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.