After rumours swirled for months, Apple has confirmed it will be constructing a 20MW solar farm.
Apple revealed the first details on its plans not in a press release, but in its Facilities Report – 2012 Environmental Update (PDF) published yesterday.
To help meet the energy needs of its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina; Apple says it is “building the nation’s largest end user–owned, onsite solar array” on 100 acres of land surrounding the data center.
When completed, the 20-megawatt facility will generate 42 million kWh of solar electricity annually.
Additionally, Apple is constructing a fuel cell installation that when completed will be the “largest non-utility fuel cell installation operating anywhere in the country”.
Located adjacent to the Maiden data center, the 5-megawatt facility will be powered by biogas and provide more than 40 million kWh of electricity each year.
Maiden data center was commissioned last year and has earned LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
“We know of no other data center of comparable size that has achieved this level of LEED certification,” says the company.
Constructed with 14 per cent recycled materials, the facility incorporates a white roof design to provide maximum solar reflectivity, high-efficiency LED lighting combined with motion sensors, a chilled water storage system to improve chiller efficiency and the use of outside air cooling during night and cool-weather hours, which, along with the water storage, allows the chillers to be switched off more than three-quarters of the time.
According to the US Department of Energy, Data centers can consume up to 100 times more energy than a standard office building. While the servers collectively consume a great deal of electricity, almost equal to that consumption can be energy used in air conditioning to keep the equipment from overheating.
Apple states that across its facilities globally, 493 million kWh of electricity and 3 million therms of natural gas were consumed in 2011, but that through participation in various renewable energy programs, approximately 30,000 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions were avoided.
Source/image source
