Apple’s ground-breaking bet on its clean energy infrastructure, with exclusive photos

Last week a utility in North Carolina announced something seemingly mundane on the surface, but it was a transcendent moment for those that have been following the clean energy sector. Duke Energy, which generates the bulk of its energy in the state from dirty and aging coal and nuclear plants, officially asked the state’s regulators if it could sell clean power (from new sources like solar and wind farms) to large energy customers that were willing to buy it — and yes, shockingly enough, thanks to restrictive regulations and an electricity industry that moves at a glacial pace, this previously wasn’t allowed.

For years Duke Energy largely ignored clean energy in North Carolina (with a few exceptions), mostly with the explanation that customers wouldn’t pay a premium for it. But turns out when those large energy customers are internet companies — with global influential consumer brands, huge data centers that suck up lots of energy and large margins that given them leeway to experiment — they can be pretty persuasive.

Moments after the utility’s filing hit the public record on Friday, Google, which has been publicly working with Duke Energy since the spring of this year on the clean energy buying project and has a large energy-consuming data center in Lenoir, North Carolina, published a blog post celebrating the utility’s move. Google has spent over a billion dollars — through both equity investments and power buying contracts — on clean energy projects over the years, and has been a very public face of the movement to “green” the internet.



But absent from a lot of the public dialogue has been the one company that arguably has had a greater effect on bringing clean power to the state of North Carolina than any other: Apple. While the state’s utility has just now become more willing to supply clean energy to corporate customers, several years ago Apple took the stance that if clean power wasn’t going to be available from the local utility for its huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina, it would, quite simply, build its own.

http://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/apple-solar-farm-fuel-cell-farms-exclusive-photos-investigative-report