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Apple: 75% of Our World Wide Power Needs Now Come From Renewable Power Sources
skade88 writes "Apple now owns and runs enough renewable energy power plants that 75% of their world wide power needs come from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro. From the Apple Blog Post: 'Our investments are paying off. We've already achieved 100 percent renewable energy at all of our data centers, at our facilities in Austin, Elk Grove, Cork, and Munich, and at our Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. And for all of Apple's corporate facilities worldwide, we're at 75 percent, and we expect that number to grow as the amount of renewable energy available to us increases. We won't stop working until we achieve 100 percent throughout Apple.'"
We mean human souls... Muahahahaha
#PostAround820
Does that include the Asian suppliers' and subcontractors' plants that actually manufacture all of Apple's products?
I didn't think so.
So perhaps Apple should not too their own horn very loudly on this.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Green Apple then?
It seems a bit deceptive for a company selling physical goods to put out a headline like this while apparently ignoring the energy used to actually manufacture their products.
Oil IS renewable, but takes a long time. Solar power is not renewable. Once the sun has spent its fuel there can be no more.
That's what they mean by "renewable energy source".
75% of Apple's Power Comes From Renewable Sources
Instead? Or even
Apple Says 75% Of Their Power Comes From Renewable Sources
which would also be more clear.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's why Apple products are so expensive!
PS: I wonder how renewable the energy burned to drive the truck that deliver products to their retail stores is.
"When did Apple become Communist?"
Renewable power bought from a utility company is a zero-sum game--only one party gets to use it, and everyone else gets stuck with whatever's left. So until they are actually generating all that power themselves, the claim is just chest thumping. No real benefit to the environment.
They are if you spend a little more time exposed to the sun.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And for all of Apple's corporate facilities worldwide, we're at 75 percent
So their office buildings? What about the factories where all their products are made? You know... where probobly 99.9% of the power they use is consumed?
My fireplace is now powered by 100% renewable resources! I challenge the rest of the world to meet my same goals!
They forgot to mention that their Foxconn plants are powered by thousands of Chinese children in giant hamster wheels.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Why so much Apple hate here? Yes, they have shitloads of cash. Yes, they make the most of a capitalist system. I couldn't care less if Apple went bankrupt tomorrow. I'm just asking, WHY SO MUCH HATRED? This company actually invests in renewable energy - how many other fortune 200 companies are doing this? It seems like this is just more of the same old attitude - "It's a money making entity! Kill it!"
Where is moderation: -1 False?
It's already clear that they conveniently left out all manufacturing/storage facilities, as if subcontracting made them not responsible. And of course, they don't use conflict minerals, their workers work 8-hour shifts in comfy offices ... you get the idea.
Now I need a new tag for this PR BS.
"bs"?
"prspin"?
"corporatebull"?
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
"Twenty percent comes from the energy generated by the white-hot hatred of Slashdot users!"
Dark Reflection
Right, that's why you would buy Samsung. Now with even more child labour and more denied cancer deaths, right ? You are a moron of epic proportions if you think child labour is an Apple specific problem and/or all other manufacturers are holy. Quite the opposite. Foxconn conditions within the Apple section are bad, but still among the best in china. The wages in Shanghai(china) are far above those in Taiwan.
You mean the child slave labour that Apple actually works hard to not use, unlike every other tech company?
The other thing is that "using" renewable energy is possible on the normal grid by purchasing renewable energy through the utility. As long as you know the store's consumption, you pay the utility that delivers it for the rate they have to purchase/generate it at. This is the same way "competitive" energy markets in the US work, the electricity enters the grid from a mix of where the customers want it. Just because you didn't get the electrons that were pushed by a windmill doesn't mean you aren't using a renewable resource.
These places are not under Apple's control unless they buy the facilities outright then convert them. Dell and HP have the same problem too if they were to convert to green energy. Dell and HP don't own Foxconn that manufacturers their goods. They don't own stores like BestBuy that sell their wares.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Much like the term 'All-Natural', Renewable doesn't mean much.
The term causes the mind to think of things like 'Solar, Wind, Water, Geothermal', but the reality is that Renewable also means: "BioDiesel, Wood, Ethanol, Methane"
My point is, that there are many polluting, but renewable sources. I don't mean to imply that making sure our energy supply is sustainable is a bad thing, not at all, but just a reminder to keep an eye out for the marketing angle companies use when they use the term 'Renewable'.
People hear 'clean, green, healthy, responsible' when a company says they are renewable, but the honest truth is that a company could be powered by 100% Renewable Sources by burning pine trees in a 100 year old 30% efficiency furnace.
A previous company of mine recently converted their entire energy supply to renewable sources, generation was performed on site. The source was sawdust from the local saw mills. (However, it was actually a good move, because their system was actually a new high efficiency process they wanted to showcase, and by purchasing from the local sawmills, they helped support the community in a very direct fashion)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Really though, what do they mean? I did not see where they define what they consider renewable.
After all, coal and oil are also renewable, given enough time.
One should also take into account the useful life of the products they manufacture, with sealed-in batteries and throw-away design, along with their own marketing effort to out-fashion their own devices after only two years.
Using terajoules of the cleanest energy to produce stuff that will end up in the trash faster than you can say "planned obsolescence" is still waste.
