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Apple plans Nevada solar farm in clean energy push for data centers

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An Apple logo is seen at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2013 in San Francisco, California June 10, 2013. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

An Apple logo is seen at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2013 in San Francisco, California June 10, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Stephen Lam

Mon Jul 1, 2013 9:59pm EDT

(Reuters) - Apple Inc said it plans to build a new solar farm with NV Energy Inc for power supply to its new data center in Reno, Nevada, a major step towards its goal of having its data centers run on renewable energy.

Apple and other technology companies such as Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, that build and run computer server farms have come under criticism for their high consumption of electricity and other resources.

These data centers cater to an explosion in Internet traffic, streaming content through mobile devices and hosting of services to corporations.

The new solar farm will provide power to Sierra Pacific Power Co's electric grid that serves Apple's data center and when completed will generate about hours 43.5 million kilowatt of clean energy a year, Apple said in a statement.

Apple already runs its largest data center in the U.S. on solar power. The center in Maiden, North Carolina produces 167 million kilowatt hours, the power equivalent of 17,600 homes for one year, from a 100-acre solar farm and fuel cell installations provided by Silicon Valley startup Bloom Energy.

(Reporting by Avik Das in Bangalore and Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
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Comments (2)
fwupow wrote:
Usually data centers need lots of electricity for cooling which is even worse in a hot climate like Nevada. Seems like going north would be better.

Jul 02, 2013 3:21am EDT  --  Report as abuse
Netprophet wrote:
The question is why? And how much money is the government kicking in. In 2012, coal generation accounted for 1,517,000,000,000 kwhrs of generation and nat gas accounted for 1,213,000,000,000 kwhrs. So, this plant will account for 0.0016% of the amount produced by nat gas and coal. The avg coal plant (of which there are 600) produces 2,530,000,000 kwhrs of electricity a yr about 60 times larger than this thing. In other words, we would need 60 times 600 or 36,000 such solar farms to replace our coal capacity assuming all parts of the country are as sun as NV and they are not, so we would probably need closer to 75,000 of them. I am sure there will be a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate how Apple is helping to stop carbon pollution to fight non-existent global warming (there is no correlation and between increased CO2 and temp as has been shown repeatedly). More of your tax dollars being wasted on nonsense.

Jul 02, 2013 6:29am EDT  --  Report as abuse
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