Goaded by Greenpeace Apple Swears Off Coal at Data Centers Worldwide

Following a barrage of bad publicity on May 15th—when two Greenpeace activists costumed as iPhones barricaded themselves inside a super-size pod outside its Cupertino, California, headquarters and broadcasted demands for the technology company to power its computer server farms with renewable energy, not coal— Apple (News - Alert), Inc., has capitulated.

With a focus on Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina—which currently is using some coal power from Duke Energy (News - Alert) to help drive its expansion—Greenpeace International had gathered signatures to its “Clean Our Cloud” petition from more than 215,000 people within the past month, asking Apple to power its iCloud with clean energy.  

“For a company known for its innovation, Apple is being left in the dust by companies like Facebook (News - Alert), Google, and Yahoo, all of whom have taken steps and adopted policies to ensure that their clouds are increasingly powered by clean energy,” Greenpeace IT Analyst, Casey Harrell said.

On Thursday, the Apple blog announced that the company would power its main U.S. data center entirely with renewable energy by the end of this year—purchasing a commercial plant solar solution from San Jose-based SunPower Corp. and fuel cell technology from its neighbor Bloom Energy in Sunnvale. The company will deploy two solar farms, covering 250 acres near its Maiden plant. Once up, the solar farm will supply 84 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy annually.

 Apple CFO, Peter Oppenheimer told Reuters (News - Alert), Apple plans on using coal-free electricity in all three of its data centers, with the Maiden facility coal-free by the end of 2012.

“While we’ll produce 60 percent of the power used by our Maiden data center onsite, we’ll meet the remaining 40 percent of our energy needs by directly purchasing clean, renewable energy generated by local and regional sources,” Apple stated. The company will partner with Raleigh-based NC GreenPower — an independent, nonprofit organization created by the North Carolina Utilities Commission — to increase local renewable energy production throughout North Carolina.

Apple also noted that its Maiden facility already “has earned the coveted LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. No other data center of this scale has achieved this high level of LEED certification. Qualifying for LEED Platinum certification requires meeting extremely rigorous standards for energy efficiency. The Maiden data center was designed and built from the ground up to meet those requirements.”

Among the energy efficient design elements already in place at the Maiden center, Apple said, are:

• A chilled water storage system to improve chiller efficiency by transferring 10,400 kWh of electricity consumption from peak to off-peak hours each day;
• Use of “free” outside air cooling through a waterside economizer operation during night and cool-weather hours, which, along with water storage, enables the chillers to be turned off more than 75 percent of the time
• Extreme precision in managing cooling distribution for cold air containment pods with variable-speed fans controlled to exactly match airflow-to-server requirements from moment to moment;
• Power distributed at higher voltages, which increases efficiency by reducing power loss ;
• White cool-roof design to provide maximum solar reflectivity;
• High-efficiency LED lighting combined with motion sensors;
• Real-time power monitoring and analytics during operations’; and
• Construction processes that used 14 percent recycled materials, diverted 93 percent of construction waste from landfills, and sourced 41 percent of purchased materials within 500 miles of the site.

Other Apple facilities, according to the blog, either are green already or soon will be. “For nearly 10 years,” the blog said, “we’ve purchased 100 percent renewable energy for our operations center in Austin, Texas. Since then, we’ve added our Sacramento, California, and Cork, Ireland, operations centers and Munich, Germany, facilities to our list of sites with 100 percent renewable energy. By doing this, we’ve avoided 30,000 metric tons of CO2e emissions from our annual carbon footprint. In 2012 we began purchasing direct-access renewable energy for our Northern California facilities. That includes Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, which currently uses more than 50 percent renewable energy, some of which is supplied by onsite fuel cells.”

Apple’s newest data center, which is under construction in Prineville, Oregon, “will be every bit as environmentally responsible as our Maiden data center,” the company promised. “At Prineville we have access to enough local renewable energy sources to completely meet the needs of the facility. To achieve that goal, we’re working with two local utilities as well as a number of renewable energy generation providers to purchase wind, hydro, and geothermal power — all from local sources.”

At press time, the global activists had made no comments about Apple’s promises to make “green peace.”