With Earth Day past us, our commitment to environmental responsibility is top of mind here at Yahoo!, so we thought we’d share some little-known facts about our energy consumption:

• 56% of Yahoo!’s  electricity demand at our data centers is met with renewable energy
• Yahoo! has built some of the world’s most efficient facilities with a unique “chicken coop” design that runs almost entirely on free cooling
• Our most efficient data centers consume 40% less energy than conventional data centers due to their unique shape and use of free outside air cooling 98 percent of the year
• The Lockport data center is saving enough energy to power more than 9,000 New York State households energy annually.
• The Yahoo! Lockport data center is saving enough energy to power approximately 300,000 CFL light bulbs for one year, running 24/7.
• Yahoo! will save more water per year than flows over the Niagara Falls for a minute straight
• The water saved at the Lockport site in one year is enough to provide drinking water for 200,000 people to sustain a healthy life (Approximately 180 gallons per year per person is the average amount of drinking water in a lifetime).
• A lot of people assume that a green facility has to cost more up front. Our Lockport data center was cheaper to build than a conventional data center.  And was built from ground to commissioning in 6 months.

These points and more were recognized earlier in a new report from Greenpeace International, titled “How Clean is Your Cloud?”  The study found that Yahoo! is leading the way among large technology companies through its use of clean energy in its data centers.  Yahoo! earned the highest “Clean Energy Index” score (a company average for clean energy usage) and we are proud of it!

This is because we strongly believe that location matters, and choose sites for our data center facilities very carefully.  We base decisions on things like the presence of clean power and great workforces, as well as weather conditions that we know will help us build energy-efficient free-cooled data centers.

As a result, we were also named a finalist this week in the Facility Design Implementation category of the 2012 Green Enterprise IT Awards, which recognize pioneering advancements for significantly improved energy productivity in IT and data center operations.

So rest assured.  We love delivering great consumer experiences and we do it responsibly with an eye towards the future of our planet.

In the meantime, you might want to check out public radio. Chris Page, our director of climate and energy strategy, who works with the data center team to squeeze more work out of every kilowatt-hour our data centers consume, spoke to the folks at Public Radio International’s “Living on Earth” program for a segment that aired this week. She gives you both a virtual tour of our local Sunnyvale data center and explains how far the industry has come since energy efficiency became a priority. Think facilities that operate more like a Tesla than your mom’s old wood-paneled station wagon (but without the pricetag).

Head over to “Living on Earth” to check out the transcript or listen to the program.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

This is significant because data centers represent the majority of our energy consumption. Keeping Yahoo! running smoothly for more than 500 million people around the world calls for a lot of server power. So we’ve made it a priority to become a leader in designing and building data centers that are environmentally sustainable, investing millions to design facilities that make the best use of the energy we consume.

Here’s what makes us so proud of our future New York data center plans. First, it will be powered by one of the cleanest utilities in the country – fed predominantly by renewable hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls. And second, a record 90% of that energy will power the servers. To put that in context, the industry average is 50% or lower, with the other half dedicated mostly to keeping the servers cool.

For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo Lockport, NY, data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better. To achieve that, we’ve come up with a unique building design that we call the Yahoo! Computing Coop (because it looks like something chickens live in), which is angled to take advantage of Buffalo’s microclimate, using 100% outside air to cool the servers.

We’ve been pushing green data center standards since we started building our own data centers two years ago. For example, our facilities in Washington are powered by zero-carbon wind and hydroelectric sources, and we use free cooling for most of the year, dropping energy consumption by 40-50%. As we build more capacity to meet demand, we’ll continue to focus on innovations and inventions that improve energy efficiency. And we’ve been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.

And we’ll continue to push ourselves hard to lower our impact. Today we’re committing to reduce the carbon intensity of our data centers by at least 40% by 2014. In other words, we’ll decrease our average electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from our data centers around the world. We’ll get there through a combination of innovative data center design, improving how we utilize our servers, cloud computing, and locating our data centers in areas where cleaner energy is available.

Reducing our carbon footprint has always been a priority and we’ve decided to focus all our energy and investment on that philosophy. We will no longer purchase carbon offsets as announced in 2007. Instead, we’ll focus our resources on reducing our carbon impact while helping the rest of the industry do the same. We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change.

So the next time you check your email, do a Yahoo! search, or get the latest environmental info on Yahoo! Green, you can feel good about putting some of the greenest data centers in the industry to work.

David Filo
Co-founder and Chief Yahoo