Apple Building Solar Farm at North Carolina Data Center

[AidenShaw]

A data centre only has a few servers though, they have more of I guess storage units?

Yes, but a "few" is a "few tens of thousands of servers".

Microsoft's Chicago Data Centre has about 50,000 servers on the first floor, as well as over an acre of server rooms on the second floor.

It takes a lot of compute power to handle the IP requests for data.

 

[jwdsail]

I agree but I wasn't responding to that. I was responding to the guys arguing Apple would be able to break even with a feed-in tariff. Only way that would be possible is if they built a solar farm that could cover the load, and only way to do that is by overbuilding to compensate for the crappy capacity factor.

Technically there's nothing else Apple could use that solar farm for except covering a portion of their load. Unless they're trying to pull a Google and get into the energy market.

Also, I'm not sure how a data center works but I'd think the load is fairly constant 24/7. I don't think they start shutting off servers at night the way we turn off everything before we go to sleep.



I'll tell you straight up, not only are they unlikely but grid batteries that can last a day without losing charge currently don't exist.



Unless they plan to build the world's biggest solar farm, Apple is not going to have any leftover electricity that would require a molten salt storage system. That electricity is going directly through a transformer into their data center.

The molten salt isn't just storage, it's how steam is generated to produce electricity.... The storage ability is just a nice side-effect for times where the sun isn't on the mirrors heating the salt... This type of solar facility is much more efficient than PV solar..

A good video on one of these type of facilities...

http://twit.tv/show/green-tech-today/4

 

[Mad-B-One]

If you spend more energy than you can make, batteries are useless. All storage is useless. Because there's nothing to store.

Really? You buy the rest you can't produce and then: Think outside your battery box. There are multiple pump storage power plants to shift energy from night to day in the European alps. There are new ways of storing it chemically in for of hydrogen gas. Remember the experiment in school how to split water? It really works even on a large scale. And that large scale is reality already. Opened this month, a plant using 70 large-scale electrolysis cells, a wind energy plant producing hydrogen for either Fuel Cell cars or hydrogen electricity generators. Storage problem solved!

 

[farmboy]

The problems is this "scientific evidence" is a fraud. The people behind the movement (and Al Gore's powerpoint) specifically at East Anglia University have been discredited as frauds by their leaked emails, making up data and rigging equations to meet a political objective. Always follow the money and that leads us to carbon credit trading.

IT IS UTTERLY FASCINATING that Deniers have moved so quickly from "There is NO GLOBAL WARMING and all these scientists know it" to "YEAH, BUT IT'S NOT OUR FAULT and all these OTHER scientists know it". Very facile indeed.

Anyhow:

FOUR independent commissions have CLEARED the EAU of ANY scientific impropriety and NONE of their data has been shown to be incorrect. Don't make crap up.

As to most of your other points, which allude to conspiracies and money trails, all the money is on the side of the CO2 generators (industry, oil, etc.), not on the climatologist sides. Wouldn't a reasonable person like yourself follow that money?

 

[MacDav]

I can't believe it

I can't believe there is actually someone posting on this topic who knows what they are talking about. Thank You!!!!

As a Mechanical Engineer there is only viable type of Nuclear Power and they are now calling it 4th Generation [although it was the original 1st Generation developed by the Father of Thermodynamics, Ernesto Fermi] -- Pebble Bed Nuclear.

The radioactive isotope doesn't have to be the Uranium 238. Sure, there is Thorium but the issue is the way in which Energy is extracted and contained.

Fermi recognized the concept of a Fuel Rod was asinine and served only to drive the goal of the Military to have plutonium created.

Pebble Bed encases Carbon around the Uranium in the form of uniform carbon spheres suspended in Liquid Helium and the energy differential extracted from the radiation turns the Turbine which converts it into MW of Electrical Power. One catch: It doesn't provide a mechanism for Weaponry.

But like all matters of politics and control:

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-PBMR_postponed-1109092.html

Westinghouse postponed it along with South Africa.

Then we had the Japanese Tsunami with it's Nuclear Issues.

China woke up and is now going head long into 4th Generation Pebble Bed.

http://www.nucpros.com/content/porvair-supplies-filtration-system-chinas-4g-nuclear-reactor

So, once again we'll let China lead in Solar, Wind and Nuclear that we invented. All three are important, but if done right, even Pebble Bed Nuclear is unnecessary..

