Greenpeace International has ended a long running campaign calling on Facebook to "unfriend coal" as a source of energy for its data centers, after Facebook agreed to promote clean and renewable energy.

In late October, Facebook announced plans to build a new data center in Lulea, Sweden, using hydroelectric power for the servers and relying on the local climate to cool the data center for free. At the time, though, Facebook made no commitment to use clean and renewable energy in its other data centers.

Greenpeace rated Facebook's existing data centers as among the dirtiest on the planet in its April report on cloud computing services, "How dirty is your data?"

Back then, the campaign group estimated Facebook's reliance on coal at 53.2%, second only to Apple's (at 54.5%) and far higher than Google's (34.7%) or Amazon's (28.5%). Greenpeace based its estimates on published figures for data center power consumption and electricity utilities' reports of their energy sources.

(Sourced from itworld.com)