Gigawatt-hours is energy, not power. Multiply power by number of hours the plant is running to get energy; but then you’d probably be interested in how many petawatt-hours it made.
Fun fact: the lifetime electrical energy output of the Neckarwestheim plant is approximately 30 kg by relativistic equivalence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... : 3.2GW (roughly three times that) for a construction cost of £20bn, or $28bn, roughly six times that. Plus subsidies throughout its life by the strike price mechanism. And that's just the construction cost, not the operating cost for staff and maintenance etc.
The original design claim was apparently £24/MWh. So the agreed subsidy price was £92.50/MWh.
The strike price is high, and it is an implicit subsidy. But the construction cost is covered by the constructor. So u cant complain about both of them.
The 1.2GW of renewable runs at ~30% capacity. Nuclear is generally at 90%. So your 3.2GW nuclear is equivalent to 9.6GW renewable !!
Nuclear is too expensive, true, but you are paying for dispatch-ability. Do you want a 50% discount on electricity which only runs 70%/80%/90% of the time?
The 24/mwh was just a presentation slide. Yes, the UK got a shitty deal. But when negotiation started 10 years ago off-shore wind as 500% more expensive. And on-shore wind was banned by politicians.
I love the green stuff. It is cheaper. More scalable. It will win. But we need every nuclear reactor we can get.
/end runt
EDIT: The UK is also x10 more densely populated than the US. Metros such as London or Tokyo are an extra challenge for low-density renewables.
…for a very small amount of time. Tsar Bomba (about 50 megatons of TNT) released about 58 TWh (according to Google, searching for “50 megaton TNT in twh”) in, I guess, less than a ms.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption, you would need ten of those each day to cover the world’s energy needs (≈ double that to convert heat into motion, move it to users (who won’t want to live near the energy production facility, etc)
Well it was 1.21GW, but for how long? The lightning strike lasted what, 1/10th of a second? 121MJ. Plug a capacitor into a socket for a day and you're talking a 1.4KW draw.
Capacitors consume power as they charge. Producing a 25 Farad capacitor that's stable at 1000 volts and can discharge in the required time is left as an exercise to the reader
It's not like a chunk of plutonium just gives you 1.21GW in electricity you can plug into the grid. The fuel in nuclear is extremely cheap for the power it gives you. It's the rest of the system needed to safely extract that power and turn it into usable electricity that's expensive (whereas converting wind and solar to electricity is fairly cheap).
Something is really driving investment in utility solar in marginal resource locales. In Ohio there is a total of 4GW of plant across 2 dozen projects spanning 60,000 acres (250 sq km) in some stage of approval or construction.
> Market forces are to thank for the push to renewables, experts said, with increasingly more companies making pledges to switch to renewables. That includes Facebook, Google and Amazon, all of which have developed energy-demanding data centers in central Ohio.
I hate all this virtue signaling, fake actions and meaningless gestures made with one hand while other hand dumps waste without any remorse.
And it's not only about apple, basically all industries are guilty: top shelf fashion companies shredding incredible amounts of unsold products; pralines packed in 3 layers of plastic,tinfoil and paper; cars body made from incredibly thin and not sufficiently protected material - how can it last at least 20 years if corrosion is visible after 2?
Examples can be multiplied endlessly, most products are produced just to consume as fast as possible and buy next one as fast as possible - with eco-friendly slogan label slapped on top of package.
Greenpeace have done in depth investigations and analysis of the environmental impact of tech companies. If anyone cares about real environmental impact and does something about it, it's Greenpeace. They have given Apple the highest rating for environmental responsibility for any of the big tech companies. In fact the only tech company at all they are behind is Fairphone. They're ahead of Microsoft, Sony, Google, and a very long way ahead of Samsung and Amazon.
How are we supposed to distinguish between virtue signalling moves and real, practical steps to address sustainability. Are you suggesting Greenpeace doesn't know how to distinguish in this way?
Nuclear power is a hot button topic for sure, but while I am somewhat pro nuclear myself, I have to admit there are plenty of perfectly reasonable objections to it. "On a par with Exxon" is wing-nut level cranky though.
Some, but CO2 is not the only concern here. Greenpeace is a broad-spectrum environmental campaign group.
