Healing the planet: Al Gore's Apple and Al Gore's Google exploit cheap coal power

Dirty data: The Internet's giant carbon footprint

...your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
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Apple’s 46,000-square-metre iDataCenter is set to open in North Carolina this spring with a price tag of $1 billion U.S. It will use an estimated 100 megawatts of power – as much as about 100,000 Canadian homes.

Apple’s mega-facility is part of a cluster of gigantic new data centres coming on line in North Carolina that are powered largely by cheap and highly polluting coal power. Google has a 44,000-square-metre data centre in the state that will eventually consume an estimated 60 to 100 MW.
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Google threatened to abandon the project if the state legislature didn’t pass a special law to exempt server farms from sales tax on electricity use.
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But Google chose Lenoir for more than just some nice hand-outs. It also wanted cheap electricity for those power-hungry servers.
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It just so happens that the state’s electricity is also some of the dirtiest in the country. Only four per cent comes from renewable sources like wind or hydroelectric power.
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Nearly two-thirds of the state’s electricity comes from coal.

Apple - Press Info - Board of Directors

Albert Gore Jr.
Former Vice President of the United States

Albert A. Gore Profile - Forbes.com

Albert A. Gore, Jr. has served as a Senior Advisor to Google, Inc. (Google) since 2001