Apple to Build 200 Megawatts of Solar Energy in Nevada Through NV Energy Partnership

Apple and Nevada energy company NV Energy today announced ('http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nv-energy-announces-solar-agreement-with-apple-300396620.html') a new agreement that will see the two partnering to build 200 megawatts of additional solar energy

5 more of these will almost be enough for time travel.
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Powered by 100% solar energy...except for in the night when its powered by nuclear or coal most likely. At least with companies like Tesla they can charge batteries in the day time but with Apple their data centres don't shut down when the sun goes down

The solar farms produce enough excess during the day to offset the non-solar usage at night. That means somewhere less coal or uranium is getting burned to the same degree or better than if the solar plant could run during the night. Since all the energy gets mixed into the grid anyway, it doesn't make any sense to talk about where the energy actually goes and comes from. So long as it's made cleanly, the right customer pays for it, and some dirty energy is scaled back to compensate.

I can't speak for the US energy grid but other countries are developing batteries in the 200MW range to address the future issue of supply peaks failing to meet demand peaks.

5 more of these will almost be enough for time travel.
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Well, they've been promoting their Time Machine for years after all... :D

Anyway, this is very good news. Especially when others are taking the concept of a huge pipeline rather more literally than Apple do...

5 more of these will almost be enough for time travel.
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Now this one will blow your mind then:

Last year, China installed 15.13GW of new solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity, reaching a cumulative solar capacity of 43.48GW.
China's sets a 2020 solar PV target at 150GW to 200GW.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3147845/sustainable-it/china-leads-the-world-in-solar-power-installations.html ('http://www.computerworld.com/article/3147845/sustainable-it/china-leads-the-world-in-solar-power-installations.html')

Powered by 100% solar energy...except for in the night when its powered by nuclear or coal most likely. At least with companies like Tesla they can charge batteries in the day time but with Apple their data centres don't shut down when the sun goes down

That is pure garbage. The amount of power that needs to be generated at night remains constant

Grid demand at night is much lower than during the daytime. Peak solar hours correspond fairly well (but not perfectly) with peak demand hours in most regions.

Power usage at night si actually frustrating for everybody involved in energy generation because often the light loads end up being handled in very inefficient ways.

That's true. Solar, along with storage technologies, helps with this by flattening out the peaks and troughs in demand across the day. That means less need to start and stop gas peaker plants and less need to keep plants idling as spinning reserve, which can be expensive and wasteful.

Second; the amount of solar energy generated in this country is a tiny fraction of what is needed to power the country. That tiny contribution to the electrical grid comes with a massive waste of land space, often in areas with sensitive ecosystems.

Nonsense. The daily energy demand for the entire USA could be supplied by about 11 million acres of solar panels. That's equivalent to a small corner of Nevada, which has plenty of sunny empty desert available!

In fact, a small section of the Sahara desert could power the entire planet's energy demand.

Obviously we don't yet have the ability to store and transmit it efficiently/cheaply enough for 100% solar to be a reality, but the point is that the amount of potential energy available via solar is enormous.

Sure it does because stupid things like people thinking nuclear energy is dangerous can be addressed.

Nuclear energy is certainly less dangerous than highly polluting alternatives like coal, but it is very expensive. Nobody would be bothering much with solar, gas, or coal if nuclear was cheap and easy. Unfortunately it's not.

True, Apple doesn't power down their data center at night, but modern servers have a huge variance in power usage depending on system load. I did large scale video processing a few jobs back. Think thousands of servers around the world spitting out videos in different formats for set top and mobile devices. Your servers are working hard when your customers are awake sending you content and they sit fairly idle when your customers are sleeping. Modern servers have really solid power saving functionality. When people are uploading tons of files to iCloud, downloading new apps, or just signing into iCloud Apple's servers are probably running decently hot. 3am: not so much.

Here's a Tom's Hardware breakdown on a 1U Intel Xeon 2600 v3s system, which is pretty standard stuff:

Idle: 91W
Full load: 528W

Granted you don't usually run your servers at 100% unless you're doing image/video processing workloads, but you get the point here. Their datacenter can easily drop power usage by 1/2 at night. Peak loads in the day on power grids are crazy. Most places use natural gas generators to supplement their baseline generation. Natural gas is cleaner than coal, but still not the best stuff. Natural gas in your water post fracking is less than great. Generating large amounts of solar during the day absolutely offsets other forms of energy generation.

source: paid a power bill more expensive than a lot of houses

That is pure garbage. The amount of power that needs to be generated at night remains constant and solar power has little impact on that. Power usage at night si actually frustrating for everybody involved in energy generation because often the light loads end up being handled in very inefficient ways.

I've no idea how this backs up you 'pure garbage' claim. If Apple is sharing x hundred excess megawatts into the grid during daylight hours, then somewhere else a power station can ramp down its output during those same hours by x hundred megawatts.

I think you're saying that isn't fair because the overnight usage, necessarily brings with the the baggage of overnight inefficiencies. Yeah, I could concede that and deduct, what 10% of Apple's kudos? Hardly merits a 'total garbage' though does it?

If I didn't want to concede that point, I'd point out that oversupply is really just a problem for fuel-based energy suppliers and it's their problem to solve, not pass blame onto customers. They get suitably punished in their margins, so the free market is applying the pressure there.

First; off Uranium is not burned, the heat for the steam generators is generated via nuclear processes.

Come on, I know that. Creative license for the sake of brevity.

They rest I'd love to chat about, but time is short for me right now.