iCloud Goes 100% Green In 2012

According to CFO Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's North Carolina facility dedicated to iCloud data will be run entirely on renewable energy by the end of 2012. This data center is not the only one of its kind made for this purpose for and by Apple, but it is the main iCloud data center, this forging the way forward for the company which was just this past April the subject of a Greenpeace report "How Clean is Your Cloud?" Apple had since rejected Greenpeace's claims that they were lagging behind Google and Facebook in the green department claiming that they already had 50 percent more renewable energy in action in their data centers than they'd projected originally.

This new information has Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer speaking with Rueters on the situation, saying two new solar farms will cover 250 acres in Maiden, North Carolina, their core data center for iCloud. This solar farm will provide 84 million kWh of energy annually, this more than enough for the whole data center's inner workings. Apple also plans on creating a new bio-gas fuel-cell plant by the end of 2012 as well.

"I'm not aware of any other company producing energy onsite at this scale. The plan we are releasing today includes two solar farms and together they will be twice as big as we previously announced, thanks to the purchase of some land very near to the data center in Maiden, which will help us meet this goal. ... We haven't finalized our plans for on-site generation, but any power we need to run our center in Prineville that we get from the grid will be 100 percent renewable and locally generated sources." – Oppenheimer

The expansion and creation in Apple's iCloud data centers here has Apple purchasing equipment from SunPower Corp as well as startup Bloom Energy. SunPower shares jumped 9 percent earlier today at news that Apple would be picking up equipment from them in the near future.