As I've commented elsewhere, I'm not inherently anti-nuclear, but cost is not the only issue. The political and institutional demands nuclear places on societies are substantial — and I don't see much evidence anyone has risen to them yet. Even big pro nuke places like France don't have fully funded schemes to decommission old nuclear plants. And in the US money taxed from generators has been corruptly spent on other things... Whether it's "fair" or not, this is a strike against nuclear because until we can safely decommission plants and store waste it's unproven tech and the costs (including externalities) are not fully known.
Pretty sure that an organization that pushes the idea that Gas is renewable and Nuclear is bad for the environment really isn't something we can trust in any issues relating to the environment.
Yes that is produced mostly by Natural gas. During 2020 the mix was ~99.2% Naturalgas and 0.8% wind. Producing hydrogren from naturalgas puts the CO2 footprint at around the same as coal since per kwh hydrogen you need to input double the amount of energy.
But this is such a straw man. Nobody at Greenpeace is suggesting we use natural gas to hydrogen at scale. It's part of diversifying the energy economy in ways that _can_ be sustainable in future. This is a way of pump priming an infrastructure that can make (even) more sense of renewables and solve distribution headaches.
It'd be better if they'd start an energy company that produces hydrogen only from nuclear and wind instead. That way it would be sustainable and promote important sustainable energy sources.
>the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.
This are real actions. A trillion dollar company can't turn around overnight.
On the other hand, smart phones have to some extent replaced a bunch of much larger products - desktop computers with large monitors, landline telephones, handheld cameras, recording devices. Not to mention, all the physical media replaced by digital delivery, and all the unnecessary trips saved by online shopping and virtual meetings.
First time I've ever heard of a 4.7B investment fund referred to as "virtue signaling, fake actions and meaningless gestures". That's an incredibly large marketing budget that you're suggesting is for the sole purpose of expressing a morally disingenuous viewpoint with the intent of communicating their good character.
Or perhaps they really believe in combating climate change and consuming only renewable energy given they've made it a primary focus who are about to reach its 3rd anniversary of being 100% powered by renewable energy in all its global facilities, including retail stores, offices & data centres that they are working with their manufacturing partners to ensure all Apple production is powered by 100% clean energy.
All taxing capital gains does is slows it down as a currency for every day goods. I’m taking USD loans against it because it’s tax efficient (not because it would be unpractical, what people usually suggest).
Bitcoin mining off unused power at a hydro plant, the cheapest way to do it, already doesn’t hurt anything because there isn’t anything better being done with it or better ways to store it.
And yet that's far from the majority of where energy for bitcoin mining comes from. It's still mostly fossil fuel sources (miners don't shut down their miners just because their cheapest energy goes away).
By and large, there isn't "unused power" lying around anywhere needing to be used up. There are occasional spikes from high wind, but those are occasional, and miners tend to run 24/7.
> doesn’t hurt anything because there isn’t anything better being done with it or better ways to store it
That's a very strong statement. If you unpack it a little bit, what you are saying is there is absolutely nothing productive ("better") that could be using that energy. I don't know if that's the case. Bitcoin mining might just be the most profitable thing to do, so nothing else was attempted.
I didn’t say anything better could be done with it, just that it isn’t. If we had carbon capture technology or an aluminum plant that would be a better use.
There appear to be disagreements about it, but the normal media got their info about how much electricity is used from those same crypto fans in the first place. They've just chosen to not believe the same crypto fans saying it's mostly renewable power.
$4000 a KW does sound expensive for renewables but it doesn't say how much of the $4.7 billion was spent to build 1.2gw so you can't really tell anything.
You price per KWH, not per KW. This facility is going to stay up and running for a few decades. That's a lot of KWH.
8760 hours per year basically works out to about 45 cents per KWH in the first year. 22.5 cents for for two years. And so on. Of course, it's solar so you need to average it out across night day and cloudy days. But it probably works out to 1-3 cents per KWH over the life time of the facility; just like other recent solar bids.
KW of solar panels produces roughly 1000kwh a year. So if it cost 4000 dollars for a KW of solar that's about 4 dollars a kWh for only first year or 20c over twenty years very crudely. But as I said it probably didn't cost 4000 dollars a KW as the article gives no details. It would make more sense to think of renewable costs as price per kWh but it's way too complicated and individualized for casual conversation.
It depends a lot if you are putting these on your roof in Germany or whether you are buying in bulk for some grid setup in Dubai. But 3-4kwh per day per kw of solar panel sounds about right for a lot of places in more Northern regions (i.e. not California). I think that is about right for places like the UK. It's more in the summer and less in the winter and you have to account for cloudy days too.
