Guest opinion by Tim Worstall
Nonsense, Pish And Tosh – Apple Claims To Run On 100% Renewable Energy
Apple is claiming something which isn’t true, that the company now runs on 100% renewable energy. It’s not just not true, it’s nonsense, pish and or, to taste, tosh. No one at all has worked out how to run a 24/7 energy system purely upon renewables. At least, not one that delivers reasonable amounts of power as and when desired. The claim that anyone has is thus a serious misstatement of the truth. It also underplays the difficulties we’ve got in getting the economy to a non-emitting energy system. Assuming, of course, that we even want to do that.
What Apple is actually claiming – and it’s necessary to read through quite a bit of their announcement to grasp this – is that Apple generates the same amount of renewable energy as it uses, or at least purchases renewably generated, or renewables certificates in the last resort. It isn’t true that Apple only uses such renewably generated for the same reason that plagues evey other such desire and dream of a greener world – intermittency.
This is direct from Apple and it is wrong, pish and tosh style wrong:
Cupertino, California — As part of its commitment to combat climate change and create a healthier environment, Apple today announced its global facilities are powered with 100 percent clean energy. This achievement includes retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India. The company also announced nine additional manufacturing partners have committed to power all of their Apple production with 100 percent clean energy, bringing the total number of supplier commitments to 23.
If this weren’t a family magazine I’d be describing this claim as [poppycock, hornswaggle, and fermenting piles of steaming nonsense. .mod]
One report has a slightly sheepish footnote to it:
Update April 9th, 4:17PM ET: Clarified that Apple, like Google, is not actually 100 percent powered by clean energy, but it uses the term to signal that it buys enough green energy to offset its global power consumption.
That’s quite possibly true. But it’s of little use in that fight against climate change which is why the distinction between the two claims is vitally important.
You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, 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. This is where Siri lives. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.
Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of power–constant, uninterrupted, redundant power. At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms.
This is really extremely unlikely. Those server farms operate 24 hours a day. Solar power plants tend not to given that rotation of the Earth thing. And no, the specific plant we’re talking about,. Fort Churchill, is indeed a PV one, doesn’t work at night, at least not unless Nevada’s been as stupid as Spain was over feed in tariffs.
It could be that the solar farm produces twice the electricity Apple needs during the day, half of which they sell to others. Then at night, they buy similar power supplies back to power the server farms. But that’s not running on 100% renewables at all. It’s doing the easy part of going green but it doesn’t deal with that hard, possibly impossible, problem of intermittency.
…
So, Apple says it runs on 100% renewables. Nope, that’s not a technological challenge anyone’s managed to crack as yet, not over cycles of energy.
Story originally published at The Continental Telegraph, more here
(republished here at suggestion of the author)
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Tim Worstall!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! More please!
I’m at Continental Telegraph these days. http://www.continentaltelegraph.com – the new project.
It’s Apple. They simply redefined the words to fit their need. After all, they know best.
I just got this e-mail from Arcadia power pedaling this renewable nonsense.
“Since starting your Arcadia Power membership last month, our community has sourced over 60,000 kWh of clean energy – that’s the equivalent of 200 acres of trees!
Ready to join us?
Get started by connecting your NorthWestern Energy MT account to our platform and let us handle the rest!
With your membership, you’ll be able to start accessing clean energy, worry-free bill payments (with no credit card fees), our community solar program, and the ability to get home efficiency products at zero-down.”
I have no memory of accepting any membership either.
Er, Arcadia how many KWH per tree is that??? Or is is trees per KWH? Pure gobbledegook.
I think I would rather they planted trees on 200 acres. Heaven knows it would have more of an effect on the environment. And a beneficial one to boot!
I bet they didn’t say how much extra the existing trees grew from the extra CO2 from those damn evil coal plants! Greening the earth, one molecule of CO2 at a time!
