No green energy, no dice.

That’s Microsoft’s stance on siting new data centers, according to a story in the Roanoke Times. The company passed on building a nearly half-billion dollar facility in Montgomery County, Virginia. Instead, it settled on Boydton County.

The reason: A dearth of renewable energy options. Oh, yeah, and sinkholes.

The sinkholes are an obvious concern as no business, be it a data center or otherwise, wants their buildings sucked into a crater. However, it’s the clean energy requirement that provides some insight to the shifting priorities of big web and cloud services providers when they go looking at places for their servers to call home. Unfortunately, Montgomery County doesn’t look like it’s up to the task, which is a shame for its local economy. For Microsoft, however, it’s a way to drastically reduce emissions caused by the massive computing center, so expect some big eco-flavored announcements when it finally opens.

Maybe Facebook could have avoided Greenpeace’s wrath if it borrowed a page from Microsoft’s data center siting handbook.

Image credit: nixter – Flickr – CC