Closer to the equator, it might be closer to 6-7kwh or even better. Places like Dubai or California get a lot of sun throughout the year and a setup like this would have the panels positioned optimally presumably. So, I'd guesstimate at least 3-5 cents per KWH is a reasonable expectation for this setup.
Recent bids are actually closing in on 1 cent per kwh. E.g. there was a Portuguese bid for 1.3 dollar cents per kwh last summer. I'm sure that probably has been undercut since then by someone. And Portugal is pretty far North compared to California, most of which would be at the same latitude as Sub Saharan Africa. So, potentially I am low-balling it. Probably in the next few years we will get sub 1 cent bids happening with some regularity.
I think op is pricing correctly (installed capacity rather than energy generated).
A typical domestic solar installation in the UK costs around £6000 for a 4kW system, which works out at around £1500 per kW installed capacity. This makes the Apple's schemes seem pretty expensive in comparision, especially as one would expect large schemes to benefit from economies of scale.
But, as mentioned, we don't know how much of the fund has directly gone into building renewable energy schemes so it's not a fair comparison.
> Apple has completed construction of two of the world’s largest onshore wind turbines, a source of clean, renewable energy that is now operational. Located near the Danish town of Esbjerg, the 200-meter-tall turbines are expected to produce 62 gigawatt hours each year — enough to power almost 20,000 homes — and will act as a test site for powerful offshore wind turbines. The power produced at Esbjerg will support Apple’s data center in Viborg, with all surplus energy going into the Danish grid.
funny how they mention "enough to power almost 20,000 homes" but then say the power goes to Apple's data center.
And I bet Esbjerg residents are thrilled that their skyline is now full of wind turbines that power Apple's data center while Apple pays almost no taxes.
If you had ever been there you would know that the residents are left-leaning, forward thinking people who are very proud of those wind turbines.
They are incredibly eco-conscious and would roll their eyes at your statement, invite you in for tea and tell you how proud they are of those turbines.
Esbjerg is one of my favorite places in the world, also the tiny island next to it called Fanø. I’ve been there twice every year for the past 7 years.
I was married there. Almost all of the (Fanø) houses are thatched-roofed hobbit houses, people rarely knock before entering neighbors’ houses and it is super quiet (except for the fog horn).
Esbjerg is a small (70k) person university city, lots of student co-ops, some industry and a strange phenomenon of stolen / discarded bicycles laying on the side of the roads (not downtown, but a km out of the center on the through-roads).
The uni there has great environmental science, chemical engineering, biology, and marine biology (and marine archaeology!) programs.
I couldn’t imagine a place where this is more appropriate.
sounds like it's a nice, picturesque, quiet place. now they got 200 wind turbines powering Apple's data center. it's not even powering their homes. how are they benefiting from this exactly? what are they proud of? Apple is just going to open more data centers, hardly eco-friendly.
To begin with, those wind turbines don’t build or wire themselves, now do they? Just the construction creates a lot of good jobs, so does the maintenance work involved. So does the infrastructure built and maintained to get that power into the grid. This is all good for the economy.
The datacenter helps grow the tech industry here, the benefit of this should really be self-evident. All my comments above in terms of the construction and maintenance of the turbines also applies here.
These are offshore windfarms in a quiet seaport city next to the existing industrial area. It’s not like these are downtown.
data center and wind turbines don't need much maintenance. that's why both can be offshore. they need some low skill maintenance. so you shouldn't expect to see a tech hub growing around a data center or wind turbine farm. and they are not built there of course. data center is just a warehouse with server containers. wind turbines are probably built in germany
Sure, I’m sure you are 200% correct. This will be nothing but a resource drain, and will have $0 economic benefit whatsoever.
That’s why so many regional and international governments clamor to attract datacenter projects. Because they are trying to get absolutely nothing out of it whatsoever.
The datacenter and wind mills are just built in another country, flown in by helicopter, plopped down, turned on, and subsequently ignored and 100% self-maintained.
I don’t think you can see beyond your dislike of wind power to actually understand the economic impact of large projects like this.
Where did you get the idea that the viborg datacenter is offshore?
I’m sure the construction of those other datacenters will also mean nothing to the economy.
