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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.
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
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
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.
You mean the same Apple that gave me a FREE BRAND NEW TOP OF THE LINE Macbook Pro in November because I brought in one of the GPU problematic MBPs that you are mentioning that I bought new in Aug of 2007? No questions asked; they even threw in a display port to DVI adapter at no cost. I didn't have AppleCare and I had upgraded the machine myself at home about 9 months earlier, I didn't even bring it in for the GPU issue, I brought it in for a battery and just told them that it was a POS from a hardware perspective but that I loved the OS and I was getting tired of constantly having to fix something on it (most recently the battery AGAIN).
Maybe Nvida ultimately paid for my goodwill gift, but as a consumer I could care less who pays for it if I get a new free computer and stellar service.
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.
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.
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
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 hasn't been trustworthy for over 2 decades. They lie, bully and extort.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
All of this is pure bullshit speculation. If you read what Apple said, they specifically said that Greenpeace did not account that the total cost including the cost of building a solar array which lowers the number of servers that they would purchase. It has nothing to do with Apple having 5X server efficiency, it's about incorrect assumptions made by Greenpeace about what Apple did or did not purchase. While Apple did not reveal detailed numbers, they did let the public know about the solar array. Greenpeace just ignored it in their guesses.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.