New aerial images of Apple's planned NC fuel cell, solar farms emerge

How much more will it cost to maintain all those solar cells and biogas than just buy some mass produced energy from the local power company? One of these days all these little extra expenses are going to add up and Apple will find themselves unable to compete.

That's one expensive 9.8% worth of energy source..

Heck... Why don't they just scoop up all the pine straw they can find... Hint, think CRAPTON! and just use that as a power plant fuel?

Look we can pick apart every alt energy and show how it's totally unusable to replace oil and coal it's fun to read the laundry lst of points that show how solar cant even break even however if we did the same thing with oil I'm pretty sure we could make just as compelling a case as to why oil is a failure. Apple is doing a good thing here just let em be...

I guess Apple has found a way to waste some of the cash they have laying around, and at the same time get some good PR from the tree huggers...

What they need is a small nuclear power plant, like the ones used in aircraft carriers... It's the cleanest energy around..

I assume by "largest privately owned in the US" the author actually means non-utility owned.

FYI: The claim that the renewables "will provide 9.8 percent of the energy" comes from Greenpeace and is highly suspect. Their calculations assume that every device in the data center will be running at 100% its rated utilization for 100% of the time and there is zero overhead for redundancy.

It's sort of like calculating the annual power usage for your 1.1kW (1100W) toaster like this:

1.1kW * 24h * 365d = 9636 kWh per year

Which ignores the fact that even if you did you your toaster 24h a day, the element is not on that whole time. Thus, actual power consumed is much less.

Having been involved in the design and construction of large data centers, actual usage is nowhere near the maximum design rating of 200W psf.

I don't totally disagree with you, but it is worth noting that the most important function of the fuel cells is to provide backup power for when the electric utility has a blackout. There is no price you can put on having 99.9999% uptime for a data center. The 9.8% of total power is probably related to Apple adding more servers. The older servers are probably backed up by diesel generators.

I hope the thing is tornado proof.

Well, they are getting 1% return on the cash. I suspect the return on the solar will be better.

ROI is a screwy concept when interest rates are so low and the cost of money (if you have it) is almost nil.

After initial purchase cost, maintenance on solar is near zero. Maintenance on a biogas generator is quite small. These things will reduce Apple's costs over the long term rather than increase it.

In my mind, this is a FAR better use of their cash than a dividend because the savings for the solar system will increase year over year. Most solar systems have a life of around 25 years. Want to guess what Apple's fuel or electricity costs would be in 25 years?

Solar involves a very high initial purchase cost and then near-zero operating costs. For a company which is cash-rich and doesn't have greater needs for the cash, it's a fantastic solution - even aside from the PR benefit.

I only wish that they had put the panels on the roof rather than clearing another 100 acres of forest.


Absolutely. Be very suspicious of what you hear from Greenpeace. With some experience in data centers, it is likely that the solar cells will provide a pretty large percentage of total energy usage. There's not enough public information to know for sure, but based on typical figures for a well designed system, it's large.

A good facility designed to reduce energy usage will use less than 30 kW per square foot (daily average). That would put the total energy usage at roughly 15 MW for this data center, with the peak usage occurring during daylight hours. Now, the solar system has a peak output of 20 MW, but taking into account nights, cloudy days, etc, they probably average only about 30% of that - or 6 MW. So the solar system can probably provide closer to 40% of the total power usage, not 9.8%. And if Apple is using state of the art methods to reduce energy usage, the power usage could be even lower, so solar might providing even more of the total.

I think they made their little spreadsheet before doing such a thing... Seriously, who would do any business move without exploring whether it is sustainable or not... Of course it will be worth it. Electricity for huge businesses like this costs a lot more per kW than your regular home or small business. And if they want to grow, then a billion dollar solar and biofuel farm is not an option.

And considering how the electricity is made in the US, it maybe very well come from a dirty electricity power plant. So technically you should than them for building that. They're cleaning your air.

Well let's hope they got some great deals on those solar panels during the auctioning off of Solyndra, that, along with the purchase of a few Chevy Volts to traverse the complex ought to make it the greenest fuel cell, solar farm in NC... Well, except for all the missing green trees, shrubs, and grass... </facetious>
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Until it comes time to decommission the plant or dispose of the spent fuel. Then it is far from the cleanest.

And IMO, it has been demonstrated that the engineers, regulators and suits cannot be trusted to design and maintain nuclear plants with sufficient safety factors in place.

