Apple Praised for Renewable Energy

Greenpeace commented on Apple’s place at the top of the list:

Apple’s aggressive pursuit of its commitment to power the iCloud with 100% renewable energy has given the company the inside track among the IT sector’s leaders in building a green Internet. Apple has made good on its pledge by building the largest privately owned solar farms at its North Carolina data center, working with its utility in Nevada to power its upcoming data center there with solar and geothermal energy, and purchasing wind energy for its Oregon and California data centers. Apple’s commitment to renewable energy has helped set a new bar for the industry, illustrating in very concrete terms that a 100% renewable internet is within its reach, and providing several models of intervention for other companies that want to build a sustainable Internet.

Also near the top of Greenpeace’s “Green Internet Innovators” (“Those committed to 100% renewable energy. Their leadership is helping to make our lives, online and offline, greener.”) are Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) (“Radical improvements in transparency and efforts to deliver significant wind energy investment in Iowa have helped drive Facebook into the top tier of companies creating the green internet.”) and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) (“Google has continued to lead the major internet brands in purchasing renewable energy at scale to power its massive online ecosystem. The company is now reporting electricity consumption of 3,315 GWh, with 34% of its operations powered by clean energy.”)

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) fell toward the middle of the Greenpeace list, as did eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

One of the dirtiest, or those stuck in the Internet’s past, as Greenpeace calls it, among the most recently founded large Internet companies is Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR). Greenpeace’s comment on the short message social network:

The microblogging platform has remained silent about the type and amount of electricity that is powering those data centers. Twitter remains at the bottom of the industry for energy transparency, disclosing no information about its energy footprint.

For Twitter management and investors, the ranking may mean little. Unlike Google, it has no slogan like the search engine company’s “Don’t be evil.”

24/7 Wall St. recently pointed out that Apple is one of the U.S. companies holding billions of dollars offshore. But what investors and analysts may be most looking forward to from Apple is the release of the iPhone 6.