Facebook Turns to A Little Solar For Its Data Center

Turns out social network giant Facebook has been eying clean power after all for its new data center in Oregon. Well, a very small amount of solar compared to the sizable power needs of its data center. According to Data Center Knowledge, Facebook has built a 100 kW solar panel array, which will produce 204,000 kilowatt hours of solar power per year, next to its data center. The solar system will provide power for some of the facility’s office rooms, but not power for the rooms that house the servers themselves.

What you need to know is that a 100 kW system, generating 204,000 kWh per year, is a fraction of the amount of power that a 300,000 square foot data center facility would commonly use. For comparison’s sake (these aren’t apples to apples, but just to give you an indicator) according to a 2009 MIT study, 16,000 servers used by eBay are thought to use 60,000 MWh per year. Forty thousand servers used by Akamai are thought to use 170,000 MWh per year. For those that forget physics class, 1 megawatt (MW) is 1,000 kilowatts (kW).

But small as it is, Facebook’s move suggests a couple things to me. First off, Facebook is ready to take baby steps into clean power and explore the types of deals and contracts needed to add in renewable energy outside of a utility. Facebook built its data center in Oregon in the footprint of utility Pacific Power that largely derives its electricity from coal, which is why Facebook is now the focus of Greenpeace’s media campaign, “Facebook Unfriend Coal.” That campaign looks like it generated a Guinness World Record for how many comments a single Facebook post has received in a 24-hour period.

Facebook could add in much more solar capacity to this facility or others, and now has learned a little something about sourcing these clean power deals. For any future data center projects, Facebook could also use this knowledge to work with clean power developers in advance of construction on much larger projects, as the anchor tenant, in the way that Google or Sprint has done.

Beyond education, part of what Greenpeace was asking for in its campaign, is leadership and some sort of commitment to move toward clean energy. In a blog post on Friday Greenpeace said: “Through some combination of  direct on-site installation and investment in clean energy development (a la Google), Facebook should set a target to use more renewable energy to power its data center, and use its bulk purchasing power to work with Pacific Power on getting more renewable energy onto the grid.” Well, one (albeit small) part of that challenge has been met.

I reached out to Greenpeace and will update this post, with their thoughts. My guess is this move will be no where close enough to what Greenpeace wants. Another lesson: these types of media campaigns can be particularly effective and seems to have worked in some small way with Facebook.

Greenpeace plans to launch a report at our Green:Net event this Thursday called “How Dirty Is Your Data?” which it explains as examining the “energy choices of Facebook and its IT peers.” At Green:Net Google and Yahoo will discuss their green data center plans. Register for our awesome event here.

The solar panels for Facebook’s solar project were reportedly produced by Oregon’s own SolarWorld, the project was developed by Sunlight Solar Energy, and the trackers for the panels (which move the panels throughout the day to follow the movement of the sun) were made local manufacturer PV Trackers. Data Center Knowledge’s Rich Miller took this fine photo of the array.