But yes, they are free from toxic emissions during normal use.

Laugh all you like I hope this is the final legacy of SJ that is disrupting the the oil based energy industry with renewable energy.

I would like to see in my life time the clowns eating crows for lunch and dinner.

An after thought would oil price be what it is today in the year 2018. I just wonder.

The other thing that the solar array and biogas facility give Apple is better cost certainty. If you depend wholy on the grid for electricity then you are subject to whatever price fluctuations the local utility will subject you to. Remember Enron and the manufactured energy crisis that California went through?

With a solar array, you know how much that electricity is going to cost you for the next 25 years.

Apple is doing a similar thing with their new campus in Cupertino. They are going to to generate their own power and use the grid as backup.

Calling these "biogas" is a stretch - they will initially (perhaps permanently) be running on Piedmont's natural gas derived from fracking, with future biogas "offsets" to be eventually produced and utilized off-site. And solid oxide fuel cells like the Bloom Box aren't pollution free - unless you don't consider carbon dioxide a pollutant: SOFCs running on natural gas rather than pure hydrogen still produce CO2 at close to half the level of a traditional fossil fuel-powered plant. [Data from "The International Fuel Cells, a United Technology Company", Fuel Cells Review, 2000.]

There is no evidence in this article that this installation will use biogas. It is almost certain that it will use natural gas.

I was kinda hoping for more than 9.8%. It would have been nice to see Apple using renewable energy for something like 70% of their energy usage. Apple is definitely leading the way when it comes to stuff like this which is why I support them.

1) Perhaps that is their goal, but they are starting small, as they usually do, and they expand from there.

2) Isn't their DC being powered by a hydro-electric dam right now?

When I saw this article about self-sustaining "fuel cell, solar farms" I thought we were going to see this:

This company has a pretty nice solution: http://www.gen4energy.com/

Imagine if only Apple could harness all the hot gases produced by all the Apple fans and haters on all the blogs such as this one.

High density computing can't really be calculated by watts per sq. ft. with any accuracy. It really depends on too many factors. Even if you figured 1/3 of your area was filled with servers, theoretically each 44U rack could be capable of using 50kW. Then you have to double that for cooling and then double that again for 2N redundancy. So you really need a lot of capacity to run a modern datacenter. Getting that power from multiple sources is a good idea. Just like financial planning, diversifying your sources of power is better than having only one source.

Apple is using:

Grid power probably from Duke Energy oil and coal fired plants
Natural gas fuel cells
Solar energy
Back up - Diesel Generators and UPS batteries

When this story first surfaced months ago, there was discussion that they could put some solar on the roof and I had mentioned that there was a chance that there would be AC units on the roof. All we had to go on were some photos of the building under construction. I wish there were higher res photos available, however, it is now evident from the completed building image that they are using chilled water for their cooling, so no AC on the roof. The roof was probably not designed for the structural load of any utility equipment up there, hence the separate adjacent land.

I wonder how modularized the computing environment is inside. As I recall from some early interior images it didn't look like much modularization, but more of a traditional raised floor design. There are some new rack designs that incorporate chilled water cooling right inside the rack itself as a way to increase efficiency by only cooling the actual servers and not the surrounding space.

Solar is one of the best investments for an energy source- it guarantees you a set energy rate while traditional utility rates rise 3-8% a year. The size of the space used for the solar farm goes to show how much power these server farms use. Only 9% is a very low number. Perhaps Apple can have the building audited once its operational and they can find ways to conserve energy use further which would lower their dependence on the grid.

You should tell the people in japan that nuclear power is the cleanest power around..its strange the govt. has closed down all nuclear power plants and are now looking for new sources of power, that does not require perm destroying japan and wipe out its people.

That's a little naive. Anyone planning a data center has to have some idea of the power usage. What I did was look up the average for large data centers and it was around 50 kW / ft2. Considering that many of them are older and that Apple presumably be putting more than a little energy into data efficiency, my 30 kW / ft2 figure is probably not too far off.

The problem can be clearly bee seen in the waste of land in these photos. Solar electric has its uses as supplemental power if incorporated into a acolytes structure. Here we see over a hundred acres wasted for a facility that will never cover all of the facilities energy need. That is an incredibly sad sight to see.

In a nut shell the mad rush to solar electric will result in far more environmental damage than any other source of so called green energy. This is the problem amply demonstrated by the arial photos. Frankly it is far more damaging than strip mining as at least the land can be turned back to nature after resources extraction.

