Apple’s renewable energy projects are helping to create 1.2GW of clean power
apple.com
apple.com
It would be a very low-hanging, high-payoff way to improve emissions if bitcoin was just banned.
That is the process. You can participate in it.
That's a very strong statement. If you unpack it a little bit, what you are saying is there is absolutely nothing productive ("better") that could be using that energy. I don't know if that's the case. Bitcoin mining might just be the most profitable thing to do, so nothing else was attempted.
But either way, good on them! More clean energy = more better
Long story short, investing in renewable energy might have some tax benefits for Apple, but I don't think it has much (if anything) to do with repatriating overseas cash.
And I see an essay about the law calling wealth taxes unconstitutional but that doesn't seem to be consensus.
If it is effectively a criminal fine, no, that would still be an ex post facto law; the Supreme Court has struck down at least one retroactive federal tax on that ground [0]. And, more commonly, retroactive tax increases have been invalidated on other grounds (mostly, substantive due process under the 5th, or for state action 14th, amendment.)
[0] But note that sneaking in what is effectively a criminal penalty as a tax is also unconstitutional if it isn't retroactive, since it will still violate a host of other Constitutional protections applicable to criminal punishment, so any tax struck down as ex post facto would necessarily be struck down even if it applied only to future “taxable” events.
Indeed it is changing a red-ish reflecting soil into a huge black surface in an already hot location. I mean this is not carbon emitting, but this surely produces a significant local warming. So I am cautious about creating massive solar panel parks because of that.
I have never found any study that would count the calorific impact of turning black square kms in sunny places, and what impact it would have on global warming if we go massive.
https://www.epa.gov/heatislands#:~:text=Heat%20islands%20are....
I kept looking and I have found some albedo figures: deserts have a typical albedo of 0.25-0.40 (let's round it at 0.33 / source in French: https://www.lelivrescolaire.fr/page/6761182).
Current commercial solar panels yield 15-20% (let's retain 18%) of the received energy into electricity (the purpose) and the rest into local heat. No reflection (they are black), so albedo close to 0, but let's consider the extraction of electricity like a reflection (the energy is not absorbed locally): albedo 0.18.
That means making a desert into a solar park changes the albedo of the covered surface from 0.33 to 0.18. It means the absorbed light turned into heat goes from 0.67 to 0.82: +22% sunlight turned into heat.
I would be curious to find a modelization that considers all warming effects of solar panels (carbon and non-carbon) to know if it is a good idea to rush into covering deserts like Apple does here.
8760 hours per year basically works out to about 45 cents per KWH in the first year. 22.5 cents for for two years. And so on. Of course, it's solar so you need to average it out across night day and cloudy days. But it probably works out to 1-3 cents per KWH over the life time of the facility; just like other recent solar bids.
A typical domestic solar installation in the UK costs around £6000 for a 4kW system, which works out at around £1500 per kW installed capacity. This makes the Apple's schemes seem pretty expensive in comparision, especially as one would expect large schemes to benefit from economies of scale.
But, as mentioned, we don't know how much of the fund has directly gone into building renewable energy schemes so it's not a fair comparison.
Closer to the equator, it might be closer to 6-7kwh or even better. Places like Dubai or California get a lot of sun throughout the year and a setup like this would have the panels positioned optimally presumably. So, I'd guesstimate at least 3-5 cents per KWH is a reasonable expectation for this setup.
Recent bids are actually closing in on 1 cent per kwh. E.g. there was a Portuguese bid for 1.3 dollar cents per kwh last summer. I'm sure that probably has been undercut since then by someone. And Portugal is pretty far North compared to California, most of which would be at the same latitude as Sub Saharan Africa. So, potentially I am low-balling it. Probably in the next few years we will get sub 1 cent bids happening with some regularity.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/30/new-record-low-solar-pr...
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/doe-officially-...
I wonder what the mix of projects was
If* a small chunk of plutonium can output 1.21GW, then $4.7B in spending seems extremely high, like multiple orders of magnitude high.
If that's the true cost of green electricity then I understand why conservatives have been bullish on the topic.
Though I'd rather use green alternatives and reduce power consumption overall, personally.
* Movie magic could be lying to us, I'm just running with the movie's idea.
EDIT: from cursory checking it seems like plutonium can output 8 gigawatts, holy shit.
EDIT2: Downvoted for asking a question. :\ is it because I said conservatives may have had a point? I can be wrong, don't downvote to disagree.
The original design claim was apparently £24/MWh. So the agreed subsidy price was £92.50/MWh.
The strike price is high, and it is an implicit subsidy. But the construction cost is covered by the constructor. So u cant complain about both of them.
The 1.2GW of renewable runs at ~30% capacity. Nuclear is generally at 90%. So your 3.2GW nuclear is equivalent to 9.6GW renewable !!
Nuclear is too expensive, true, but you are paying for dispatch-ability. Do you want a 50% discount on electricity which only runs 70%/80%/90% of the time?
The 24/mwh was just a presentation slide. Yes, the UK got a shitty deal. But when negotiation started 10 years ago off-shore wind as 500% more expensive. And on-shore wind was banned by politicians.
I love the green stuff. It is cheaper. More scalable. It will win. But we need every nuclear reactor we can get.
/end runt
EDIT: The UK is also x10 more densely populated than the US. Metros such as London or Tokyo are an extra challenge for low-density renewables.
If you state this fallacy you should at least tell everyone the unique geological issues HPC is facing.
What unique geological issues?
South Korea's nuclear plants are also much cheaper, for the same reason.
