A North Carolina TV station has published pictures of a 100 acre (40 hectare) solar energy farm that Apple is building adjacent to its new data centre in that state. WCNC-TV has published still photos from an aerial video it has taken for Wired magazine of the solar farm, outside the town of Maiden, the “biggest little football town in the world".
The solar farm is capable of generating 20MW of electricity. Apple is building another, half as big again, nearby. Apple has said that the two solar facilities will generate most of the data centre’s power. “This means we will be producing enough onsite renewable energy — 124 million kWh — to power the equivalent of 10,874 homes,” Apple says.
Apple announced the 46,000 square meter cloud data centre in July. The thousands of solar panels used in the facility come from Californian company SunPower. They are mounted on tracking devices that follow the sun during the day.
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Graeme Philipson is senior associate editor at iTWire and editor of sister publication CommsWire. He is also founder and Research Director of Connection Research, a market research and analysis firm specialising in the convergence of sustainable, digital and environmental technologies. He has been in the high tech industry for more than 30 years, most of that time as a market researcher, analyst and journalist. He was founding editor of MIS magazine, and is a former editor of Computerworld Australia. He was a research director for Gartner Asia Pacific and research manager for the Yankee Group Australia. He was a long time IT columnist in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and is a recipient of the Kester Award for lifetime achievement in IT journalism.
