Green energy pdf file Continue You have to see The Reno Apple, Nevada, data center from the inside to really understand how huge it is. It consists of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry bush landscape near I-80, and a corridor that connects them through the middle, a quarter of a mile long. On both sides are large, dark rooms-more than 50 of them filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their front panels. Siri lives here. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of energy to constant, continuous, overpower. In Reno's data center, this means 100% green energy from three different Apple solar farms. The Fort Churchill Solar Project provides 20 megawatts of clean energy to Apple's Reno data center. The closest, and first built, is Fort Churchill Solar Farm an hour southeast in a desert country near the town of Erington, Nevada, where there is nothing but flat, dry land bordered by low, jagged hills and blue desert skies. From the main road you can walk up to the fence and look down the seemingly endless line of solar modules on the other side, with long concave mirrors catching and focusing the sun's energy in a line of small black photo cells sitting right behind them. Churchill is a representative of the growing number of renewable energy sources that have spred up around Apple's data centers in recent years. Since these massive computing machines use more power than any other apple facility, the company has worked hard to get them powered by 100% renewable energy, reaching that goal in 2014.Now Apple says it has finished getting the rest of its facilities running 100% green energy from its new Apple Park headquarters, which has one of the largest solar roofs on the planet to its distribution centers and retail stores around the world. While the 100% figure only covers Apple's own operations, not those of suppliers and contract manufacturers who do most of the work of bringing their ideas to life, it has also convinced 23 companies in their supply chain to sign a commitment to get to 100% renewable energy for part of their business related to Apple products. At Apple Park, solar power, which rings on the roof, can be stored in batteries in place to help reduce costs from peak energy periods. (Photo: Carlos Chavarria) The achievement is the culmination of a furious effort over the past six years that involve financing, building or finding new renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind farms, near the company's facilities. Apple says that in Time has 25 active renewable energy projects, with 15 more currently in construction in 11 countries. Just eight years ago, only 16% of its facilities were powered by renewable energy. By 2015, this number Apple signaled its seriousness about green initiatives in 2013, hiring former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson as vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives. CEO Tim Cook wanted Jackson to focus Apple's environmental initiatives and possibly speak as a respected emissary in Washington, D.C. She did both. According to Jackson, it would be easy enough for Apple to trumpet its landmark achievement in renewable energy earlier. If you look at our trajectory, over the last couple of years we've been close to 100%, she says. That's only four percent more, but that four percent did the right way. So this ad feels like a classic Apple product release. Like our products, we sweat the details, we have pretty strict standards and we prefer to wait and meet our standards than hurry up and make a statement. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, led the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama from 2009 to 2013. (Photo: Carlos Chavarria) I spoke to Jackson in one of the many well-designed but identical-looking meeting rooms of Apple Park, the large glass behind it revealing the curved outer shell of the spacecraft. The chemical engineer, who grew up in New Orleans, has a smooth vocal quality and a leisurely way of talking. First of all, it's clear. She avoids energy jargon and is frank about what she's seen and done at Apple over the past five years. Apple's main goal of going 100% green, of course, is to reduce harmful emissions from dirty fuel. The company says it has reduced greenhouse gas (CO2e) emissions by 58% since 2011, preventing 2.2 million metric tons of CO2e from entering the atmosphere. But Apple's own progress, as measured by numbers, is not the only point. In places where it has facilities, the company has often been a catalyst, working with local utilities and regulators to build new solar or wind farms that pump new green energy onto public networks. Jackson told me Apple especially likes to do this in markets where most existing energy comes from environmentally unfriendly sources such as coal or oil. It's an approach that's really important because you're growing a clean energy market around you, she says. Former Vice President Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth and a board member of Apple since 2003, believes the company is sending a signal that environmental responsibility can be good business. This proves the business case that well-managed companies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions that climate crisis while reducing their energy costs, he said in a statement to Fast Company. His efforts are transforming the way the technology sector uses energy, both domestically and around air vents on the roof of the Apple Park water intake for HVAC building systems. The company expects that the facility will not require heating or air conditioning for nine months of the year. (Photo: Carlos Chavarria) It started with data centersNst Apple has reached its 100% goal, the more effort focused on some of its smallest, most remote offices and retail stores around the world to 100%. Over the past year, the company has been busy searching for and signing electricity purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable energy projects in places such as Brazil, India, Israel, Mexico and Turkey. The hardest part was finding renewable energy projects small enough to serve limited needs of power operations such as tiny sales offices. Previously, however, the company was able to get most of the way up to 100% in large chunks. He did this by finding or creating renewable energy for the energy- intensive data centers he created as services such as Siri, iCloud and Apple Music became increasingly key to his future. Apple now has data centers in Maiden, North Carolina; Reno, Nevada; Mesa, Arizona; Newark, California, and Prineville, Oregon. The company announced plans for another data center in Waukee, Iowa, as well as one in Ireland, two in Denmark, and two in China.These sprawling facilities require a lot of energy to keep their thousands of servers buzzing together in their quiet corridors, and more energy to keep them all cool. Before it started building any data centers, Apple decided that it would run them on renewable energy. With its $285 billion cash reserves, Apple certainly has enough money to just buy up the existing green power to get to the 100% goal. But one of the strict standards that Jackson says Apple follows is what's called extras, or a preference for sponsoring the creation of new renewable energy sources. We want to put new, clean energy on the grid, so we don't suck all the clean energy that's out there, she says. Earlier, when the company began construction in the early 2010s, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydropower were seen by the energy industry as new and inefficient. So the offer in most places was limited and expensive. It soon became apparent that if Apple was serious about running its data centers on green energy, it would be actively involved in priming the market. That's what happened in North Carolina, where Apple built its first data center in 2009. Looking at local energy suppliers for sources and find none, he decided to build his own solar farm. In 2012, it hired Bay Area-based solar contractor SunPower, which built a 20-megawatt farm right across the street from the data center. (To give you a sense of scale, 20 megawatts would be enough to power about 3,300 homes.) Apple will eventually build three solar projects in north North North A 20-megawatt solar power plant and an 18-megawatt one, as well as a bio-gas fuel cell farm capable of generating 10 megawatts of green energy. In 2012, in California and Oregon, Apple began using a state-sanctioned program called Direct Access, which allows large electricity consumers to buy energy directly from a third-party renewable energy supplier instead of a local utility company. This has cleared the way for Apple to fund its own solar and wind projects, with the intention of being a major user of the energy generated by them. Apple points to this approach as a key reason for creating several energy projects that will power its data center in Prineville, Oregon. In 2017, the company agreed to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity from a new wind farm called the Montague Wind Power Project, which is due to go on sale in 2019. It also agreed to buy 56 megawatts of energy from the nearby solar star Oregon II Solar Farm, located a few miles from the data center.