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Green power to you, Intel, Cisco and IBM!

OK green list fans, here's another one for you. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency released its list of companies who are leading the way when it comes to buying "green power.
Written by Heather Clancy, Contributor

OK green list fans, here's another one for you. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency released its list of companies who are leading the way when it comes to buying "green power." The list came about as a result of a challenge made by the Green Power Partnership in December 2006 encouraging members of the Fortune 500 to switch as much of their energy purchases as possible to green sources.

(The EPA considers "green power" as that subset of alternative energy that will have the biggest environmental benefits, including solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact small hydroelectric sources.)

The 53 companies that show up on the list are collectively buying more than 6 billion kilowatt-hours of green power, which is the equivalent amount of electricity needed to power 670,000 average American homes for a year.

Intel, which led the ranking, accounts for more than one-sixth of that amount on its own (1.6 billion kilowatt-hours per year). The next-highest rank tech company on the list was Cisco Systems (No. 7), with 373.5 million killowatt-hours per year, followed by IBM (No. 12) with more than 110 million kilowatt-hours per year. That amount is about 4 percent of the company's U.S. purchased electricity, according to some stats sent over to me by one of IBM's green spokesmen.

Other I.T. giants rating a mention were Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple (Austin facility), Oracle (Austin facility) and Yahoo!

Here's the full press release.

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