So I’d be curious to see an accounting of claims of “green energy” use versus green energy produced. That is, add up all the kWh actually consumed by those claiming to use green energy and compare to the total kWh produced in the same market. I have a suspicion that there may be a bit of an imbalance which could indicate some green energy credits are being sold more than once. Perhaps a serious audit should be done.
There is an annual audit by an independent industry association, but dual claims remain and are at times overlooked.
“If this weren’t a family magazine I’d be describing this claim as the seed producing parts of male genitalia and not just that but great big hairy, dangly, ones.”
How amazingly crude. Utterly unnecessary and unworthy, and just the sort of expression the lefties use, not the right.
I stopped reading right there.
Jan T: You must be amazingly fun at parties…..
Agreed. I’m no expert but renewables are hourly and seasonal. I can go into monthly forecasting, but at the end of the day, voluntary (i.e., those not covered by RPS) are working towards 100% renewables. During certain weather conditions, fossil fuels are the default. Even those who are under RPS mandate find it difficult to manage demand to renewables. We should applaud those who are not under a mandate to attempt to secure renewables to meet their demand.
Another EPA ex-Secretary trying to convince the world she knows what she talking about. The simplicity of Apple’s claim about preserving the Clean Power Plan sounds like another anti-intellectual argument.
Separately, does the Apple include the energy and emissions related to the manufacturing their products? In China and elsewhere?
The summer time cooling requirements for those buildings and those 200,000 proceesor slices is certainly far more than the Solar PV farm can provide at 3pm in July. Then’s there’s those nights where it stays hot..
They probably are only accounted for computer power not facility cooling.
And the reason it’s in Nevada should be obvious. Lower grid power costs. Less burdensome state regulations. No income tax for the employees.
My car is completely carbon neutral because I was planning on driving 40,000 miles per year, but I chose to drive only 20,000 miles. That means I prevented as much CO2 as I created, and therefore I have added no CO2 to the atmosphere! Apple math is fun!
“You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center”
Data centers generate a significant amount of heat.
Why build a data center where it’s hot and cooling is expensive and complicated?
Why not build them in cold places where cooling is simple and inexpensive and all that heat is potentially valuable?
If Apple were truly committed to using renewable energy, they would have the roofs of their data center covered in solar panels. From looking at Google Maps I don’t see a single solar panel on the property.
Maybe like many Skeptics they have done the math and it figured out that’s solar power is not cost effective.
The reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change that we have been experiening is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climat sensivity of CO2 is zero. There may be plenty of good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them. So Apple’s efforts will have not effect on climate. But even if Apple’s efforts could stop the climate from changing, extreme weather evernts and sea level rise are part of the current climate and would continue unabated.
I can only imagine that the transport of personel, materials, and products both too and from Apples facilities still involves the use of fossil fuels.
Lets hope they don’t store the power in Apple batteries.
Why don’t the simply buy batteries from the giga-factory along the road, like South Australia, and then they could have ONE plant that really runs on 100% renewable energy. Does this mean that even the world’s wealthiest company can’t afford dispatch able solar power?
Clearly none of the denizens here gets it. “At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms,” which, obviously, must run off Dark Energy — an unknown form of energy which is hypothesized to permeate all of space” — when the sun is not shining. Otherwise, I think folks who are truly committed to renewables ought to demand that Siri, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple Pay be shut down when the sun is not shining directly on those three different Apple solar farms.
For fun, perhaps someone here could do a back-of-the-envelope of how large those solar farms must be in order to power more than 200,000 identical servers. Who wants to bet the heat load is impressive?
One thing this does prove is that the Apple PR department is in possession of an infinite supply of weapons-grade BS.
The Reality Distortion Field ain’t what it used to be.
How about:-
If a company were to build two large reservoirs at different heights with a turbine between them. Use wind and solar power to pump the water from the lower to the upper reservoir as well as power the company and then let the water through at night to generate the electricity.
Would that work?
“No one at all has worked out how to run a 24/7 energy system purely upon renewables”
Hydro?
By California definitions, large scale hydro does not count as “renewable”.