What an iSore: Apple's massive new 100-acre solar farm - which DWARFS the data centre it powers

Daily Mail Online ^ | September 14, 2012 | Eddie Wren

[Uncle Chip]

Huge, ugly and cluttered, it is almost the antithesis of Apple's iconic design style.

Apple has almost finished work on a massive solar farm next to its data centre in North Carolina, hoping to boost its green credentials - but scarring the landscape with a 100-acre eyesore at the same time.

Organisations such as Greenpeace have, in the past, accused Apple of hurting the environment by using coal to power these centres.

Apple's data centres keep the world's iPhones running - syncing contacts to the 'iCloud' and storing a wealth of information on each user.

When completed, Apple’s 100-acre, 20-megawatt facility will supply 42 million kWh of energy annually, and is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct.

[nascarnation]

I can smell the tax breaks and subsidies all the way from Indiana......

[cripplecreek]

LOL Check this out and keep in mind that this is only for 25% renewable energy. We're talking nearly 16,000 windmills if we want to power the whole state.

Proposal 3 would require that the state add as many as 13 times more wind turbines in Michigan than currently operate. Proposal 3 would mandate that 25 percent of Michigan’s energy come from renewable sources. Wind is expected to be the primary supplier of renewable energy if the proposal passes.

Advocates and experts predict 2,300 to 3,790 nearly 500-feet high wind turbines would have to be added to meet the 25-percent mandate. Michigan currently has 292 wind turbines in operation.



Most of Michigan is 'Poor' or 'Marginal' For Wing Energy

[The Mayor]

This is the future???? Where will we all live?

[montag813]

Looks good. How is it an “eye sore”? I won’t bash Apple for something I pined for 20 years ago. Solar is awesome. It is a shame that Democrats have to enforce it and wind power at the point of a gun. ALL energy has its place. When the gov’t picks winners and losers, everyone loses.

[who knows what evil?]

iSore? Now that’s funny...

[randog]

Wow, the pics tell it all.

So, the lefties tell us that eating animals is bad because, for starters, it takes too much land to graze animals, land better suited to growing crops. OK, but what about using 100 acres of arable land to not grow food but, instead, cover with solar arrays to make electrical energy? Not energy for general use, but energy used for a non-critical purpose like pimping yourself on Facebook?

I know, I know--it's tough being a hippy/hipster.

[nascarnation]

Is the UAW building wind turbines?
This smells more like corporate/union welfare than it does “green” energy....

[Secret Agent Man]

How much water will they waste keeping the panels clean?

How much desertification will be created because plant roots won’t keep the soil from blowing away?

What about the freaking sun snake or min-snail or some other godforsaken trumped-up animal this will supposedly devastate? Where were the eco-nazis protesting 100 acres being taken out of circulation by an evil corporation who already makes billions and billions of dollars and causes massive environmental damage on a huge scale due to its use of plastics and batteries?

It’s easy to be a liberal, consistent thinking is not allowed.

[Uncle Slayton]

It would seem that since Apple is only worth 700 Billion Dollars that they would have little money for a solar project.

[Lmo56]

Wait for the first good hurricane or Nor’ Easter snow storm and watch Apple cry ...

[nascarnation]

Funny part is windmills only work when the wind blows and solar only works when the sun shines.

But electric demand doesn’t seem to follow those rules....

So you either need massive energy storage, or backup fossil or nuke generators of equal capacity, right?

[MileHi]

I won’t bash Apple for something I pined for 20 years ago. Solar is awesome.

BS Solar is useful in very limited applications where conventional power is not an option. Where conventional power is available, the payback time exceeds the life cycle of the equipment so all you get is very expensive power.

[cripplecreek]

I’m all for green energy that actually works. We’ve got enormous hydroelectric potential in the form of thousands of existing dams in America. Hydro is also about as cheap as it gets. Hydro doesn’t stop unless you have too little water which is rare to the point of being negligible in much of the country. If you have too much water, the excess is dumped over the spillway and the turbines keep right on turning. They also create high dollar lake frontage property.

Naturally the greentards are in a desperate race to tear them out before anyone realizes what they’re doing.

[ctdonath2]

I don't see the problem.

That's what serious solar looks like. It's a gray grid on a large field, little different than a food farm. You can't see it save from an airplane. The surrounding area is largely unused, untouched forest. Its look is not much unlike the appearance of the inside of Apple's rMBP.

And Apple could surely use something much, much smaller and get a similar result. For about $100k and a hundred square yards, they could get a 135MW nuclear reactor.

None of the complaints surprise me. I long predicted that once solar was taken seriously, the environmentalists who advocated it would turn on it with the same basic complaints.

Solar strip-mining ain't pretty, folks.

[Uncle Slayton]

Why would anyone be concerned about a private company spending money on solar power?

It is their money and they have lots of cash to burn.

[cripplecreek]

Solar strip-mining ain't pretty, folks.

LOL Nice, I'll be using that in the future.

[Mad Dawgg]

I have a BIL who is convinced that Solar Power is right now a viable way to power our homes and we need nothing else.

Well he was till I showed in the estimate for our building and the area we would need to have enough solar panels to totally power our building (It was designed with all the environmental issues factored in like where we are on the planet and normal weather patterns like clouds and snow and rain etc.)

The area needed to power our entire building (And that is without AC in several parts of the structure) would require something like 4 times the roof area of the building. And then of course there is the batteries and converters and such.

[Grams A]

BS Solar is useful in very limited applications..”

Bought my son a solar charger for his cell phone because they camp a lot where there is no electricity so it seemed like a good thing to have. Everytime he had a need to use it, it was either raining, snowing or very cloudy so put it in the garage sale and finally one guy offered me $.50 for it. Glad to see it gone.

[shotgun]

At this size they should produce and sell it to the power grid for $150 million year. More if they are rotating.