In Facebook’s explosive six-year history, millions of people around the globe have shared stories, made new connections and strengthened old friendships on the social networking site. But what many users don’t know is that Facebook, which boasts more than 500 million users, also is a pioneer in energy efficiency — and the Alliance’s newest Associate member.
Alliance staff spoke with Facebook about the thousands of people-hours and tens of millions of dollars the company has invested into energy efficiency, as well as what to expect from the new partnership.
Alliance-Facebook Partnership Promotes Energy Efficiency
The relationship between Facebook and the Alliance marks new territories for both organizations, as the Alliance combines decades of efficiency expertise with Facebook’s unparalleled messaging power. The partnership with the Alliance also marks the first time Facebook has allied with a non-industry organization on energy efficiency.
“We at the Alliance are excited about these opportunities to use Facebook’s unique, broad-reaching channels to encourage consumers to become more energy efficient in their daily lives,” said Alliance President Kateri Callahan.
In the near future, Facebook users will be able to “like” a new "Green on Facebook" page. This resource will showcase the company’s environmental initiatives and provide information and tools for users to easily become more energy efficient.
Multiple Channels to Spread Message to Consumers
With its presence on Facebook, the Alliance will link visitors back to LivingEfficiently.org, the Alliance’s newly launched consumer website that offers energy efficiency tips, product information and news on saving energy at home, school, work and on the go.
The launch of both LivingEfficiently.org and the Alliance’s partnership with Facebook also will coordinate with a series of Alliance-sponsored videos on CBS’s 520-square foot billboard in New York City’s Times Square touting LivingEfficiently.org for the month of November.
Facebook: A Story of Efficiency
The Alliance-Facebook partnership is one of many major steps Facebook has taken toward energy efficiency. Since the company's beginning, Facebook has been interested in efficiency for a simple reason: It makes good business sense, said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations. Heiliger understands a basic tenet of energy efficiency, which is that the cleanest and cheapest energy is the energy you don’t use. With that idea in mind, the company has poured increasingly substantial resources into developing hardware and software that reduces energy demand on its website, one of the most trafficked in the world.
As the world’s largest photo-sharing site, Facebook is home to billions of photos—with users continuing to upload more than 200 million each month. To meet this demand, in 2009 Facebook developed Haystack, which is a storage system that reduces energy consumption, data use and infrastructure requirements—all while increasing performance speed. Furthering the goal of energy efficiency, Facebook announced in early 2010 a new technology to make computer language PHP more efficient. The project, HipHop for PHP, reduced CPU usage on web servers by more than 50 percent. Less CPU usage means fewer servers, resulting in less overall energy usage. The company even decided to open source HipHop for PHP, making it available for free so anyone could use it to save energy.
In the world of data servers, Facebook has improved the efficiency of its leased servers by an average of 10 percent to 15 percent by conducting energy audits and analyzing how air travels through each space, Heiliger said. These assessments have substantially improved the energy effiiciency of Facebook offices' cooling infrastructure. However, Heiliger explained, the greatest opportunities for energy efficiency are in data centers where the company is both owner and operator, like Facebook's new site in Prineville, Ore.
By taking advantage of the carefully selected cool climate, as well as the ability to tailor both the building and hardware infrastructure to specialized needs, the Prineville data center will operate without conventional chillers—resulting in huge energy savings. Operator-owned data centers like Prineville give Facebook the opportunity to try out new ideas and conduct R&D on efficient technologies, such as energy-proportional computing that would allow energy use to fluctuate with demand.
Looking to the future, Facebook plans to increase efforts to help its employees and the users it serves to realize the benefits of efficiency, including saving money and contributing to environmental sustainability.
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