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Apple receives regulatory approval for solar farm in North Carolina
As noticed by AppleInsider, the North Carolina Utilities Commission approved Apple's application to build a 20-megawatt solar farm on land adjacent to its Maiden, North Carolina data center. The proposal was filed on February 15 and publicly announced at the end of March. It received no complaints and was approved by the Commission on May 14. This approval gives Apple the green light to continue work on the solar farm, which will provide a portion of the power required by its data center. The solar array is expected to be completed by November and will start providing power late in December. Apple has said it will be the largest user-owned solar array in the United States. Apple's data center has been the target of several Greenpeace demonstrations around the world. The environmental activist group criticizes Apple for its reliance on coal and says the company could improve its usage of clean power. [Via AppleInsider]
Greenpeace: Apple falling short of sourcing clean power
Environmental reports can be all over the place these days -- at times, it seems like these reports tend to be more about politics than the environment. But while Apple has always said it's leading the charge on being environmentally friendly, Greenpeace apparently isn't so sure. The group has called out Apple in a recent report for not using environmentally friendly sources to power Apple's North Carolina data center. Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all got good marks from Greenpeace's report, because their buildings are in areas that use "clean" power like wind and solar power. But Apple's center uses mostly coal and nuclear electricity, which Greenpeace looks negatively on. Apple does deserve some credit. It leads the industry in using green power, even if this specific plant, according to this report, isn't doing what Greenpeace wants. Apple also got bad marks for transparency. The company says it uses clean power, but apparently it doesn't always share the specific evidence that Greenpeace wants. At any rate, there's probably fair points on both sides here. Apple does a lot to use "green" energy in all of its work, and of course, as Greenpeace suggests, there's always more that can be done. The North Carolina data center, as you know if you've ever used iCloud or Siri, is nice to have. But it would be even nicer if it was run on power that did not as negatively affect the environment.
Apple plans nation's biggest private fuel cell energy project
Apple has made several moves lately that point to it becoming one of the nation's leaders in terms of adopting clean energy technology. First, the company announced that is installing a 20-megawatt solar farm across from the Maiden, North Carolina data center. Now the Greenboro, N.C. News & Record reports that the company plans to install the largest private fuel cell energy project in America near Maiden. The project, which should be producing energy by the end of the year, will use large modular fuel cells from Bloom Energy of Sunnyvale, California. The company's "Bloom Boxes" (see photo above) are in use in a number of other fuel cell projects throughout the country, primarily in California. Fuel cells produce electrical energy from hydrogen gas through an electro-chemical process, with water being the only byproduct. They've been used on NASA spacecraft for years, and have only recently made an impact on electrical power generation. The technology is rather expensive, which is why most fuel cell installations have been made in California where the state provides incentives equal to about half of the installation cost. Apparently, the hydrogen fuel will be produced from natural gas feedstocks, with Apple hoping to offset the use of natural gas with landfill methane gas or other biogas. Bloom Boxes are being used for clean energy production by a number of other large tech firms, including Adobe, eBay, and Google.
Apple touts solar array at North Carolina Data Center
Apple has updated its Apple and the Environment web page with information about the huge new data center in Maiden, North Carolina. This US$1 billion, 500,000 square foot facility is the home of Siri and part of the backbone of iCloud. Not only has the facility already earned a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification, but the company has plans to power the facility primarily with renewable energy. According to Apple, the LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council is unique -- "We know of no other data center of comparable size that has achieved this level of LEED certification." As for the renewable energy plans, Apple notes that they have "major projects under way to achieve this." Those projects include building the largest end user-owned solar array and non-utility fuel cell installation in the U.S. Last October, Apple received the OK from Catawba County officials to reshape 171 acres of land adjacent to the data center in preparation for installation of the photovoltaic solar array. The Maiden data center won't be the first Apple facility to use renewable energy: The Apple Facility Report for 2011 notes that company sites in Elk Grove, California, Cork, Ireland, and Austin, Texas use 100 percent renewable energy resources. Apple also added biogas-powered fuel cells at the Cupertino campus in late 2010 to reduce carbon emissions.
Apple has the "least green" data centers
Apple has come in last place among a list of tech companies in the latest Greenpeace tech report How Dirty is Your Data? [PDF]. While Apple has made some pretty big strides over the last few years in trying to eliminate environmentally unfriendly chemicals from its products, Apple placed last in this list due to its heavy reliance on coal power at its data centers. The report compares energy consumption and sources made by Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Akamai, Amazon and Yahoo. In it, Greenpeace points out that Apple's new North Carolina data center, which is set to open this year and will supposedly be primarily used for cloud-based computing services, will triple Apple's energy usage and use the same amount of energy as 80,000 US homes. Of that energy, 62 percent will be provided by coal (one of the dirtiest energy sources), and 32 percent of it will be provided by nuclear power. This isn't the first time Greenpeace has expressed concern over Apple's energy footprint regarding cloud computing. In March of last year, Greenpeace also expressed concern about the North Carolina data center that runs on "dirty coal power."
