14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has something new to brag about. Just yesterday, it was awarded a Green Power Leadership award by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States.
The Agency offered the company said award as a way to congratulate it for efforts to improve on its ecological footprint by upping its dependency on green energy sources.
By the looks of it, all the data centers currently operated by Apple are powered by green energy alone.
Some of this power is generated by solar plants and other similar facilities owned by the company itself. Whatever extra energy is needed in order to keep data centers up and running comes from grid purchases.
“Apple supplies all of its data centers with 100 percent renewable energy though its own projects or through grid-purchased renewable energy,” the EPA explains.
The Agency further details that, for the time being, the company's largest data center, i.e. the one in Maiden, North Carolina, presently has 60% of its energy demand met by tapping into the power output of a 20MWsolar array that covers about 100 acres of land, and that of a 10MW fuel cell installation.
“Choosing clean energy is especially important in North Carolina, where Apple would otherwise have to buy dirty energy from Duke Energy, an electric utility that makes electricity from coal, gas and nuclear power plants, with no plans to clean up any time soon,” Greenpeace explains.
What's more, the EPA says that, for the time being, an impressive 85% of Apple's US energy consumption (i.e. the power needed by the data centers, corporate facilities, and retail stores it owns and operates in this country) is met by renewables.
In time, the company wishes to have all these facilities powered by environmentally friendly energy alone.
“In the future, as its facilities and data centers grow, Apple plans to increase its green power use to keep pace with growth and pursue its goal of using 100 percent clean, renewable energy,” the EPA tells us.