Be Innovative in Energy Use is Greenpeace's Demand of Apple

Editor's note: This article is an update on Tuesday's article and contains new information obtained from a Bay City News Service report.

Greenpeace activists who landed at One Infinite Loop early Tuesday morning to protest Apple’s use of “unclean” energy at its North Carolina data center demanded Apple be more innovative in its energy production choices, while reportedly using Apple devices themselves.

Two activists—who barricaded themselves in a giant pod they were calling a “survival device” with a likeness of Apple’s logo painted on it—were arrested. The 8-foot by 10-foot structure has been used in separate protests such as to prevent arctic drilling.

Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies responded to trespassing reports from Apple employees around 8 a.m., and arrived to find two women in their early 20s who had barricaded themselves inside the device, which was painted white with an apple logo, according to sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Jose Cardoza.

Sheriff's deputies then teamed up with Apple maintenance employees
and members of the Santa Clara County Fire Department to get the women out of
the pod using electric saws. 

The two protestors who were arrested around 10 a.m. are Elizabeth Donahue, 21, of Montana and Brandy Palm of Sacramento, according to David Pomerantz, a spokesperson for Greenpeace. The pod was removed about 30 minutes after their arrest.

Donahue and Palm had reportedly attached themselves to each other and the pod using a large metal rod, and did not cooperate with requests by Apple employees or sheriff's deputies to leave the pod and vacate the property, sheriff's officials said.

"Both of them are activists who are really passionate about fighting coal and climate change," Pomerantz said.

In an appropriately tech-related twist, Palm was actually blogging from inside the pod this morning. "I want Apple to use their influence to power the iCloud I use every day with clean energy," she said.
Four other activists dressed as giant iPhones with “fully functional screens” across their midsection that showed messages the group says come from Facebook and Twitter supporters, according to AppleInsider.

Additional messages from supporters were projected on Apple’s headquarters.

The protest is one among several staged throughout the country calling on Apple to do more to use its power and influence of good “by building a cloud powered by renewable energy," Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford was quoted in AppleInsider. "As Apple’s customers, we love our iPhones and iPads, but we don’t want to use an iCloud fueled by the smog of dirty coal pollution."

Apple’s 500,000-square-foot Maiden, North Carolina data center manages its iCloud services and is powered by Duke Energy, which reportedly gets 52 percent of its energy from nuclear facilities and 46 percent from coal.

Greenpeace alleges that Duke gets its coal by by mountain-top mining, a technique that Pomerantz said not only destroyed mountains but also contaminates streams, with significant negative impact on local communities.

Duke Energy itself seems to acknowledge the dark side of coal, naming "Reducing our reliance on mountaintop coal" as one of its goals in the "Environmental Footprint" section of its 2011/2012 Sustainability Report.

Apple’s plans for the data center include installing solar and biogas operations to power the center, but Greenpeace isn’t satisfied with that.

Pointing to Google’s signed commitment to renewable energy, Greenpeace IT analyst Gary Cook told Wired, “If Apple had something like that, that would be something that would give us a lot more confidence in their intentions.”

Apple says the solar farm and biogas project would, "make Maiden the greenest data center ever built," joined by a 100 percent renewable energy powered facility in Oregon in 2013.

"We're concerned about a company that brands itself as so innovative ... still using something as anachronistic as coal," said Greenpeace spokesperson Keiller MacDuff.

—Bay City News Service contributed to this report.