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:"43.5 million kilowatt hours" (Score:4, Interesting)
137 acre plant != 137 acres of solar panels
Large solar setups need roads to access the panels, and if they are tilted it'll need space between panels to avoid wasted panel area from shadows.
Here's a similar but older plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellis_Solar_Power_Plant [wikipedia.org]
14 MW, 140 acres, 30 GW*h/year, built in 2007
Note in the photos how much sun hits the dirt (i.e. not on panels within the 140 acre plant).
So it's the right ballpark for a newer plant of the same size (but with better solar panels or packing) to be 18MW in 137 acres. I think you are right that it isn't optimistic, 43 GW*h/year sounds perfectly reasonable for a plant built 6 years later.