Apple has broken ground on a brand-new data center in Prineville, Oregon -- one that the company is billing as even more environmentally friendly than the Maiden, North Carolina, facility that powers its iCloud.
When the Maiden complex is completed, it will have biogas fuel-cell plant and a massive solar array that will collectively generate 12 megawatts of energy, or 60 percent of the data center's requirements. But the plans for Prineville are even more ambitious. Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said that Maiden will soon be "the greenest data center ever built, and it will be joined next year by our new facility in Oregon running on 100 percent renewable energy."
Apple and local county officials have now hammered out a long-term agreement that will give Apple millions of dollars in property tax breaks as it constructs a massive data center on a 160-acre plot it has purchased just outside of town, says Jason Carr, the town's Economic Development Manager. Apple needs to create 35 local jobs to cash in on the tax breaks, he adds.
"They've started construction already on a small 10,000-square-foot data center," Carr says "That's just an initial phase and Apple has plans to build a much larger facility, similar to what Facebook has already built."
Carr adds that the 10,000-square-foot data center -- that's less than half the size of the Grand Central Station Apple Store -- is expected to go online by August.
"There is some demand with a lot of the new iCloud stuff that they're doing," Carr says "There's just a lot of technology they're rolling out; they really need to get some data centers up and rolling and this allows them to do that by the summer."
"We're looking forward to joining the community of Prineville with our new data center," says Apple spokeswoman Kristen Huguet, adding, "we will be hiring dozens of people and bringing hundreds of construction jobs to the area."
Apple has been hanging around in Prineville since last summer, shortly after Facebook went public with its plans to build there. Oregonian Business Writer Mike Rogoway ran into an Apple delegation at Facebook's data center -- just a few miles away from where Apple ended up setting up shop -- around August of last year.
Right now, Apple is building a modular data center, a pre-built structure that can be set up and removed quickly, but it will have to build a much larger facility in order to be able to take advantages of the tax breaks, says Rogoway, who has been reporting on Apple's efforts for months.
Although Apple is clearly trying to burnish its environmental credentials, it's been bashed around by Greenpeace this week, which says that the Maiden North, Carolina, data center is overly reliant on coal-produced power. Apple says that Greenpeace simply has its facts wrong, but, other than a brief statement, the company has refused to provide any new data on the Maiden project.
Gary Cook, an IT analyst with Greenpeace says that other data centers -- Yahoo's Lockport, New York, facility and Facebook's Luleå, Sweden, data center, for example -- have been able to get a large percentage of their energy from renewable sources such as hydro or wind.
Prineville's Carr says it's possible that Apple could do the same by signing up for long-term renewable power contracts from local power companies such as Central Electric, which generates a lot of hydroelectric power or Pacific Power, which runs a renewable energy program.
"I'd like to hear the details from Apple as to how they'll be provisioning that facility," says Cook.
This story has been updated to include comment from Apple.
