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Greenpeace Activists Protest From Roof of Apple's Irish Headquarters

Posted April 18, 2012 at 3:15pm by iClarified · 5696 views
Greenpeace activists scaled the roof of Apple's Irish Headquarters to protest the company's use of dirty energy at its data center, reports Corkipedia.

This morning 18th April 2012, four protestors claiming to be from international rights group Greenpeace staged am hour-long protest on the roof of Apple's European Headquarters in Cork, Ireland. The protestors went on to the roof of the Apple building at Holyhill in Cork at around 7am. It is understood the protest was in relation to the use of coal to power data centres for cloud computing. A sign in the windows at Apple reads "Clean Our Cloud".

The protest follows a report from Greenpeace which criticizes Apple and others for relying heavily on dirty energy.

"To deliver iCloud services, Apple has dramatically expanded its data center infrastructure. It has invested at least $1bn in an "iDataCenter" in North Carolina, one of the world's largest data centers, and just announced another facility to be built in Prineville, Oregon. Unfortunately, both of these investments are powered by utilities that rely mostly on coal power."

Apple quickly responded to the Greenpeace report saying:

"Our data center in North Carolina will draw about 20 megawatts at full capacity, and we are on track to supply more than 60% of that power on-site from renewable sources including a solar farm and fuel cell installation which will each be the largest of their kind in the country."

"We believe this industry-leading project will make Maiden the greenest data center ever built, and it will be joined next year by our new facility in Oregon running on 100% renewable energy."

The protesters also handed out the leaflets which can be seen below...

Read More [via MacRumors]