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Environmental group Greenpeace has stepped up a campaign against Facebook challenging the social networking company to go green and stop using coal and nuclear power at its data centres.

A television advertisement, which uses the photographs of hundreds of supporters of Greenpeace's 'Facebook Unfriend Coal' page, is running in Facebook's home town of California.

With fewer than 25 days to go before Earth Day, Greenpeace is trying to convince Facebook, the world's largest social network with more than 600 million members, to switch to renewable energy sources.

Almost 600,000 Facebook users have either signed up to English, Spanish, German, French and Dutch groups entitled 'We want Facebook to use 100% renewable energy' or 'Unfriend Coal'.

The campaign was promoted by Facebook's announcements last year that it was opening two data centres which will use enough power to fuel tens of thousands of homes.

The first in Prineville, Oregon will be powered by a local coal plant. With a size in excess of 300,000 square feet (or three times the size of an average out of town supermarket), this centre is expected to use enough power to fuel between 30,000 and 35,000 homes.

Greenpeace launched the Cool IT Challenge in 2009 to call on information technology companies to power technological solutions needed to fight climate change.

The environmental group has calculated that the amount of electricity needed to power the Internet, not including the devices used to access the service, exceeded 622 billion kilowatt hours in 2007. If the Internet was a country, it would be the world's fifth biggest consumer of electricity. And in America alone, Facebook accounts for nine per cent of all Internet traffic.

The electricity demand for the Internet is now expected to triple over the next ten years, meaning that it will consume more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.

Facebook has retaliated, claiming that (beyond designing a new efficient data centre) it is obliged to use whatever electricity is supplied by local utilities - a claim that is disputed by Greenpeace, which offers five 'clean' steps for the social networking site to follow.

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