Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:48:52 PDT
Earlier this year, environmental activist group Greenpeace made waves with a
report taking Apple and other companies to task for not doing enough to
eliminate the use of dirty coal-sourced power at their data centers. Apple
quickly responded at the time to note that Greenpeace had greatly
overestimated the power needs of the company's flagship data center in
Maiden, North Carolina, thereby understating the impact of Apple's solar and
fuel cell power generation occurring at the site.
In that statement, Apple refuted Greenpeace's estimate of peak power demand
of 100 megawatts for the data center, revealing that power demand would
actually peak at 20 megawatts. And a month later, Apple published
additional details on its efforts to run all of its data centers on 100%
green energy.
Greenpeace announced yesterday that it has prepared an updated report on
Apple's energy usage based on the new information, but as noted by Data
Center Knowledge's Rich Miller, the group still seems to be being overly
critical in its grading of Apple, even continuing to make up its own
estimates of the North Carolina data center's energy usage rather than
believing Apple's public statements.
In its initial report in April, Greenpeace estimated Apple’s power use in
North Carolina at a whopping 100 megawatts. The group has reduced that
slightly to 81 megawatts, dismissing the company’s disclosure that it
expects draw about 20 megawatts at full capacity.
Miller goes on to note that Apple has clearly disclosed in regulatory
documents that it intends to install backup generators capable of producing
41 megawatts of electricity in an "N+2" configuration that keeps at least
two generators as spares, meaning that Apple is only planning for peak
demand of 35-36 megawatts at an absolute maximum.
Miller points to two possible reasons for Greenpeace's continued refusal to
acknowledge Apple's statements and other official documents addressing the
data center's power needs:
Greenpeace’s continuing use of this methodology, in light of Apple’s
disclosure and permit data, raises several possibilities:
- Greenpeace is having difficulty developing estimates that accurately
incorporate data center operations and power usage.
- Greenpeace is predisposed to cling to estimates that make Apple look less
“green” because it generates more headlines for its awareness campaigns.
For its part, Apple has continued to stand by its earlier comments, issuing
a statement to Forbes:
We’re committed to building the world’s most environmentally responsible
data centers and are leading the industry in the use of renewable energy,
including the nation’s largest private solar arrays and non-utility fuel
cell installation,” Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokewoman, said today. “As
we’ve said before, our North Carolina and California data centers will be
coal-free as of February 2013 and our newest data centers in Oregon and
Nevada will be designed to meet that standard from Day One.”
Greenpeace's revised report gives Apple no additional credit for
transparency, despite the company having explicitly revealed the power
requirements of the data center, and the group's insistence on sticking with
an 81-megawatt estimate of peak power capacity brings Apple's usage of
renewable energy at the site down to just 22% as opposed to the 60% figure
explicitly stated by Apple.
Greenpeace is also reluctant to give Apple credit for its fuel cell
installation, waiting to hear whether Apple will actually be using biogas to
directly power the cells or if it will be using natural gas and instead
purchasing biogas to be inserted elsewhere in the distribution system to
offset the company's natural gas usage. But given that Apple's biogas
commitment would have the same net effect on overall natural gas consumption
regardless of where exactly in the distribution system it is used, it seems
that Apple should be pursuing the most cost-effective strategy for
deploying that biogas.
