Cloud providers’ green claims are full of smoke

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

You can’t get through a month without hearing a group of cloud providers tell us how green their clouds are by using alternative energy sources instead of carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Although I’m sure they’re taking steps to reduce the amount of carbon emissions their new data centers put out, just the fact of data centers the size of a large airport seems counterintuitive to the "green" claim.

Last week, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a panel of cloud providers crowing about how they’ve forced power companies to switch to non-fossil-fuel sources: "By strong-arming power companies — for business, not necessarily altruistic, reasons — name-brand tech giants like Google, Rackspace, and Facebook can claim significant portions of their power comes from renewable sources like wind, hydro, and solar."…

These days, being green is politically correct as well as cost-efficient. I get that. However, cloud providers that continue to pat themselves on the back by running alternative-energy-powered data centers are beginning to irk me. It doesn’t matter much if the power to the data centers come from wind, solar, or a guy peddling a fusion generator…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/cloud-providers-green-claims-are-full-of-smoke-231117