I'll applaud when they reverse the flow and encourage people to keep their computers longer through cheap support plans and openness.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
I'm sure they include their subcontractor's facilities, which tend to be energy intensive, in their count.~
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
I knew when I saw the title of this, Apple was going to get flamed here by slashdotters no matter what. I was not let down. It's hard for me to understand why good news is turned into bad news on this site so often based solely on a brand name. Is it not respectable that a company with a huge global presence would be striving to be more efficient with the energy they use, and succeeding? Would there be this much flaming going on if it were Google, or IBM, or Samsung?
I do work for many IBM data-centers across the country. Apple use's IBM's products for their datacenters, and I know these servers and storage racks are not power sippers. I find it astounding that they could run one of them (much less all of them) on purely renewable energy. An entire large datacenter of IBM equipment running off solar power and fuel cells is truly a feat I'd love to see in person.
"That'll never compile."
Many are in malls, connected to the regular grid.
One wonders what percentage would result if these were factored into their equations?
I notice it also doesn't appear to cover Apple shops....
Much lower - but still higher than any other computer / phone / consumer electronics company on the world.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Really though, what do they mean? I did not see where they define what they consider renewable.
Apple's definition of renewable is Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Sadly, there are lots of reasons why renewable sources won't solve our energy needs. Tom Murphy, a physics prof at UCSD, has a great blog http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/ where he works out the details. This was covered a while ago here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/02/2315207/limits-on-growth-of-energy-use-and-economies
Apple doesn't shut down their data centers when the wind stops or when it is cloudy, and their biogas generators works only as fast as the microbes make methane, a process that is difficult to quickly throttle up and down. Perhaps they have vast underground tank farms storing methane for winter. Or perhaps this is all a fashion show to impress gullible green-wannabee customers.
So Apple is drawing the bulk of their power, most of the time, from the same grid the rest of us draw power from. They are building a new data center here in the Pacific Northwest, making the same claims about wind power. Wind power availability is random, on average less than 15% of nameplate capacity, and often entirely stopped for weeks at a time. On the rare occasions when wind farms produce much more than their tiny average, the Bonneville Power Administration is forced to buy it, regardless of the state of the power grid. BPA is being forced to spill water over the dams on the Columbia, which super-nitrogenates the water and kills salmon, thus violating their former "prime directive" - preserve fish runs. While maintaining navigation, controlling floods, providing irrigation, and about a dozen other important goals written into their charter. No wonder their director recently quit.
Solar - similar deal. The worst case solar insolation in winter is tiny, even in "sunny" New Mexico. No sunlight at night, of course, thin sunlight under week-long cloudy skies. Look at a December or January solar insolation map from NREL, and do the math yourself.
Where does the makeup energy come from? Given the short-term intermittency and quick-start requirements, mostly from natural gas turbines, increasingly fed through the national pipeline network from frack gas fields in the east and midwest. Gas magnate T. Boone Pickens /loves/ windmills.
Many of us here are technologists, capable of finding the numbers and doing the math. We do not have to rely on the pronouncements of corporate PR departments, government agencies, or conspiracist crackpot websites to figure out what is going on. We can go to primary sources, we can build our own spreadsheets, and we can replace magic thinking with nuts-and-bolts analysis to learn what works and what doesn't. The risk to the global climate is real (key phrases: IR column opacity versus altitude, adiabatic lapse rate), but the popular notions of how to deal with it are often worse than doing nothing.
And that is scary as hell.
Buy Apple products if you think the unregulated pollution from the power plants feeding Apple Chinese factories is better than the unregulated pollution due to their competitor's Chinese factories. If you don't, consider using free software on recycled/rebuilt/hot-rodded computers, like I am doing right now.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
Simple... They're not talking about the exact electrons used being shoved down a wire in a renewable energy based generator. They're saying "we use xW of energy in total, we personally generate 0.75xW of renewable energy".
Does Apple own the factories that manufacture their products?
It's easy to say that the operations you own are largely using renewable energy sources, if you're outsourcing your factory work.
How are any of the sources other than hydro renewable?
You interrupt wind flow, capture solar radiation, reduce water and heat released into the atmosphere with geothermal........ All of those have an impact on the environment; butterfly effect increases it over time. More use in more places exponentially increases the butterfly effect.
Now water falling/flowing, that's something you can interrupt and have it pick back up again because of the magic thing called gravity. Do believe that was the first power conversion (generation) method Humans came up with that involved machinery, too. You know, mills over waterways. Windmills came after that, but since only a few small places use them, we aren't able to see the negative repercussions of interfering with and reducing boundary layer winds globally.
The adults need the work in Elk Grove, California. They used to build iMacs there. Now they do it in China. Apple, like most other multinationals, is scum.
So apparently all Apple do is run data centres, offices and retail shops.
What powers the ships full of iDevices from China? What powers the factories that produce them?
The soon to be announced iPhone 6 will only charge and operate from wind, solar, geothermal and hydro power sources.
All other power sources will be incompatible.
Time to change the world.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Acutally it's a law in china that they are allowed to pull students from school and put them to work in the factory until production levels are met for their launch date. They get away with it by stating it's some sort of work co-op program, even though the hours are brutal just as the work conditions. That's also why their suicide levels are higher. Google the conditions on apple factories in China and you will find ample articles on it