Apple Powering Nevada Datacenter With Solar Farm 104
Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple's Nevada data center has been in the works for quite some time: a 2,200-acre plot outside of Reno will host a 90,000-square-foot datacenter that, in turn, will support the tech giant's cloud services. Apple will reportedly spend $1 billion over the next decade on the facilities, in return for significant tax abatements at the city, county and state levels. It will also fund and build a 137-acre solar farm, managed in conjunction with NV Energy, to power the datacenter (it will generate approximately 43.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity). The Reno datacenter will be the third Apple cloud facility in the U.S. that is powered largely or entirely by solar power. Sixty percent of the power for Apple's North Carolina datacenter comes from an existing solar-power farm near the facility; an Apple datacenter in Oregon uses solar power for part of its power load, but also uses power from wind and hydroelectric sources."
Re:Cool! (Score:2, Informative)
I'm a physicist and software engineer, and although I agree that the idea is fantastic, I'm skeptical of the execution. Photovoltaics, as I understand, are economically less viable than concentrated solar power (even Concentrated Photovoltaics, which are more efficient than your run-of-the-mill solar panel, aren't quite there yet), particularly in the form of Solar Power Towers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower). I'm not sure what the obsession is with solar panels: they're not only resource-intensive, but they're still quite inefficient (commercial units now have ~20% efficiency, only recently has research broken the 30% limit). They require materials that are more difficult to obtain (rare earths) than what's require to build Solar power towers (steel, lots of steel, and water).
Please, somebody tell me what the obsession with photovoltaic solar power is...