During Tim Cook’s talk at the Goldman Sachs Tech Conference 2015 today, the Apple CEO announced a new initiative that will see the company build a solar farm in Monterey County, California that Cook called Apple’s “biggest, boldest and most ambitious” energy project yet.
“We know at Apple that climate change is real… our view is the time for talk is past and the time for action is now… we’re now running all of our data centres… off renewable energy.. Just today we’re announcing our biggest, boldest and most ambitious project ever…building a solar farm in Monterey County…”
Apple says the new solar farm will offset all of its California operations including 55 retail stores, its entire under construction Campus 2, its other offices in California, and at least one of its data centers. Apple’s new Campus 2 alone is scheduled to house approximately 16,000 of its employees in 2.8m square feet once complete.
The new solar farm site will be located on approximately 1,300 acres in Monterey, according to Apple, and will cost around $850 million to build. Apple is partnering with First Solar on the project.
First Solar made its own announcement regarding the project noting that “Apple has committed $848 million for clean energy from First Solar’s California Flats Solar Project in Monterey County, Calif. Apple will receive electricity from 130 megawatts (MW)AC of the solar project under a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA), the largest agreement in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user.”
Construction on the site is expected to be complete by the end of 2016, around the same time Apple will expects to complete construction on Campus 2.
Apple already operates other solar farms including a 137 acre solar array next to its Reno, Nevada data centre and two other locations with solar farms near its data center in Maiden, North Carolina.
Once complete, the amount of renewable energy the Monterey solar farm will produce could power 60,000 California homes, according to Cook.
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+1 to Apple for helping the environment amidst their massive building project.
It’s commendable that Apple wants to bring in all that green energy but I have an idea.
Instead of buying and unnecessarily taking up all that land to put up a solar farm, they could do the same thing with the roofs of people’s houses. Imagine Apple outfitting the homes in their community, in Cupertino, with solar panels and working out a “energy sharing” agreement with home owners.
Now I know there would be alot of legal wrangling and other hoops to jump through but I just think that it’s a more efficient use of resources…to reuse already occupied land than to take up new land energy production.
As much as I would love this and many more others, there’s just so much liability with trying to do something like this. Someone, somewhere, would be unhappy (or not) and file some sort of lawsuit just because it’s Apple doing it, and because they know Apple has lots of $$$.
3 things.
1. Apple is VERY smart.
2. This has nothing to do with Climate Change.
3. Apple is VERY smart.
So Tim Cook felt compelled to lie when he said “…that climate change is real…”? To what end? It makes no sense for anyone to claim he is lying.
Maybe not lying but….think of him as a politician. Saying what he thinks people (some not very smart) want to hear. Saying that climate change is real. We sure it is. The climate has been changing since the earth was made. Apple just has the $$ to do it and put a spin on it.
Global climate change is real, and is majorly caused by humans. Anyone who believes otherwise is ignorant.
Majorly caused by humans…. what proof do you have exactly? Considering we have been on this planet for a very short time, please do explain HOW we are causing this?
Timescale has really nothing to do with the ability (or inability) of human to alter nature. We can easily destroy in a second a mineral billion years old, we can also pollute the atmosphere in a few decades enough to alter the climate, and we are doing it as most scientists agree.
Most scientists agree: climate change exists and is heavily influenced by human activity. Only Americans doubt this. for some reason I don’t understand.
Maybe this is how Apple was supposed to give Tesla a run for its money? Tesla was supposed to offset its battery factory’s power consumption with solar energy. So maybe this trumps Tesla’s planned solar farm.
Or maybe they’re planning their own gigafactory for improved battery production.
Slow on the gun there. I already posted that comment on the original article about how Apple was going to give Tesla a run for its money. Welcome the conversation.
Do you know wether Apple will use the energy generated at this solar farm directly in the above mentioned location), or they will sell it to the grid hence the term offsetting used in the article?
This isn’t being used directly. In the middle of a sunny day when the facility is going full blast it is a massive amount of energy. Even Apple’s largest data centers don’t use that level of energy. I think it all goes into the grid and offsets energy that Apple takes from the grid elsewhere. Basically Apple probably pays to wheel the energy from the plant to its various heavy load centers.
So it isn’t selling to the grid specifically, but basically it is.
At least this is my guess. I don’t know the California energy market well enough and certainly not at this size, which is huge.
Unless you have a solar plant adjacent to your data center, with a direct behind-the-meter connection, this energy will be moved into the local grid. Electrons flow to the path of least resistance, so the energy will be used in the local area.
What Apple is trying to do is offset the energy they are taking out of the grid all over California with their stores, campuses, etc. by injecting power back into the grid in this location.
What’s not disclosed here is if they have made a deal with one or more of the utilities for the energy payment. This plant and the Apple campus in silicon valley should all be in the service territory for PG&E, so I’m sure Apple entered into a sophisticated form of power purchase agreement with PG&E to determine annual usage at the campus vs. annual production at the energy facility.