AppleInsider Staff
The images, captured by Wired in March and posted on Friday, show a large swath of cleared ground in front of Apple's datacenter that will presumably house the Bloom Energy fuel cells as well as 100 acres of freshly razed land that is expected to be used for a solar farm.
Apple will employ 24 Bloom Energy Servers using natural gas supplied by Piedmont Natural Gas and a 20-megawatt solar installation to power its massive $1 billion datacenter. Once finished, both of the energy sources will be the largest privately owned systems of their kind in the nation.
Opened in early 2011, Apple server facility supports its iTunes and iCloud services and is the nerve center of the iPhone 4S' Siri virtual assistant.
Reports estimate that the alternative power sources will begin operations later this year and will provide 9.8 percent of the energy required to run the 500,000 square-foot datacenter.
Cleared land across from the Maiden datacenter to be used for solar farm. | Source: Wired
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143 Comments
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..
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.