Eventually Nuclear will be replaced with Positron Energy sources that will have Space and Military Application.

 

[jwdsail]

Solar cells have limited efficiency. Solar furnaces have better efficiency.
So yes, if they built solar furnaces and turbines, it'd be "greener" than solar cells. But it'd also mean they'd have to operate this plant with molten salt at 600 degrees C. Apple isn't a power company, so they're back to solar cells.

My state college wasn't a "power company", yet it generated it's own electricity (and steam for heat) on-site in the 1990s...

Company my father worked at in the 1970s did so as well...

Technology in power generation, micro-controlers, monitoring equipment, and automation has progressed allot in the past 20-30 years, you really think something like this is out of Apple's reach?

You're claiming that since "Apple isn't a power company" they can't possibly use the more efficient method for generating electricity from the sun? One of the largest companies on Earth, a leader in the tech industry, can't possibly do what my college did in the 1990s and what my father's employer was doing in the 1970s? Even when Apple has much more money and much better technology at their disposal? .... Act as their own power company, at a scale that is efficient for their facility...

Really?

Congratulations, you've made my brain itch for the rest of the day...

 

[AidenShaw]

My state college wasn't a "power company", yet it generated it's own electricity (and steam for heat) on-site in the 1990s...

The state university where I went to graduate school was doing it in the 70's.

You're claiming that since "Apple isn't a power company"....

The "space ship" campus (which I'm betting will never be built) is planned to have its own fossil fuel electric generating plant.

 

[Liquorpuki]

Any datacentre tries to save as much energy as possible; servers turned on = cost in energy, cost in wear and tear. In a good setup, when the load goes down clock rates will be reduced to save energy, and then servers will be shut down automatically and restarted automatically when needed.

I don't know much about servers and datacenter architecture so I think it's interesting they can drop clock rates and switch off equipment at will.

I googled the load profile for a typical data center though and most of the links say a Data Center load profile is relatively flat. If that's true, a Data Center doesn't follow the peak/off-peak residential load profile and needs a steady feed of generation.

The molten salt isn't just storage, it's how steam is generated to produce electricity.... The storage ability is just a nice side-effect for times where the sun isn't on the mirrors heating the salt... This type of solar facility is much more efficient than PV solar..

A good video on one of these type of facilities...

http://twit.tv/show/green-tech-today/4

I watched your video and realized what you're really arguing for is a solar furnace with heliostats, not molten salt.

Really? You buy the rest you can't produce and then: Think outside your battery box. There are multiple pump storage power plants to shift energy from night to day in the European alps. There are new ways of storing it chemically in for of hydrogen gas. Remember the experiment in school how to split water? It really works even on a large scale. And that large scale is reality already. Opened this month, a plant using 70 large-scale electrolysis cells, a wind energy plant producing hydrogen for either Fuel Cell cars or hydrogen electricity generators. Storage problem solved!

Pumped hydro is great if you want to store a few hours daily to dump during peak loads. It's not great if you want to compensate for a week of overcast skies.

And the stupidity of hydrogen cars goes something like this:
Hydrogen Vehicle = Electricity --> Hydrogen --> Fuel Cell --> Electricity --> Electric Motor
Meanwhile...
Electric Vehicle = Electricity --> Electric Motor

What's the point of all those extra steps?

My state college wasn't a "power company", yet it generated it's own electricity (and steam for heat) on-site in the 1990s...

Company my father worked at in the 1970s did so as well...

Technology in power generation, micro-controlers, monitoring equipment, and automation has progressed allot in the past 20-30 years, you really think something like this is out of Apple's reach?

If your college generated its own electricity, I'm pretty sure it was a fossil fuel based cogen tied into your local utility. Not renewable based and off the grid.

And the tech advances that are needed have nothing to do with generating electricity more efficiently and everything to do with storing it longer. If you could figure out an economical and practical way to store energy long-term, you'd end up winning a Nobel prize I kid you not.

 

[biggreydog]

I wish I could get a grading permit in 24 hours.

 

[hortod1]

Unless Apple has reinvented solar power... ?

Last I knew, solar power was incredibly inefficient... so I'm going to second you on saying it's a waste.

Not reinventing solar power, just reinventing the sun. To be called iStar.

