Apple has been claiming, to great public acclaim, that it uses 100% renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind for many of its power needs, including its data centers.
From Apple’s website:
Since 2012, all our data centers have been powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources. That means no matter how much data they handle, there is a zero greenhouse gas impact on the environment from their energy use.
This is highly misleading.
Apple, like nearly every other international technology company in the world, gets the overwhelming percentage of its power from cheap, plentiful, reliable coal and almost none from expensive, unreliable solar and wind.
Apple, like nearly every other international technology company in the world, gets the overwhelming percentage of its power from cheap, plentiful, reliable coal and almost none from expensive, unreliable solar and wind.
The whole truth
Like any other large tech company, Apple requires a lot of energy for its operations–and this energy needs to be cheap and reliable. But today’s politically correct sources of energy, above all solar and wind, are neither reliable nor affordable. To call them “renewables” is a misnomer, because “renewables” advocates generally refuse to support the only cost-effective “renewable” option, large-scale hydroelectric power: building a dam, they say, is not sufficiently “green.” Solar and wind should be called “unreliables” because the intermittent nature of sunlight and wind have made them useless as scalable, reliable sources of energy that can meaningfully substitute for hydro, nuclear, let alone fossil fuel power. These unreliables require subsidies and government mandates to exist.
So how can Apple claim to be between 87-100% renewable yet actually be a coal-powered company?
By committing two types of energy accounting sleight-of-hand:
- Paying off other companies and consumers to give Apple “green credits” for its coal electricity usage.
- Concealing that the vast majority of computer energy use comes from coal-powered manufacturing and the coal-powered Internet.
Apple pays off consumers and other companies to give it ‘green credits’ for its coal electricity usage
Like most households and industrial facilities, Apple data centers are connected to local electric grids. To objectively determine where Apple’s energy use comes from you just need to look at the percentage of different power sources on the grid—how much comes from coal, how much comes from nuclear, how much comes from gas, how much comes from solar.
There is no grid in the world where the percentage of renewables/unreliables is near 100%. Germany, famously a leader in solar and wind, generates less than 10% of its overall energy use from solar and wind—and pays 3-4 times American electricity prices for that luxury.
So, how does Apple get to its 100% number? As the company’s own report admits, Apple’s data centers do in fact consume the standard blend of coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydro power–with a small amount of solar and wind mixed in. But the company literally pays other energy users to pretend that they only use coal, gas, and nuclear power so that Apple can claim to use only renewable power.
Think of it this way. Imagine you and 9 other people are traveling on a yacht that has both sails and a diesel engine. For the 10% of the time that the wind was blowing perfectly in the right direction, the yacht would use the sails. For the other 90% of the time, the diesel engine would do the heavy lifting. Now imagine that, after the trip, you want to claim that you traveled the entire distance by sail, so you pay every other passenger $10 for the right to claim that you used their 10% sail time. You get to claim that you sailed 100% of time, while the other passengers have to say they used the “dirty” diesel engine for their entire trip. That’s basically what Apple is doing with their energy accounting sleight of hand.
You may have heard Apple brag about all the local power sources it creates, like solar arrays, that supposedly are sufficient to meet the energy needs of their data centers. Apple’s website boasts that in 2014 the company “began construction on its micro‑hydro facility in Prineville, Oregon, and its solar plant in Yerington, Nevada, to provide renewable energy for its data centers.”
Here’s the question to ask when a company claims they are supported by their own power facility: Are you connected to the grid? The answer is: yes.
Why does Apple use the local grid if they produce solar power on their own sites? Because it turns out that Apple doesn’t actually run their facilities on solar. Instead, they feed the unreliable, stop-and-go power from their on-site solar panels into the local utility power network, making the system less reliable and more expensive. The solar power Apple produces is a parasite on the reliable local utility capacity, which has to serve as a host while Apple trades in its unreliable and expensive power for cheap and reliable power from all the nonrenewable power plants.
Here are some specific numbers.
Apple’s flagship data center in Maiden, NC, for example draws from the local Duke Energy grid with 51% nuclear power, 38% coal power, and less than 1% renewable sources in 2014, according to the latest report by Apple.
The average percentage values for the local grid power available to Apple’s data centers as disclosed in the report for 2014 include 34.8% coal, 22.3% natural gas, 18.3% nuclear, and only 10.6% renewables!
It is actually a great thing that Apple’s data centers run on 100% reliable local utility power, not unreliable solar and wind. It allows Apple to provide their amazing services at prices we can actually afford.
What is not amazing is Apple’s blatant chicanery. And unfortunately, the chicanery does not end here.
Apple conceals that the vast majority of computer energy use comes from coal-powered manufacturing and the coal-powered Internet
The energy accounting sleight-of-hand committed by Apple regarding its data centers is massive on its own terms.
But its focus on data centers rather than its operations as a whole is also misleading.
The truth is that Apple’s energy usage is driven mainly by their manufacturing and shipping operations, such as the production and etching of silicon wafers for the processors. The ubiquitous label–“Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.”–already suggests that most of that energy comes from local power in the factories of Southeast Asia. And what do those factories use? Coal power, mostly—over 75% of China’s electricity generation is coal-fired.
From the mining, shipping, and processing of the raw materials to assembling the vast number of parts into a finished device, the largest proportion of energy goes into manufacturing rather than operating a device–which Apple barely mentions in their latest report on environmental impact.
To a much smaller degree, Apple’s energy footprint comes from powering or charging iPhones and Macs and powering its data centers. Yes, a data center uses a lot of power at once, since it handles enormous amounts of data for a large number of customers every second, but, per user and per transaction, the amount of energy used is small–and pales in comparison to the energy involved in manufacturing. Add to that, the entire infrastructure of the internet Apple relies on for their services is also overwhelmingly created and run using coal and other fossil fuels, and it becomes clear that Apple’s claims about being run on “87 percent renewables” is highly misleading.
The truth is Apple is powered mostly by coal and other fossil fuels, but rather than tell Americans the truth–that their amazing technological achievements are made possible by fossil fuels–they are cooking their energy books in order to dupe us into believing that we can have innovators like Apple without the cheap, plentiful, reliable energy provided by the fossil fuel industry.
When the world’s leading technology company misleads the public about its energy usage, it contaminates our whole national discussion of energy, which requires an honest, careful assessment of the benefits and costs of all our energy alternatives.
Apple was asked for comment on this analysis, but has not yet responded. If Apple does, I will include its full response below.