Apple Expanding NC Green Data Center 34
The North Carolina data center that Apple has touted as especially earth-friendly (for having biogas-fueled generators, for one thing) will soon have a smaller companion; Apple is expanding its presence, according to filings reported over at Slash DataCenter, with another 21,000-plus square foot facility at the same site. "Apple also plans to build a hydrogen fuel-cell facility in the area, at least based on other filed permits. That would complement the solar-array installations under construction. Apple has claimed that some 60 percent of the data center facility’s power will be generated onsite. As it stands now, the Maiden facility already incorporates energy-efficient design elements, including real-time energy monitoring and analytics."
Re:Hypocritics! (Score:3, Insightful)
*dons asbestos flame retardant clothing* Well, the Apple fanboys are gonna hate this... I'll be impressed if my reply last 5 minutes before getting modded into oblivion... but the truth is, you're going easy on them.
Don't forget their solution to suiciding workers due to poor working conditions was to install netting outside the buildings... and only started to address poor working conditions at the FoxConn plant after Jon Stewart and a host of other journalists named and shamed their practices. And those poor working conditions included... vats of boiling acid. I'm not shitting you; That's how you etch circuit boards, and they had the most lax safety standards of any factory the independent observers sent in had ever seen. I don't know if anyone actually fell in or anything, but parts of the FoxConn factory resembled James Bond sets. I half expected to see shark tanks and lasers. And this is China we're talking about -- a country that's strip-mining its own resources for exportation in electronics. Bejing, where the factory is, has smog so thick that it can and has killed people who didn't heed the air quality sirens. It's like the smog you see in the opening scenes for the Fifth Element.
Apple isn't green to begin with, and when you look at their business partners, the picture gets even more bleak. But then, what would you expect from a company with the largest market capitalization of any country in the world, and has the largest cash reserves?