Apple's iCloud data center to use 100% renewable energy by end of year
The feat will be accomplished with the construction of both new solar arrays around the existing North Carolina facility, Reuters reported on Thursday. Together, they will supply 84 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year.
The new solar installations will also reportedly rely on high-energy cells and an advanced solar tracking system. The announcement comes as Apple has been under fire from Greenpeace, which has called on Apple to build a "clean" iCloud rather than relying on coal-powered electricity.
Greenpeace's "How Clean is Your Cloud?" report, issued in April, accused Apple of lagging behind other technology companies like Facebook and Google in utilizing environmentally friendly power for its cloud-based services. Apple, however, rejected the estimates in Greenpeace's study, and provided its own figures, which claimed that renewable energy would provide more than 50 percent of the center's power needs than was originally projected.
That will all change with Apple's announcement on Thursday, however, as the data center will rely on entirely "green" energy by the end of 2012. Until then, the non-solar capacity will come from coal-fired power plants from Duke Energy.
The solar plants will also be supported by a 5-megawatt fuel cell installation that will open later this year. Apple has said it will be the largest non-utility fuel cell installation operating anywhere in the country, and will be powered by 100 percent biogas.
Plans first surfaced last October that Apple was planning to build a solar farm opposite its North Carolina data center. The solar array will exist on 171 acres of vacant land on Startown Road that was acquired by Apple.
Apple first announced its plans to build the server farm in Maiden, N.C. in July 2009. The $1 billion data center opened last spring and currently supports iTunes and iCloud services.
32 Comments
And you can bet Greenpeace will be breaking in, standing on the roof, and dancing about until the second the last percentage is fulfilled.
And you can bet Greenpeace will be breaking in,...
No, you can bet GP will take credit for this "victory". Because it wouldn't have happened without them.
No, you can bet GP will take credit for this "victory". Because it wouldn't have happened without them.
It shows how absolutely stupid Greenpeace's stated goals are too. Their major objection was simply that in their opinion, when building a giant data centre, the *first* factor to figure in was the availability of so-called "green energy." They took Apple to task not because Apple didn't plan to eventually be as green as possible, but simply because to Apple it wasn't the primary consideration.
I'm on Apple's side here. Being green is of course important, but when building a multi-million dollar data centre for distributing and supporting content world-wide, it's just not the very first thing to consider. There are many other more important factors.
Greenpeace is utterly irrelevent, and relies desperately on its attacks on Apple to keep their name and perception of relevance in the news, otherwise, nobody gives a sh-t about greenpeace since they've become a partisan political institution.
North Carolina has one of the world's biggest sources of biogas: 10 million hogs with their vast lagoons of feces.
Too bad the center of hog production is hundreds of miles away near the coast.