Last month Apple unveiled that it plans to build both a massive fuel cell farm and a huge solar farm at its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Now, late last week, in a filing with the North Carolina Utilities Commission, Apple let loose a few more details about its fuel cell plans (hat tip Wired and the local News & Record).
Apple says in the filing that it will install twenty four 200 kW fuel cells at an outdoor site next to its data center, and the fuel cells could start generating electricity, using biogas, as early as June 2012. Apple expects the entire 4.8 MW system to be online by November 30, 2012.
Apple didn’t name the fuel cell supplier in the filing, but the fact that it will use 200 kW fuel cells points the finger even more solidly at the Valley’s Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy sells both 100 kW (ES-5400) and 200 kW (the ES-5700) fuel cells. UTC, another fuel cell maker, only sells a 400 kW fuel cell.
I wrote last month that it looked like Bloom Energy is the supplier for Apple’s fuel cells. This local report states that Bloom Energy is indeed the supplier for Apple’s fuel cell farm, but doesn’t say where it got that info. That local report also says that Apple “will extract hydrogen from natural gas supplied by Piedmont Natural Gas,” and then “will arrange to produce landfill methane gas or some other biogas to offset its natural gas use.”
Bloom’s fuel cells are large boxes that suck up oxygen on one side and fuel (natural gas or biogas) on the other to produce power. With Apple’s fuel cell farm and its solar farm it will be able to partly power its data center with clean distributed power that isn’t coming from the local utility via the grid. North Carolina has some of the dirtiest (but cheapest) grid electricity in the country.
Internet companies are increasingly experimenting with energy efficiency and clean power for their data centers. While all data center operators are looking to reduce the overall energy consumption of data centers, it’s still early days for adding clean power to data centers. For example, Amazon’s web infrastructure guru James Hamilton isn’t quite convinced that solar technology is a good fit for data centers.
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