Apple moves to repair its reputation

APPLE, ranked the least green of the big tech companies earlier this year, is moving quietly to repair its reputation by switching its vast US east coast data centre from coal to solar power.

Officials in North Carolina say the company is preparing to build a solar farm next to its $1 billion data centre in Maiden.

The facility could help Apple recover from a Greenpeace report earlier this year that said its cloud-computing operations - run from centres such as the one in North Carolina - were reliant on dirty energy such as coal.

Tech companies are notoriously secretive about their data centres and the energy that powers them. A spokeswoman for Apple would confirm only that the company was preparing the ground next to its centre.

But the project became public knowledge in the town when work crews began burning the cleared brush from the 50-hectare site in mid-October. Neighbours complained about the smoke billowing into their homes. ''They decided after that, since it was annoying the neighbours, to bring in a chipper and shred and mulch all the wood,'' a Catawba County engineer Toni Norton says.

With the expansion of cloud computing, companies such as Apple have invested heavily in large data centres for their web-based services - often in areas promising cheap electricity, such as North Carolina. Google, American Express and Facebook have also built data centres in North Carolina. Apple's is one of the largest, about 46,000 square metres, according to Maiden planning director Sam Schultz.

Data centres currently consume about 3 per cent of US power supply, according to Greenpeace. North Carolina gets most of its electricity from coal and nuclear. It's not even clear when Apple intends to break ground on the solar facility. Maiden town manager Todd Herms says the company still had not approached the town for a building permit.

''The plans say solar farm but for all the permits show they could be putting a big mobile home park there,'' Norton says.

GUARDIAN