Greenpeace: Amazon Web Services' Data Centers 'Dirty'

Amazon Web Services (AWS) scored an “F” in a ranking of its commitment to renewable energy in a Greenpeace report released last week. The report, “Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet,” claimed AWS was one of the “dirtiest and least transparent companies” in the cloud space.

“If Amazon was motivated, you’d have a very different scenario unfolding,” Greenpeace analyst Gary Cook told Wired. “We haven’t seen a change in Amazon. Unfortunately, unlike many of those in the sector, they’ve not moved very much in the past few years.”

AWS also received low marks in other categories, including an “F” for environmental advocacy and “D” for energy efficiency. However, an AWS official said that Greenpeace “missed the mark by using false assumptions” about AWS.

“Running IT infrastructure on the AWS Cloud is inherently more energy efficient than traditional computing that depends on small, inefficient and over-provisioned data centers. With AWS, customers can reduce their overall consumption of IT resources while also improving utilization. Collectively, AWS customers are the driving force in this effort by eliminating hundreds of thousands of individual data centers worldwide, along with the associated wasted capacity and overprovisioned energy,” an AWS official told Wired.

Other report findings included:

Responses from over 300 data centers across 19 global IT companies were included in the report. The full report is available for download here.