Intel: Now Largest Purchaser of Green Power in U.S.
by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada 
on 01.28.08
Intel worker holding a CPU wafer, probably containin 45nm Penryn cores.
Intel is announcing today that it will purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours a year of "renewable energy certificates" (which is 46% of their total electricity usage). That will make it the largest buyer of green power in the United States and give a boost to clean energy production, leading to increased generation capacity and eventually lower costs for everyone. It will also indirectly make your computer greener if you buy Intel, and it will pressure competitors to follow suit.
The purchase placed Intel at the top of EPA's latest Green Power Partners Top 25 list, and also at the No. 1 spot on EPA's Fortune 500 Green Power Partners list. You can see the rest of the EPA list here. Surprisingly (to some), #2 and #3 are PepsiCo and the U.S. Air Force.
The energy source selected by Intel is Sterling Planet and they are using Biomass, Geothermal, Solar and Wind. It is not quite clear yet what the ratios are for each, but we'll try to find out.
Update: Interview with Intel's spokesman about their clean energy purchase.
::Intel Becomes Largest Purchaser of Green Power in the U.S.
See also: ::An Alternative to Green Tags -- Sterling Planet's "White Tags", ::Google, Dell, Intel Want Greener PCs, ::Google to Tackle Global Warming, ::Intel Gets the Lead Out, ::How to: Recycle Your Computer, ::BuyGreen: Desktop Computers, ::BuyGreen: Laptop Computers, ::How Google Fights Power Consumption
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Good initiative....but.....why doesn't Intel do more to promote its ULV Cpus that uses 15 (fifteen) times less energy than its normal CPU's at the same power/performance?
I'm really curious to know how much that is relative to their total consumption of electricity. If it amounts to 1% (which it ptobably doesn't) it would amount to nothing more than clever marketing. I would love to see a figure above 50% :)
I Just went to the EPA site and apparently it's 46% of their total electricity use. Pepsi uses 100% green electricity apparently :)
The Intel ULV chips may have the same power/performance ratio, but that means the total performance is much lower. Intel probably feels that only laptop manufacturers will care about these chips. I say we should be glad that Intel has dumped the power-hungry P4/netburst line.
Robby - thanks for doing the due diligence on how much electricity this purchase represents for us. One of our goals was to not disrupt the market by affecting prices too drastically with a large purchase, while at the same time providing a significant "push" to do our part and promote further renewable investment.
We hope we balanced that out. We also have pursued this as a part of our long term energy efficiency and conservation strategy. I tried to give a few more details in a blog post this morning - http://blogs.intel.com/csr/