Greenpeace

Well, this http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/reports/How-dirty-is-your-data/ report certainly stirred it up, judging by the fantastic amount of retweeting and posting on the net.
I was lucky enough to get the report pre publication, not by much, a couple of hours maybe but enough time to circulate it around to colleagues in the Green Grid, Uptime Institute and the BCS.
Personally, I have been alarmed at the Greenwash that originates from some IT Vendors and cloud services providers and am pleased that these claims are now being looked at in some detail and alternative views are coming to light.
For the record I have raised this issue on this blog many times, moving to the cloud does NOT reduce IT energy consumption it merely moves it, and quite possibly adds to the overall energy consumption of IT in general.
Whilst in Amsterdam I was sad to hear one of the panelists state that "energy consumption in Data Centres will surpass the Aviation Industry carbon emissions some time this year, but we as an industry to not have to worrry about when that will be as Greenpeace will tell us."
I found this statement to be particulary crass, it invites criticism of the youngest industry in the World (Data Centres have only been around for about 20 years) that is misleading.

Whilst all Data Centres are energy intensive, there are many ways to reduce energy consumption and to become more efficient, the industry does care and is taking steps to address the problem with initatives such as the Green Grid, and the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres (Energy Efficiency) and assessment schemes such as the BCS CEEDA accreditation (Links below).
As a BCS Green IT & Data Centres specialist group member I have contacted Greenpeace to begin a dialogue with them regarding this issue and will report back on this blog.

http://www.thegreengrid.org/

http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative_data_centers.htm

http://www.ceeda-award.org/