TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - After nearly a decade of participation, tech giant Meta announces its withdrawal from the global RE100 renewable energy initiative. This decision marks the end of Meta's commitment to the world corporate consortium's requirement of using 100 percent environmentally friendly electricity for all its operations.
The departure of the parent company of Facebook and Instagram is in line with the company's business maneuver to actively finance the construction of natural gas power plants in the past year. Meta's management has also confirmed their withdrawal from the clean energy project, accordind to Tech Crunch.
"After several in-depth conversations between Meta and Climate Group, Meta has withdrawn from the RE100 initiative, as it is no longer able to meet the technical criteria due to investments made in new gas power," a spokesperson of Climate Group, the UK-based nonprofit that heads the initiative, told AFP, as quoted from France 24.
Meta's decision to withdraw from the clean energy initiative has sparked discussions among several analysts. The move is suspected to be closely related to Meta's inability to fully implement the use of renewable energy across all its data center operations.
As Meta chooses to leave, its competitors such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are reported to remain within RE100 along with more than 400 other global companies. Meta claims to continue striving to balance their data center's energy consumption with renewable energy supply.
However, the promise is deemed unbalanced because Meta's expansion of Natural Gas Power Plants could potentially cause a spike in emissions and air pollution.
From a technical standpoint, a 1 Gigawatt data center facility operating daily using natural gas can release hundreds of metric tons of pollutants. Emissions such as nitrogen oxides, fine particles, and sulfur oxides are at risk of causing serious health problems, ranging from asthma, cardiovascular diseases, to dementia for the surrounding residents.
Meta is not the only company looking to natural gas to support AI infrastructure, as Google and Microsoft are also investing in fossil fuel projects. However, Meta's decision to halt commitments in this voluntary industry group is a major highlight because it directly coincides with the massive expansion of their natural gas facilities.
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