"plutonium outputs 8 gigawatts" is meaningless without an amount, and without specifying if it's electrical or thermal output.
Fun fact: the lifetime electrical energy output of the Neckarwestheim plant is approximately 30 kg by relativistic equivalence.
Capacitors are reactive components and don't consume power.
A critical mass of plutonium will output just any imaginable amount of power your powerplant can handle.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption, you would need ten of those each day to cover the world’s energy needs (≈ double that to convert heat into motion, move it to users (who won’t want to live near the energy production facility, etc)
How many tens of billions of dollars (of mostly taxpayer money) does it cost to build, run, and maintain a nuclear power plant?
Citation? They're not legally required to maximize shareholder value, a common misconception, so I'm skeptical about this as well.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/environment/2020/12/28/o...
I applaud Apple for its efforts but it's obvious where we need to start.
Edit: getting some downvotes, probably because I'm coming off as cynical. Thing is that to take Apple's investment into green energy as anything other than manipulation of perception or their tax situation is to be terribly naive. Charity of this scale doesn't exist amongst the business giants.
If you had some evidence, it would help.
My gripe with Apple isn't their environmental impact, which isn't very exceptional, it's the user-hostile lobbying, and these projects are a cheap way for Apple to buy influence in that sphere.
They aren’t making this claim. They are simply announcing progress in improving their environmental impact. That is what they are claiming.
Your counterclaim is that their efforts to improve their environmental impact are ‘just greenwashing’.
Aren’t you?
> Can you honestly say you believe that they're doing this out of sincere communal and ecological concern?
Of course they are.
They have to operate in the same environment as everyone else.
You don’t think that using sustainable energy sources is in the long term interests of business?
Ok, so let me restate what your position seems to be: you acknowledge that the move is in their long term best interests, but you assume that they must be doing this for other reasons, because you’ve already decided that.
funny how they mention "enough to power almost 20,000 homes" but then say the power goes to Apple's data center. And I bet Esbjerg residents are thrilled that their skyline is now full of wind turbines that power Apple's data center while Apple pays almost no taxes.
They are incredibly eco-conscious and would roll their eyes at your statement, invite you in for tea and tell you how proud they are of those turbines.
Esbjerg is one of my favorite places in the world, also the tiny island next to it called Fanø. I’ve been there twice every year for the past 7 years.
I was married there. Almost all of the (Fanø) houses are thatched-roofed hobbit houses, people rarely knock before entering neighbors’ houses and it is super quiet (except for the fog horn).
Esbjerg is a small (70k) person university city, lots of student co-ops, some industry and a strange phenomenon of stolen / discarded bicycles laying on the side of the roads (not downtown, but a km out of the center on the through-roads).
The uni there has great environmental science, chemical engineering, biology, and marine biology (and marine archaeology!) programs.
I couldn’t imagine a place where this is more appropriate.
Related from Germany, Netherlands:
https://www.datacenter-forum.com/datacenter-forum/datacenter...
https://www.dw.com/en/the-germans-fighting-wind-farms-close-....
The datacenter helps grow the tech industry here, the benefit of this should really be self-evident. All my comments above in terms of the construction and maintenance of the turbines also applies here.
These are offshore windfarms in a quiet seaport city next to the existing industrial area. It’s not like these are downtown.
That’s why so many regional and international governments clamor to attract datacenter projects. Because they are trying to get absolutely nothing out of it whatsoever.
The datacenter and wind mills are just built in another country, flown in by helicopter, plopped down, turned on, and subsequently ignored and 100% self-maintained.
I don’t think you can see beyond your dislike of wind power to actually understand the economic impact of large projects like this.
Where did you get the idea that the viborg datacenter is offshore?
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/03/apples-viborg-den...
Also, as we have seen in The Dalles, Oregon over the past 15 years, the inevitable increase in fiber and power capacity to this region, which will attract dozens of other datacenters to the area, will also have zero economic impact to anybody whatsoever.
Would you rather Apple build these datacenters in a nation with coal power?
European datacenter construction is heavily concentrated in Ireland or UK. Denmark has plenty of coast and a diverse power grid.
It is also one of the most efficient, competent ecologically and socially responsible governments in the world. It is clearly better to build datacenters there than in say Romania or Serbia.
Please don’t tell me your next argumentnis going to be about bird deaths or ear cancer.
And it's not only about apple, basically all industries are guilty: top shelf fashion companies shredding incredible amounts of unsold products; pralines packed in 3 layers of plastic,tinfoil and paper; cars body made from incredibly thin and not sufficiently protected material - how can it last at least 20 years if corrosion is visible after 2? Examples can be multiplied endlessly, most products are produced just to consume as fast as possible and buy next one as fast as possible - with eco-friendly slogan label slapped on top of package.
Sigh.. sorry for my rant.
How are we supposed to distinguish between virtue signalling moves and real, practical steps to address sustainability. Are you suggesting Greenpeace doesn't know how to distinguish in this way?
No
Given Greenpeace's actions against Nuclear they're only helping the oil/coal industries for all I care
It's a hyperbole for sure. But how much CO2 have the nuclear closures put in the atmosphere
By doing doing so, we are losing 20 years in a race against climate change.
Or perhaps they really believe in combating climate change and consuming only renewable energy given they've made it a primary focus who are about to reach its 3rd anniversary of being 100% powered by renewable energy in all its global facilities, including retail stores, offices & data centres that they are working with their manufacturing partners to ensure all Apple production is powered by 100% clean energy.
This are real actions. A trillion dollar company can't turn around overnight.