Faced with rising and volatile energy prices and the specter of potential power outages, eBay decided last year that it was time to step up its use of renewable power sources.

With its data centers comprising about half of the company's energy consumption, eBay's sustainability team determined it made sense to focus on those facilities. First, it would consolidate the company's eight U.S. centers into three situated in Utah, Arizona and Nevada. In addition, it would add onto the existing Utah center to create a 30-megawatt facility powered entirely by renewable energy, to be completed by mid-2013.

“This means we'll be completely clean and green,” says Dean Nelson, senior director of global data center strategy, architecture and operations at the San Jose, Calif.-based online commerce platform, at right. “We're reinventing how we run our data centers.”