Also, as we have seen in The Dalles, Oregon over the past 15 years, the inevitable increase in fiber and power capacity to this region, which will attract dozens of other datacenters to the area, will also have zero economic impact to anybody whatsoever.
Nor will there be any privacy benefit to the Danes knowing their Apple data is stored within the borders of their nation or having lower latency to these services. The only reason this is being done is to destroy the world with wind turbines.
> Apple is just going to open more data centers, hardly eco-friendly.
Would you rather Apple build these datacenters in a nation with coal power?
European datacenter construction is heavily concentrated in Ireland or UK. Denmark has plenty of coast and a diverse power grid.
It is also one of the most efficient, competent ecologically and socially responsible governments in the world. It is clearly better to build datacenters there than in say Romania or Serbia.
Please don’t tell me your next argumentnis going to be about bird deaths or ear cancer.
That sounds like a beautiful place. I’m reading more about it but if you have any more stories or photos from your trips I’d like to hear and see them.
I can't help but think this is also some slick way for them to repatriate some of that sweet sweet overseas cash and reap some tax benefits on top of it.
But either way, good on them! More clean energy = more better
I'm no tax expert, but as far as I know, 2017's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) made it possible for companies like Apple to repatriate money held by overseas subsidiaries without paying US taxes on it. It did so by exempting foreign earnings from US tax via a 100% deductible on dividends received from foreign subsidiaries. It also levied a one-time tax, payable over 8 years, on money earned by foreign subsidiaries prior to the TCJA, regardless of whether the companies actually repatriated that money. This is called "deemed repatriation" and you can see it in Apple's quarterly reports.
Long story short, investing in renewable energy might have some tax benefits for Apple, but I don't think it has much (if anything) to do with repatriating overseas cash.
"No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." I don't see how this could not apply to a tax, but butchering the meaning of clearly worded clauses of the constitution is SOP for the courts so who knows.
Both “Bill of Attainder” and “ex post facto law” were existing legal terms of art at the time the provision was written, and both were then (and remain) terms of art relating to criminal law.
So congress could effectively fine people for things they did in the past with new taxes, and it would be completely constitutional. Seems like a pretty bad loophole.
> So congress could effectively fine people for things they did in the past with new taxes, and it would be completely constitutional.
If it is effectively a criminal fine, no, that would still be an ex post facto law; the Supreme Court has struck down at least one retroactive federal tax on that ground [0]. And, more commonly, retroactive tax increases have been invalidated on other grounds (mostly, substantive due process under the 5th, or for state action 14th, amendment.)
[0] But note that sneaking in what is effectively a criminal penalty as a tax is also unconstitutional if it isn't retroactive, since it will still violate a host of other Constitutional protections applicable to criminal punishment, so any tax struck down as ex post facto would necessarily be struck down even if it applied only to future “taxable” events.
An ex post facto law is one criminalizing past conduct or increasing criminal penalties for past conduct; retroactive tax increases are not ex post facto laws.
It's probably greenwashing (I've not done any estimates of Apple's environmental impact), but above all it's lobbying currency.
Edit: getting some downvotes, probably because I'm coming off as cynical. Thing is that to take Apple's investment into green energy as anything other than manipulation of perception or their tax situation is to be terribly naive. Charity of this scale doesn't exist amongst the business giants.
What do you mean by counterclaim? Apple's claim you're referring to is that they're environmentally friendly? Isn't it self-evident that that's false? 1.2 gigawatts can't offset the impact of producing millions of Apple devices cheaply. Not to mention attacking right to repair, using audacious planned and forced (updates that throttle old devices) obsolescence.
My gripe with Apple isn't their environmental impact, which isn't very exceptional, it's the user-hostile lobbying, and these projects are a cheap way for Apple to buy influence in that sphere.
Greenwashing is when you use something ecological to shape perception. The greenwasher does that one relatively cheap thing, and then can use it as a comeback. Again, I'm not commenting on Apple's environmental impact, which is relatively mundane. I'm commenting on the intention behind these investments. Can you honestly say you believe that they're doing this out of sincere communal and ecological concern?
I do think it's in the interest of everyone, and that other strategies are suicidal in the long term. It's just that in my perception Apple (or most any big business) is short sighted.
> It's just that in my perception Apple (or most any big business) is short sighted.
Ok, so let me restate what your position seems to be: you acknowledge that the move is in their long term best interests, but you assume that they must be doing this for other reasons, because you’ve already decided that.