 

[sennekuyl]

I admire the ingenuity, but from an energy standpoint its terribly inefficient.
Its essentially using electricity to pump water through a turbine to generate electricity.

The scenario is the idea that electricity initially generated would be going to waste anyway as no one was there to use it. It is better to use the electricity to store potential energy than have a vague hope that there will be people would adjust their habits to match maximum energy use efficiency.

----------

It still doesn't prove that it is man made by any significant ammount.

No, it isn't proved. However, there are very strong indicators pointing to industrial activity as the most likely cause.

----------

You are just putting religious-like faith behind "scientists" without using your own brain to draw a conclusion. It's just religious dogma that they are right...

The problems is this "scientific evidence" is a fraud. The people behind the movement (and Al Gore's powerpoint) specifically at East Anglia University have been discredited as frauds by their leaked emails, making up data and rigging equations to meet a political objective. Always follow the money and that leads us to carbon credit trading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/j...n-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

Any so-called "scientific evidence" that ignores THE SUN as a factor (one inconvenient truth is that ALL OF THE PLANETS are warming and there aren't any SUVs on Mars) and ignores that the vast majority of greenhouse gas is water vapor and methane (which can't be taxed therefore it is ignored) and way down the list is CO2 and way below that is man-made CO2 at something like .001 percent.

The Earth's climate is not static and never has been. The climate always changes, it heats up, it cools down. Evidence suggests we are actually entering another ice age (the growth in human civilization in the last 10,000 years can be linked to the end of the last ice age).

Most of man-made global warming is psuedo-science and one would do well to understand the money and power behind it, and to understand how grant money is allocated to researchers.

Further, Al Gore scolds us that "the debate is over". In science the debate is never over -- even something as seemingly immutable as Newton's laws of physics can be overturned by new facts. Saying "the debate is over" is not something a true scientist would do. It sounds no different than a creationist saying "God says so".

The biggest, and easiest, way to puncture this argument is simply this:

They say the environment is warming because of man made CO2 so we must reduce emissions and tax carbon.

If the environment were cooling would they encourage increased CO2 emissions to help warm the planet? OF COURSE NOT. End of fraud. They want to confiscate wealth by taxing energy and they need a reason to do it, a reason that makes people feel good because they're "making a difference".

You might want to update your sources... just sayin' in light of news that has come up recently by anti-AGW funded research. :whistle:

 

[JAT]

I have 37 SunPower 230 watt panels. It's 46 m², or 495 square feet. They have Enphase micro-inverters (the only way to go - monolithic inverters are crazy when there's an alternative at about the same price).

I'm in Palo Alto, CA - 37°N (Maiden NC is 35° N). We basically have clear skies and no rain from April to November.

The NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab) has a solar calculator at http://www.nrel.gov/rredc/pvwatts/grid.html (click the "•PVWatts Version 2 Calculator" link in the list). I have 8.5 kW rated, 90% efficiency, panels at 10° tilt, oriented at 195°.

The calculator says that I should get 13.56 mWh per year, and in fact I got 13.7 mWh. (I chose a very low 10° tilt to reduce the visibility of the panels and to pack more onto the roof - at a normal tilt I should have generated 14.5 mWh with 37 panels.)

Thanks. That jives with what I keep finding. Which is that I would need a pretty large area to be helpful up here. Haven't found a way to make it viable for me.

 

[twoodcc]

dang. i wonder how long it will take for them to get it going?

 

[soundof]

Kites?!

I wish Apple is planning on using kites instead of solar panels on that farm, since kites are far beyond anything else (as far as I know) in efficiency, 24/7/365 availability, and low cost:

"Unlike wind turbines which are limited to the slow and irregular winds near the ground, kites can tap into the stronger and much more persistent winds at 1km altitude and higher. When there is no wind at ground level, there is typically more than enough where kites can reach."

"Kites can extract more energy from the no-fly zone above a typical nuclear power plant than what the plant itself produces."

"Abundant, fully renewable, almost free energy. Zero pollution."

If you don't know, here's how they work:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitegen+stem
http://www.kitegen.com/en/?page_id=7

 

[AidenShaw]

Thanks. That jives with what I keep finding. Which is that I would need a pretty large area to be helpful up here. Haven't found a way to make it viable for me.

It's only viable here due to utility regulations.

