Apple plans solar farm at data center site
Apple has quietly begun work on a solar farm that apparently could help power its sprawling data center in southern Catawba County. Permits issued by Catawba County show that the Cupertino, Calif., company has been approved to reshape the slope …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple’s Catawba County build-out was already substantial enough to be visible from space in June 2011. County permits for slope work show the site is moving beyond the data-center structure itself toward supporting energy infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Apple adds a solar-farm project to the Catawba County data-center site, tying part of the facility’s power strategy to on-site development.
- Catawba County’s permits authorize the site reshaping needed for the solar work, extending Apple’s local construction footprint.
Second-order effects
- The project makes electricity supply a more explicit part of data-center siting and construction, rather than a service procured only after the facility is built.
Third-order effects
- If other large computing facilities pair generation with new capacity, data-center competition will increasingly turn on access to power infrastructure as well as building scale.
The trend: Large computing operators are beginning to treat power development as a core component of data-center capacity planning.