Green with Envy – Intel No. 1 for User of Renewable Energy in the U.S.

Though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long published rankings of companies’ use of renewable power, this year the agency decided to put together a separate ranking just for tech companies.

Against some pretty well-known competition, Intel was named the No. 1 user of renewable energy in the U.S.—buying nearly 2.8 billion kilowatt hours of green power, constituting 89% of our energy use. That’s more than double the next largest tech user, Microsoft, with 1.2 billion kW hours. Cisco, Sprint and Dell round out the top five. (View the full list at the EPA’s website.)

“Intel is inching closer toward the goal of covering 100 percent of its corporate power use,” Toms Hardware noted.

The site added, “Somewhat surprising may be the fact that Google is not quite as green as the perception may indicate. All those solar panels on Google’s roof and wind turbines hardly show any impact: Google acquires only 103 million kWh per year—which is about 5 percent” of its total energy use. Google ranked No. 6 on the list.

Now, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Intel won—we’ve been No. 1 on the EPA’s broader Green Power Partnership rankings since 2008, according to the Environmental Leadereco-news website. The list ranks companies in a variety of sectors—for example, the No. 2 overall green power purchaser after Intel this year was Kohl’s, the department store chain.

Intel buys electricity from small hydroelectric sources, solar energy providers, bio-gas companies, and wind-energy firms.