My house uses about 1.5 kW on average (couple of PCs, home server, TiVo+STB, two refrigerators and a freezer), or 30-40 kWh/day. Electric stove/oven/dishwasher/dryer. Furnace and water heater are gas.

During the mid-day, I'm pushing a net 3 to 5.5 kW back into the grid - and the utility is paying me at the peak rate of $.31/kWh. Off-peak, I'm buying my 1.5 kW at the off-peak rate of $.08/kWh. The perfect "sell high, buy low" situation.

If utility regulations didn't require the utility to buy my excess generation at retail rates, the payback would be much, much longer.

I suspect that in Apple's case, similar utility issues will drive the design of the system. Not only could Apple reduce its consumption of peak-priced power, it might even be able to get a substantial reduction in its overall bill.

(My company here in Silicon Valley has an arrangement with the utility - we get a discount on electric rates at the cost of being at the top of the "brown-out" list. During a heat wave, we'll be notified to cut our power consumption to 75% of normal or we'll be turned off. Hallway lights go off, large numbers of servers and storage systems are powered down (archives, backups, idle systems,..), environmental systems are reprogrammed for higher office temperatures, Windows desktops/laptops are reprogrammed to turn off monitors and go to sleep sooner (very easy to do with Windows tools), ...)

I'm sure that the ROI for the Apple Solar Farm is intimately tied to the terms of their contract with Duke Power, and by agreeing to reduce peak mid-day summertime load they'll get year-round savings that will help pay for the panels.

 

[hchung]

Lots of good points in your post. But one clarification. Solar cells have passed the breakeven point where the energy to construct them is less, in fact now significantly less, than the energy that they produce over their lifetime. Solar panels have gotten significantly better and cheaper to make in the last ten years. The price per watt of capacity production has decreased by 75% and further drops are anticipated in the near future. Though of course they are still an expensive source of energy compared to an old coal-fired power plant that was built and paid for decades ago.

Thanks, good to know. So given that Apple has tons of cash, and that solar cell use over their lifetime (guessing maybe 15 years?) will result in a net benefit.... it seems like it's a good idea.

----------

Really? You buy the rest you can't produce and then: Think outside your battery box. There are multiple pump storage power plants to shift energy from night to day in the European alps. There are new ways of storing it chemically in for of hydrogen gas. Remember the experiment in school how to split water? It really works even on a large scale. And that large scale is reality already. Opened this month, a plant using 70 large-scale electrolysis cells, a wind energy plant producing hydrogen for either Fuel Cell cars or hydrogen electricity generators. Storage problem solved!

"Storage problem solved"? What?

I think you misunderstood me. Maybe I didn't say it clearly enough. Let me try one more time:

If you spend more energy than you can make.... energy storage is useless.

And, several of us here are pretty sure they're going to be spending more energy than their solar farm would make.

The "storage problem" wasn't how to store energy. The "storage problem" is that there is no excess energy to store.

----------

My state college wasn't a "power company", yet it generated it's own electricity (and steam for heat) on-site in the 1990s...

Company my father worked at in the 1970s did so as well...

Technology in power generation, micro-controlers, monitoring equipment, and automation has progressed allot in the past 20-30 years, you really think something like this is out of Apple's reach?

You're claiming that since "Apple isn't a power company" they can't possibly use the more efficient method for generating electricity from the sun? One of the largest companies on Earth, a leader in the tech industry, can't possibly do what my college did in the 1990s and what my father's employer was doing in the 1970s? Even when Apple has much more money and much better technology at their disposal? .... Act as their own power company, at a scale that is efficient for their facility...

Really?

Congratulations, you've made my brain itch for the rest of the day...

Perhaps I should say it a different way. Apple makes consumer devices. That is what Apple focuses on.

In order for them to do what your college did in the 1990s and run a solar thermal power plant, Apple would have to hire full time staff to maintain and run a power plant. It's not like they could just take a few engineers, make a solar thermal power plant and let it run itself. They'd have to maintain it. It'd be a full time job outside of Apple's strengths. Essentially, it'd be an entirely new startup company within Apple and there's overhead in maintaining the company too.

So while they could do it in theory, it makes little sense for them to do so, when the alternative is to set a bunch of panels on flat land, dust them off every once in a while, and replace them in 15 years. Yes, it requires maintenance too, but dusting a panel off is much simpler than taking care of a vat of molten salt or a high temperature steam turbine.