I've not said why I believe Apple to be selfish, nor have you asked me. Though, my comments about Apple's history of user hostility might give you a clue.
They had money because of aggressive accounting tricks. I despise such marketing until Apple starts paying right tax, they stop derailing right to repair and free their walled garden for 3rd party developers.
They are legally obliged by their shareholders to reduce their tax burden in any way legally possible. Blade the US Government for allowing these loopholes.
Some solar panels on house roofs to compensate the house consumption is fine... But when I see such pictures, I always wonder about the impact of massive solar panels on albedo. Just like wearing a black t-shirt in the sun in summer.
Indeed it is changing a red-ish reflecting soil into a huge black surface in an already hot location. I mean this is not carbon emitting, but this surely produces a significant local warming. So I am cautious about creating massive solar panel parks because of that.
I have never found any study that would count the calorific impact of turning black square kms in sunny places, and what impact it would have on global warming if we go massive.
If you want to know more about this, you can look up "Heat Islands." This causes areas with higher albedo (Usually asphalt roads and parking lots in urban areas) to increase local temperatures, especially at night. It definitely has a measurable impact on the surrounding area.
Thanks, despites it is a bit different for the night: asphalt has an inertia that returns the heat at night. The solar panels are rather thin to have such inertia.
I kept looking and I have found some albedo figures: deserts have a typical albedo of 0.25-0.40 (let's round it at 0.33 / source in French: https://www.lelivrescolaire.fr/page/6761182).
Current commercial solar panels yield 15-20% (let's retain 18%) of the received energy into electricity (the purpose) and the rest into local heat. No reflection (they are black), so albedo close to 0, but let's consider the extraction of electricity like a reflection (the energy is not absorbed locally): albedo 0.18.
That means making a desert into a solar park changes the albedo of the covered surface from 0.33 to 0.18. It means the absorbed light turned into heat goes from 0.67 to 0.82: +22% sunlight turned into heat.
I would be curious to find a modelization that considers all warming effects of solar panels (carbon and non-carbon) to know if it is a good idea to rush into covering deserts like Apple does here.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadIf* a small chunk of plutonium can output 1.21GW, then $4.7B in spending seems extremely high, like multiple orders of magnitude high.
If that's the true cost of green electricity then I understand why conservatives have been bullish on the topic.
Though I'd rather use green alternatives and reduce power consumption overall, personally.
* Movie magic could be lying to us, I'm just running with the movie's idea.
EDIT: from cursory checking it seems like plutonium can output 8 gigawatts, holy shit.
EDIT2: Downvoted for asking a question. :\ is it because I said conservatives may have had a point? I can be wrong, don't downvote to disagree.
How many tens of billions of dollars (of mostly taxpayer money) does it cost to build, run, and maintain a nuclear power plant?
"plutonium outputs 8 gigawatts" is meaningless without an amount, and without specifying if it's electrical or thermal output.
Fun fact: the lifetime electrical energy output of the Neckarwestheim plant is approximately 30 kg by relativistic equivalence.
The original design claim was apparently £24/MWh. So the agreed subsidy price was £92.50/MWh.
The strike price is high, and it is an implicit subsidy. But the construction cost is covered by the constructor. So u cant complain about both of them.
The 1.2GW of renewable runs at ~30% capacity. Nuclear is generally at 90%. So your 3.2GW nuclear is equivalent to 9.6GW renewable !!
Nuclear is too expensive, true, but you are paying for dispatch-ability. Do you want a 50% discount on electricity which only runs 70%/80%/90% of the time?
The 24/mwh was just a presentation slide. Yes, the UK got a shitty deal. But when negotiation started 10 years ago off-shore wind as 500% more expensive. And on-shore wind was banned by politicians.
I love the green stuff. It is cheaper. More scalable. It will win. But we need every nuclear reactor we can get.
/end runt
EDIT: The UK is also x10 more densely populated than the US. Metros such as London or Tokyo are an extra challenge for low-density renewables.
If you state this fallacy you should at least tell everyone the unique geological issues HPC is facing.
What unique geological issues?
South Korea's nuclear plants are also much cheaper, for the same reason.
A critical mass of plutonium will output just any imaginable amount of power your powerplant can handle.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption, you would need ten of those each day to cover the world’s energy needs (≈ double that to convert heat into motion, move it to users (who won’t want to live near the energy production facility, etc)
Capacitors are reactive components and don't consume power.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/environment/2020/12/28/o...
