Facebook’s (FB) Renewable Energy: All Wind Power For Data Center In Iowa

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) appears to be paying attention to its impact on the environment, pledging that its new data center in Iowa will be 100 percent powered by wind energy.

The company’s data center in Altoona is expected to go online in early 2015, and it will be powered entirely by a wind project in nearby Wellsburg, which Facebook helped to develop, according to Energy Manager Today, a trade publication.

The wind project will add 138 megawatts of capacity to the grid in Iowa, more than what the data center is expected to consume annually in coming years. Facebook has said it wants the energy mix for its data centers worldwide to reach 25 percent clean and renewable energy by 2015.

That commitment came after a two-year Greenpeace campaign, which saw 700,000 people demand that Facebook use clean energy, and not coal, to power its data centers. After Facebook relented, the campaign ended in December 2011.

The company said in June that a planned data center in Sweden will be powered entirely by hydroelectric energy.

Other tech companies pledging to better manage their energy needs include Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). Google said in June it would power its next data center in Finland with wind energy, and Microsoft said in March that it had made its Dublin data center significantly more-energy efficient.

The data center in Iowa will be Facebook’s fourth, according to a company blog post. Google has at least six data centers in the U.S.