressmen you currently have...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Even if Apple's cloud facilities use tons of energy, it is still a net win for the environment. Think about networked computing in general. Emails and electronic documents have eliminated the need for tons of paper and the energy used to ship them across the globe. Instead of snail mail to Panama, I can just send off an email. Instead of archiving things and photocopying them, which takes up space and energy to air condition/safeguard, I can just put it on discs or store them on the cloud. Even for the provision of web services, instead of everyone rolling their own server with backups, which costs tons of energy, we can have a centralized server farm with more efficient air conditioning, power supplies, and power backups. Big server farms can do stuff like use DC. A guy in his basement? Not so much.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Don't try to deny it, that only makes you look more guilty.
---
Now think about this for a moment and decide if you want to live in a world where you are innocent until proven guilty or the other way around.
Greenpeace's power estimation model is:
* 1MW / $15M
Apple announces a $1B datacenter investment, with a huge amount of that money spent on on-site solar panels and other energy efficiency improvments. Greenpeace then says: $1B * 1MB / $15M == 67MW of dirty-fossil fuels.
Literally the only way Apple could win is by not spending *any* money on a datacenter. Even if they made a datacenter which ran on hydroelectric power and literally sucked CO2 out of the air they would still show up on Greenpeace's worst polluter list.
I guess your point is that the burden of proof is on Apple; but frankly I think they've provided a fair bit of proof about their huge solar array.
What, we're supposed to take your single unverified claim otherwise as proof? You need to back that statement up with something.
Greenpeace hasn't been trustworthy for over 2 decades. They lie, bully and extort.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just for the record: According to this source, wind turbines cost around 1.2-2.6 million USD per MW. Assuming a (I think conservative?) capacity factor of 25%, that's 4.8-10.4 million USD per produced MW, so for 1 billion USD you should be able to buy 96-208 MW.
Data centers power and cooling capacity are typically expressed as a number of watts per square foot. Apple has said it's a 20MW data center, and 500,000 square feet. Simple math gives us:
20MW / 500,000 sq feet is 40 Watts per Square Foot
That is extraordinarily low for a data center built today. Most data centers built today are in the 150-200 watts/square foot range, with some pushing higher. I personally haven't seen a data center built to less than 100 watts/square foot level since about 2000.
Apple could be doing any number of things that lead to this low rating. It could be using only a fraction of the floor space inside, and thus the 20MW is current draw of a 150 watts/square foot section occupying 1/3 of the total space. They could be doing something interesting with the cooling that requires some lower density power usage. Also, disk arrays tend to be lower power than servers burning away on compute, so they may have lower usage if it is mostly storage capacity for iCloud.
Still, I am extremely skeptical that Apple would only use 20MW of power in 500,000 feet. The Greenpeace estimates are in line with what other data centers that size would use, 100MW for a data center that size would not at all be surprising. Given Apple's secrecy there's no way to know for sure.
Excellent points. But did you know that Greenpeace is opposed to fusion research? In their own words:
Contrast this with Fusion.org's FAQ (or consult your physics book):
I'm linking to archived version of the FAQ, since the current version seems to be dumbed down.
10% of 100 MW is about the same as 60% of 20 MW
1) Accuse high-visibility company of using HUGE amounts of x resource. ...
2) Observe company admitting exactly how much they DO use.
3) Reveal WAG in original claim and propose new claim that real number is still ludicrously high.
4)
5) PROFIT!!!
The size of the facility at 500,000 sq foot would also indicate a much larger power demand. Amazon’s chief web engineer recently conservatively estimated that based just on the size of the facility, the iDatacenter would consume at least 78MW, and speculated that it is probably higher.
Did you even bother to read the response?
Literally the only way Apple could win is by not spending *any* money on a datacenter.
Apart from the likelihood that Apple is lying about power consumption, or they are building a completely new type of data center that consumes huge amounts of space and money in return for relatively little computing power, or they discovered a way to make data centers 5X as efficient as the current state of the art. Perhaps the new facility will include an unannounced detail like, say, office space or a shopping mall? Problem is, you don't get away with that kind of surprise without the local authorities shutting you down.
Incidentally, I went through the report and on page 20 it takes account of Apple's alt energy plans. Greenpeace (and Amazon, for that matter) simply don't believe the 20MW usage claim. Apple appear to have been secretive from the outset (big surprise) and didn't respond to inquiries, so this consumer is not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure the rest of the data center operators find Apple's (and not Greenpeace's) numbers difficult to abide as well.
If I wanted to give Apple a pass here, I would guess that they are initially going to use only a fraction of the new facility space, and hold on to the rest for future expansion by Apple or another data center operator leasing from Apple. Even in that case, they are telling 'truth' about the initial state of the project, but still lying by omission.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple will recycle your laptop for free (postage included).
If it's worth anything they'll even give you a gift card for a new product.
Though at only three years old I would sell an Apple laptop, as it would still be worth quite a lot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
discredit more rational conservation and environmental goals?
You mean like solar power over nuclear energy?
