Apple is stealthily planning to build a 171-acre solar farm help power its largest data center, located in the tiny town of Maiden, North Carolina, according to land use permits obtained by the Charlotte Observer.
The news of the solar farm is surprising for a number of reasons, first of them being that Apple was thought to have chosen the site for its data center at least in part due to the fact that the area is rife with dirt-cheap electricity thanks to Charlotte-based energy company Duke Energy, which generates most of its electricity from coal-fired and nuclear power plants.
The other surprise, of course, is by Apple’s design.
That would be that the plans for the solar farm have remained under wraps until now, even as other details of the $1 billion, 500,000-square-foot data center, have leaked out in the past three years, such as the fact that it was being constructed to store data from Apple customers of its new iCloud service.
Maiden’s chief of economic development, Scott Millar, who helped recruit Apple to install its data center in the town, didn’t even know about the solar farm “until a reporter showed him the erosion control permits,” the Observer reported.
The newspaper adds that the permits detail how Apple will prevent the soil it moves from the area to build the solar farm from falling into nearby creeks, but that the farm isn’t a done deal yet. Apple still has to apply for a building permit before it starts putting up any panels, and neither the government of Maiden nor that of Catawba County have received applications from the company.
And yet, Steve Jobs himself foreshadowed the development of the solar farm in his last-ever keynote address in June, saying that the Maiden data center would be as “eco-friendly as a data center can be with modern technology.”
Apple’s Chief Financial Officer Steve Opphenheimer, also alluded to the data center’s bona-fides in a July 2010 earnings call.
The whole solar ambition itself smacks of eco-friendliness, and competition to out-green Apple’s high-profile competitors Facebook and Google, which also have cloud data centers nearby in the state, which the companies claim are energy efficient.
But as industry blog Data Center Knowledge pointed out when the Apple Maiden site was first made public, Apple was going all out, committing $1 billion to the project, or “nearly twice the $500 to $600 million that Microsoft and Google typically invest in the enormous data centers that power their cloud computing platforms.”
Facebook’s still-under-construction Rutherford Data Center, located in Forest City, NC, reportedly cost $450 million and is said to feature, among other green technologies, an “evaporative cooling instead of a chiller system,” akin to the one that helped allow Facebook to boost the energy efficiency at data center servers in Prinveille, Oregon to the industry-unprecedented power usage ratio of 1.07.
Meanwhile, Google’s Lenoir, NC, data center reportedly cost $600 million, is still soliciting proposals for ideas on how to create “less carbon emissions in the immediate region, including projects that will increase the renewable energy mix powering our data centers. Applicants can be non-profit or for-profit entrepreneurs and can include efficiency enhancements as well as the generation of new energy sources…Concept papers are accepted at any time. You can submit proposals via email to lenoirproject@google.com.”
Still, Apple lags badly behind both Google and Facebook when it comes to overall environmental friendliness of its cloud servers, at least according to activist group Greenpeace, which in April released a report on the main players in the industry. According to Greenpeace, Apple ranked a measly 6.7 percent on the Clean Energy Index, compared to Facebook’s 13.8 percent and Google’s 36.4 percent.
And ultimately, as several articles highlighting the region’s draw for high-tech companies have pointed out, getting electricity directly from Duke Energy is surely not going green.
That’s why Apple’s solar farm will be an intriguing project to watch. Even the codename of the farm seems to indicate a desire for future energy efficiency ambitions: It’s called “Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded,” which with the “Project Dolphin” name given to the entire data center, first confirmed in July of 2009.
We’ve reached out to Apple, Duke Energy and Greenpeace for more on the solar farm and will update when we receive a response.