And it's not only about apple, basically all industries are guilty: top shelf fashion companies shredding incredible amounts of unsold products; pralines packed in 3 layers of plastic,tinfoil and paper; cars body made from incredibly thin and not sufficiently protected material - how can it last at least 20 years if corrosion is visible after 2? Examples can be multiplied endlessly, most products are produced just to consume as fast as possible and buy next one as fast as possible - with eco-friendly slogan label slapped on top of package.
Sigh.. sorry for my rant.
How are we supposed to distinguish between virtue signalling moves and real, practical steps to address sustainability. Are you suggesting Greenpeace doesn't know how to distinguish in this way?
No
Given Greenpeace's actions against Nuclear they're only helping the oil/coal industries for all I care
It's a hyperbole for sure. But how much CO2 have the nuclear closures put in the atmosphere
By doing doing so, we are losing 20 years in a race against climate change.
This are real actions. A trillion dollar company can't turn around overnight.
Or perhaps they really believe in combating climate change and consuming only renewable energy given they've made it a primary focus who are about to reach its 3rd anniversary of being 100% powered by renewable energy in all its global facilities, including retail stores, offices & data centres that they are working with their manufacturing partners to ensure all Apple production is powered by 100% clean energy.
I applaud Apple for its efforts but it's obvious where we need to start.
It would be a very low-hanging, high-payoff way to improve emissions if bitcoin was just banned.
That's a very strong statement. If you unpack it a little bit, what you are saying is there is absolutely nothing productive ("better") that could be using that energy. I don't know if that's the case. Bitcoin mining might just be the most profitable thing to do, so nothing else was attempted.
That is the process. You can participate in it.
8760 hours per year basically works out to about 45 cents per KWH in the first year. 22.5 cents for for two years. And so on. Of course, it's solar so you need to average it out across night day and cloudy days. But it probably works out to 1-3 cents per KWH over the life time of the facility; just like other recent solar bids.
Closer to the equator, it might be closer to 6-7kwh or even better. Places like Dubai or California get a lot of sun throughout the year and a setup like this would have the panels positioned optimally presumably. So, I'd guesstimate at least 3-5 cents per KWH is a reasonable expectation for this setup.
Recent bids are actually closing in on 1 cent per kwh. E.g. there was a Portuguese bid for 1.3 dollar cents per kwh last summer. I'm sure that probably has been undercut since then by someone. And Portugal is pretty far North compared to California, most of which would be at the same latitude as Sub Saharan Africa. So, potentially I am low-balling it. Probably in the next few years we will get sub 1 cent bids happening with some regularity.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/30/new-record-low-solar-pr...
A typical domestic solar installation in the UK costs around £6000 for a 4kW system, which works out at around £1500 per kW installed capacity. This makes the Apple's schemes seem pretty expensive in comparision, especially as one would expect large schemes to benefit from economies of scale.
But, as mentioned, we don't know how much of the fund has directly gone into building renewable energy schemes so it's not a fair comparison.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/doe-officially-...
I wonder what the mix of projects was
funny how they mention "enough to power almost 20,000 homes" but then say the power goes to Apple's data center. And I bet Esbjerg residents are thrilled that their skyline is now full of wind turbines that power Apple's data center while Apple pays almost no taxes.
They are incredibly eco-conscious and would roll their eyes at your statement, invite you in for tea and tell you how proud they are of those turbines.
Esbjerg is one of my favorite places in the world, also the tiny island next to it called Fanø. I’ve been there twice every year for the past 7 years.
I was married there. Almost all of the (Fanø) houses are thatched-roofed hobbit houses, people rarely knock before entering neighbors’ houses and it is super quiet (except for the fog horn).
Esbjerg is a small (70k) person university city, lots of student co-ops, some industry and a strange phenomenon of stolen / discarded bicycles laying on the side of the roads (not downtown, but a km out of the center on the through-roads).
The uni there has great environmental science, chemical engineering, biology, and marine biology (and marine archaeology!) programs.
I couldn’t imagine a place where this is more appropriate.
Related from Germany, Netherlands:
https://www.datacenter-forum.com/datacenter-forum/datacenter...
https://www.dw.com/en/the-germans-fighting-wind-farms-close-....
The datacenter helps grow the tech industry here, the benefit of this should really be self-evident. All my comments above in terms of the construction and maintenance of the turbines also applies here.