 

[Lennholm]

Coal is still a really good option...if we choose needlessly expensive energy sources we take away from money that can be spent creating better medicines, funding other science, making better engines, creating better living structures, funding libraries, teaching children to read, feeding the poor, etc.

The problem with hydrocarbons is that they are soo freaking energy dense. Ben Franklin said beer was evidence that God loved us and wanted us to be happy. Incredibly energy dense hydrocarbons just lying in the ground is evidence God loves us and wants us to have a modern technologically capable society and create wealth and eliminate poverty via industry. I mean all you have to do is dig it up and burn it - its AMAZING!

Don't fall for that, it's a trick! God is really an alien who wants us to destroy ourselves .

 

[ericschmerick]

The only way they'll save money is through tax credits, meaning someone else will be making up for the taxes they don't pay.

Well, not really. I presume they will get a subsidy to defray installation costs, and will get feed-in credits for the amount of power the put back onto the grid (thereby reducing their power bill). Both of these things amount money either leaving the government's coffers (subsidy) or failing to go into the government's coffers (feed-in credits instead of cash for electricity). However you should think of both of these money streams as an ALTERNATIVE investment. If you were the government, you could either use capital to invest in new fossil fuel power plants, or you give that capital to others and let them do it on a small scale, bit by bit.

For this investment what does the government get, besides power which they would have had to supply through other means anyway?

1. If you live in a spot where there otherwise would have been a coal power plant, but isn't now because its being supplied by individuals and companies through small-scale installations, you'll get the benefit of being cleaner, healthier, and happier. It actually amounts in the short-term to a transfer of pollution from the point of installation (USA) to the point of production (probably China), but over the long-term the total pollution is certainly less.

2. I believe it's generally accepted that fossil fuels are a limited resource, in the sense that the will run out someday (today, tomorrow, or 400 years from now). Therefore, some kind of alternative energy is needed. You could fund large-scale research directly, or you could just create a commercially attractive market and let private industry go to work optimizing performance and efficiency. So the gov't gets new viable energy sources by supporting the market commercially in the short-run.

BTW, coal is not a limited resource. The US has enough coal to provide all the power we could possibly use for at least the next 400 years.

Isn't 400 years, by definition, a limit?

 

[MugsyMD]

Good on Apple

You know, good on Apple for using their resources - because although I love my toys and use fuel - it would be nice to find companies that can PAY for this themselves - what about that company that went bankrupt and took a half a billion dollars of tax payer money from us, the US citizens for a solar company that never existed - so Apple, good on you for NOT asking for a dime from us as the taxpayer.

 

[MorphingDragon]

I don't know much about servers and datacenter architecture so I think it's interesting they can drop clock rates and switch off equipment at will.

Computer hardware, especially CPUs have been throttling themselves to save power for ages now. Look up SpeedStep, PowerNow! and Cool 'n Quiet if you really want to know more.

Servers that turn themselves off or sleep while not in use isn't *that* hard to implement. If you run your infrastructure on a Virtual Cluster then most "Enterprise" product solutions will do this for you.

At work we use the Virtual Cluster model, that runs virtual servers and virtual desktops. We have 8 physical servers, 1 controller and 7 host slaves. The controller is always running, logging performance and doing power management, starting servers etc. During the day all 7 of the slaves are on and running, at night only 1 is.

 

[Liquorpuki]

You know, good on Apple for using their resources - because although I love my toys and use fuel - it would be nice to find companies that can PAY for this themselves - what about that company that went bankrupt and took a half a billion dollars of tax payer money from us, the US citizens for a solar company that never existed - so Apple, good on you for NOT asking for a dime from us as the taxpayer.

Actually Apple gets a state tax break for relocating to North Carolina, and a Federal tax break for construction of green energy infrastructure.

Computer hardware, especially CPUs have been throttling themselves to save power for ages now. Look up SpeedStep, PowerNow! and Cool 'n Quiet if you really want to know more.

Thanks

 

[hchung]

...what about that company that went bankrupt and took a half a billion dollars of tax payer money from us, the US citizens for a solar company that never existed...

Hold up, that's being a little unfair. Solyndra existed. It was real, it actually manufactured solar panels and it did it all in the US.

Just because it wasn't profitable because it was undercut by cheaper manufacturing methods elsewhere doesn't mean it "never existed."