I'm all for better sources of energy but covering the planet in solar electric plants is one hedious thought.

What the country needs is diversication into alternate sources of nuclear power. The unfortunate reality is that almost every single research dollar for future nuclear systems goes into one system. A system by the way that has seen little success in the last 25 years or so. Instead we need to get the government to fund a diversity of possible paths to new nuclear energy systems.

Those trees, shrubs and grass are very important to A continued high quality of life on this planet. Hopefully people will wise up about solar electric on this scale.

Like I said, there are too many variables to simply quote average watts per sq. ft. For example, if you have a chiller room, it is occupying sq. footage and uses a tremendous amount of energy per sq. ft. where as AC on the roof uses a lot of energy but is not considered sq. footage at all. 30kW per sq. ft. is a pretty high, but irrelevant, in my opinion, because to properly design a datacenter you have to break down the individual components and calculate how much they need, not just take an average, however, shadow415's 200W is just way off the mark which is what my comment was referring to. I just wasn't in arrogant attack mode so you may have thought I was agreeing with him or possibly disagreeing with you, which I was not, in either case.

The problem is the lack of a willingness to address the waste issue. There are solutions just that people fear what they don't understand.

Even the worst situation on the planet right now, in Japan, has not harmed the world as much as coal has. In many ways people's fear over nuclear is largely over stated.

Yes, and frankly this is a dramatic difference over other sources of energy. Coal is extremely dirty and very toxic and yet we tolerate the damage these plants do every day. I'm not talking CO2 here either which more BS than anything.

I'm not sure where you get your information but very little electricity comes from oil in this country. If you believe Wikipedia it is around 1%.

You might as well eat that crow yourself.

The price of oil isn't a huge factor in the price of electricity.

Good to see Apple leading the pack with regards to green energy, want to see more of this.


I still fully support nuclear energy.

Japanese government were just stupid to place such a facility in a zone near an earthquake zone. whereas in Britain, the biggest earthquakes we get are 2.7 on the Richter scale.

I don't care how the tree huggers whine about it. I think the clear-cutting of pristine land that supports ecosystems to install acres of solar arrays that take immense resources and some of the nastiest environmentally-damaging chemicals to manufacture just so some eco-huggers and claim "green" is a bad idea.

I really want to believe in green energy and I hate coal-burners, but the reality is that this is more PR to shut the mouths of eco-whiners than anything else. What we need seriously is more investment in alternative energies, especially nuclear. Someday, I'd love to include fusion but that most likely will not happen in my lifetime.

If we can produce small-scale nuclear reactors that are just big enough to power huge centers like these, using modern technologies and safety protocols, that would just pave the way for more advanced units down the road.

If environmentally-friendly solar panels can be manufactured, and with increased light-energy ratios, sign me up. I'd love to see every rooftop, both personal and commercial fitted with solar panels like these with serious government incentives as well. All those millions of acres of empty rooftops would do much better than razing acres of habitats.

I'll most likely get flamed for this but the world cannot sustain itself with solar and wind. Anyone believing otherwise needs to approach me to purchase that bridge I'm selling for $1.

Apparently the world did sustain itself with only solar and wind for millions of years. Maybe that wasn't the problem...hmm, what could it be?

Apple is doomed.


This has been clarified as essentially a wrong claim in a couple of posts, yet people keep referring to it in subsequent posts....


It is not necessarily a waste of cash, as has been pointed out.


This is not a bad idea, but small scale nuclear is not ready for prime time yet. People expect that it will take another decade or so.



Wow, we have a winner!


The appropriate opportunity cost of capital to benchmark this - or any other - project is not the return on cash.


Yes, it will emit CO2, but far less than if the equivalent power was being supplied by local utilities.


Oh, what the heck, I give up...... too much FUD.

+1...

Apple could design a new keyboard that takes ten percent of the kinetic energy from each keystroke, converts it into electricity, then transfers that to some central collection point ready to be used.

As an added bonus, running off the kinetic energy of 'lovers' and 'haters' would guarantee 100% uptime.

They could also re-invent the layout for maximum efficiency while they're at it:

It's better for Apple, it's shareholders and customers to spend cash on alternative energy than giving money to electric companies and making others rich. I only wish it could utilize more solar power in it's California operations. Hopefully they are purchasing natural gas as cheaply as possible.