Gigaom's Katie Fehrenbacher has written a nice piece on the green data center efforts, highlighting the leaders - Apple, Google, and Facebook.

“The world’s largest internet companies are turning to clean power to run their data centers like never before. This month we saw huge clean power deals from Apple, including big solar projects planned in California and Arizona, and a big wind buy from Google to provide local power for its headquarters in Silicon Valley.

But it wasn’t always this way. It’s only been in the last several years that Apple, Google, Facebook and others have been embracing clean power as a viable option to provide a significant amount of power for their data centers, and it’s taken years for the power industry, and the internet companies themselves, to adjust to and learn about this emerging world.”

Katie tells her own personal story of covering the green data center efforts starting in 2012.

“I took my first road trip around the area in the summer of 2012 and wrote about the companies’ complicated relationship with the region’s dirty and clean power options. In late 2013, I took another trip to investigate Apple’s already built monumental solar farms there.”

Disclosure: Katie Fehrenbacher is a friend and I will regularly discuss discuss the green data center topic when we are at events like Gigaom Structure.