Being somebody who works at an alternative energy research lab, and who does programming for fuel cell control and test systems, this is particularly cool to hear for me--good to see the technology finally in use in the real world, and that a company whose way of doing things I like is applying it.
I do, however, think it's somewhat inaccurate to call it a "fuel cell farm". They're solar or wind "farms" because that's what they do--gather an available natural resource. (Solar farms, in fact, gather the same natural resource as, say, corn farms do.) Similar to what an oil well does, except it's tapping an available resource, not extracting a finite one.
Fuel cells, however, are just a generation technology--they convert stored fuel into usable energy. Same thing a car engine or coal-fired power plant does. So it's really a "fuel cell power plant" or "fuel cell generator" or something similar; "farm," it's really not.
Let's hope that an infusion of cash by Apple helps develop fuel cells as they are the best renewable energy source atm.
As above, they are
not a source of renewable energy at all. They're a way of converting a gaseous fuel to electricity. If that energy source is hydrogen produced by a wind farm, then it's renewable. If it's biogas from a landfill or hog farm, that's semi-renewable. If it's natural gas from an oil field, it might be more efficient than an internal combustion generator, but it's not renewable at all.
This isn't to say that fuel cells aren't a good technology--they are. They're just not an energy "source" by any real definition of the word. One advantage to buying fuel cells now, even if you're currently running them off a non-renewable source, is to build out infrastructure and fund future development, for when renewable fuels like solar-hydrogen become available.
[...]Anyone know how many years it would take to pay off (if ever), presuming comparison to the General and Industrial services above?
Probably never, but that's going to depend a lot on distribution costs for where it is, and how impacted the local electric grid is. If the power company needs to build a new power plant to supply the growing needs of Apple's facility, then it might well be cheaper for Apple do just build a mini one themselves.
Also important is the 100% uptime needs of the plant. If the power grid goes down, Apple NEEDS to keep the servers running, and the only way to do that is onsite generation. You can use diesel generators, but a large-scall natural-gas fed fuel cell installation might well be the best way to do that. And it's almost certainly cheaper than a bunch of UPSes, with no real runtime limit as long as the natural gas pipe holds out.
Interesting that it will be powered on biogas. There must be a landfill nearby? Otherwise, where will they get the biogas from?
This is just a random guess, but maybe hog farms? There are a LOT of them in that general region, and they produce vast amounts of waste that could easily be tapped for biogas.