No, the real answer is simply that Greenpeace is full of idiots that in fact HAVE been driving public perception to the detriment of humanity AND the environment for decades now.
They are only about power now, how they can make companies dance on a string.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You joined Greenpeace to get a piece of arse? If you are looking for willing co-eds in Greenpeace, lets just say "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". There are two types of Greenpeace enthusiasts:
1. Those who are taking prescription psychoactive medication
2. Those who really SHOULD be on psychoactive medication.
By and large, they are earnest in their concerns for the environment--they really want to do good by people and the earth, but 99 percent of them are ignorant of hard science and emotionally driven. If you hook up with one of these they will drunk dial you and drive by your house and cry at your front door, waking the neighbours. If they are not vegan they may leave a boiling bunny on your stovetop.
The 1 percent remaining are intelligent and very lucid are also very manipulative. They can contort facts better than organisers of an Arnold Swartzenegger election campaign. They will also never go out with you.
Let me don a tinfoil hat of my own at this point. This is really quite a fanciful theory, so don't take it TOO seriously (but there are probably some uncomfortable truths buried in there):
Apple may be guilding the lily a bit with its energy projections, but you can bet the truth is much closer to what Apple claims than what Greenpeace claims. Greenpeace will take the "seed" of truth then mutate it into a tangled weed of mis-stated facts. Because of their history of "defending the earth" for a good cause, and being perceived as "anti-corporate", they can get away with telling lies grown from facts used out-of-context. It is difficult to refute Greenpeace because they target "big corporate evil". A multi-billion dollar company like Apple or Exxon or General Motors garners little sympathy from the public, and when they refute Greenpeace it is seen as an activity done solely in their own interests (even if they are correcting mis-statements). Greenpeace are very clever that way--they get attention by vilifying high-profile, large corporations and because they are a "charity" it is very bad optics to aggressively defend against them (you become even more evil if you sue greenpeace for defamation and so on), so Greenpeace targets are left with little recourse but to meekly defend themselves with less spectacular facts.
Here is another example: The Keystone XL pipeline is being vigourously fought against, and Greenpeace is in the forefront of that fight. The pipeline is not itself the target--concerns about routing through an aquifer have been addressed and there is basically no government opposition--the hangups are largely with a few property owners and not of an environmental nature (mostly protests over right of ways bisecting properties, effects on property values and other economic/logistical matters). The reason they want it killed is because it allows Canadian bitumen to more readily make its way to gulf coast refineries.
The public argument is that Canadian bitumen comes from messy, energy-intensive mining operations--it looks ugly and makes more CO2 than average oil sources. But even that is not REALLY what Greenpeace hates. The REAL reason is that Canadian bitumen is cheaper than west-texas intermediate--the spread is generally even more than the added cost of refining. Also by law of supply and demand, more supply to refineries for the same demand lowers prices overall. The end goal of Greenpeace is to make fossil-fuel sources of energy as expensive as possible, and to do that you must choke supply. The most "ethical" way to get people to curtail their use of fossil fuels is to educate them, convince them to modify their behaviour voluntairly, but that is the hard way. The easier approach is to curtail supply of oil and gas and force people to use less (they work to eliminate nuclear energy much the same way).
Greenpeace's real mandate is to make all energy more expensive (not just renewable--but expensive). If energy gets expensive enough then first-world nations will have to start de-industrialising. As developing nations advance and developed nations regress the world would "equalise" at some point in the middle. The environmental theme is basically the golden good intention pavement on the road leading right to hell.
If TFA is correct, the floor space is 184,000 square feet, so the power density is 108.7 W / square foot, making Apple's numbers sound pretty realistic, even more if the floor space is not used at full capacity.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Some saying Greenpeace lied about something? Did someone just say that the the attention whores are in fact attention whores instead of putting them up on the Owl Gwar pedestal?
well said.
It is not exactly lies; it is wild speculation or possibly even a reasonable guess based upon ignorance. Even when they purposely distort things greatly it gets the results they want; therefore, they continue with the tactics. Do you not find it funny that Greenpeace is playing reality distortion with Apple?
We live in an age of PR where education and truth do not matter to a huge segment of the population and corporations who project their image with marketing and PR. Its cheaper for them to distort, cover, or lie their flaws than to fix anything and lawsuits or government are not that effective (if not working in the other direction.) Attacking their image they work so hard to create is one way to threaten effectively and cheaply. I would be surprised if they did not use the tactic against a 100x larger organization who has a great deal vested in their appearance.
Maybe they go too far, maybe they do not. It depends on how effective they are. In the USA Greenpeace gets a bad rap no matter what they do -- this is an org who've had corps paying for various types of spies and moles along with PR aimed against them for many decades. I am not a member or donor but I try to put the situation into context. The mission of activist groups is not to to be liked by all consumers - its to create change and please a like minded minority so they continue; the cause does not have to benefit society positively.
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it's the damndest thing. I always thought those guys going "doot doot doo" were complete tools. But the ladies just melted!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.