These are offshore windfarms in a quiet seaport city next to the existing industrial area. It’s not like these are downtown.
That’s why so many regional and international governments clamor to attract datacenter projects. Because they are trying to get absolutely nothing out of it whatsoever.
The datacenter and wind mills are just built in another country, flown in by helicopter, plopped down, turned on, and subsequently ignored and 100% self-maintained.
I don’t think you can see beyond your dislike of wind power to actually understand the economic impact of large projects like this.
Where did you get the idea that the viborg datacenter is offshore?
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/03/apples-viborg-den...
Also, as we have seen in The Dalles, Oregon over the past 15 years, the inevitable increase in fiber and power capacity to this region, which will attract dozens of other datacenters to the area, will also have zero economic impact to anybody whatsoever.
Would you rather Apple build these datacenters in a nation with coal power?
European datacenter construction is heavily concentrated in Ireland or UK. Denmark has plenty of coast and a diverse power grid.
It is also one of the most efficient, competent ecologically and socially responsible governments in the world. It is clearly better to build datacenters there than in say Romania or Serbia.
Please don’t tell me your next argumentnis going to be about bird deaths or ear cancer.
But either way, good on them! More clean energy = more better
Long story short, investing in renewable energy might have some tax benefits for Apple, but I don't think it has much (if anything) to do with repatriating overseas cash.
If it is effectively a criminal fine, no, that would still be an ex post facto law; the Supreme Court has struck down at least one retroactive federal tax on that ground [0]. And, more commonly, retroactive tax increases have been invalidated on other grounds (mostly, substantive due process under the 5th, or for state action 14th, amendment.)
[0] But note that sneaking in what is effectively a criminal penalty as a tax is also unconstitutional if it isn't retroactive, since it will still violate a host of other Constitutional protections applicable to criminal punishment, so any tax struck down as ex post facto would necessarily be struck down even if it applied only to future “taxable” events.
And I see an essay about the law calling wealth taxes unconstitutional but that doesn't seem to be consensus.
Edit: getting some downvotes, probably because I'm coming off as cynical. Thing is that to take Apple's investment into green energy as anything other than manipulation of perception or their tax situation is to be terribly naive. Charity of this scale doesn't exist amongst the business giants.
If you had some evidence, it would help.
My gripe with Apple isn't their environmental impact, which isn't very exceptional, it's the user-hostile lobbying, and these projects are a cheap way for Apple to buy influence in that sphere.
They aren’t making this claim. They are simply announcing progress in improving their environmental impact. That is what they are claiming.
Your counterclaim is that their efforts to improve their environmental impact are ‘just greenwashing’.
Aren’t you?
> Can you honestly say you believe that they're doing this out of sincere communal and ecological concern?
Of course they are.
They have to operate in the same environment as everyone else.
You don’t think that using sustainable energy sources is in the long term interests of business?
Ok, so let me restate what your position seems to be: you acknowledge that the move is in their long term best interests, but you assume that they must be doing this for other reasons, because you’ve already decided that.
Citation? They're not legally required to maximize shareholder value, a common misconception, so I'm skeptical about this as well.
Indeed it is changing a red-ish reflecting soil into a huge black surface in an already hot location. I mean this is not carbon emitting, but this surely produces a significant local warming. So I am cautious about creating massive solar panel parks because of that.
I have never found any study that would count the calorific impact of turning black square kms in sunny places, and what impact it would have on global warming if we go massive.
https://www.epa.gov/heatislands#:~:text=Heat%20islands%20are....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
I kept looking and I have found some albedo figures: deserts have a typical albedo of 0.25-0.40 (let's round it at 0.33 / source in French: https://www.lelivrescolaire.fr/page/6761182).
Current commercial solar panels yield 15-20% (let's retain 18%) of the received energy into electricity (the purpose) and the rest into local heat. No reflection (they are black), so albedo close to 0, but let's consider the extraction of electricity like a reflection (the energy is not absorbed locally): albedo 0.18.
That means making a desert into a solar park changes the albedo of the covered surface from 0.33 to 0.18. It means the absorbed light turned into heat goes from 0.67 to 0.82: +22% sunlight turned into heat.
I would be curious to find a modelization that considers all warming effects of solar panels (carbon and non-carbon) to know if it is a good idea to rush into covering deserts like Apple does here.