As technology companies expand their cloud storage services, data servers around the country are expanding and increasing their energy consumption. Several media and advocacy groups have taken note of these huge facilities’ power usage, and this week Apple has come under the microscope. Grist raises concerns over Apple’s new data center in Maiden, N.C., citing [...]
Archive for the ‘Coal’ Category
3 Apr
Cooling Coal’s Jets
Check out the great map published yesterday by Mother Jones, which uses data from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal project to map the status of various coal plants across the states (existing, progressing, or blocked). The accompanying article lauds the work that Sierra Club has done to toss out “two-thirds of 249 new coal plant [...]
7 Dec
JP Morgan Tops List of Biggest Coal Financiers
In a study published last week by BankTrack.org (a watchdog organization that tracks the operations of corporations in all walks of the private financial sector), in tandem with like-minded environmental organizations from South Africa and Germany, JP Morgan Chase topped a list of twenty banks (of a total sample pool of 93 banks) who were [...]
8 Nov
High Class European Banks Say ‘No, Thank You’ to Dirty Coal
A short and sweet Environment and Climate Change Bulletin from Linklaters last week tipped us off to an interesting development in power plant financing, but left us thirsty for more details. According to the global law firm, several international banks (including the likes of HSBC, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Standard Chartered and F&C Asset Management) [...]
12 Apr
To Frack or Not To Frack?
Hydraulic fracturing has received a lot of press since we originally reported on it (here and here), but probably nothing compared to the debate going forward. On Sunday, April 10th, The Hill’s E2-Wire released a pre-publication version of a study from Cornell University concluding that natural gas obtained via “fracking” could be even worse for [...]
10 Mar
EPA Highlights Tool for Researching Your Region’s Electricity Generation Profile; Washington Spurning, Not Burning Coal
If you’re a sucker for easy-to-use, city-specific, energy-related tools, then you may or may not already know and love the EPA’s Power Profiler. Enter your zip code, and within a few seconds you are looking at a short, but arguably substantial report that gives you the fuel mix and the emissions rates in your region, [...]
