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Apple has purchased more than 200 acres of land not far from its Maiden, North Carolina, data center, in what appears to be a build-out of its solar power capacity in the region.
Maiden's local paper, the Hickory Record reports that Apple recently paid $3 million to secure 219 acres in the region. Apple's parcel is a mix of residential property and farmland located about 15 miles from the data center that underpins its iCloud online services, Record reporter Sharon McBrayer said via e-mail.
Apple is nearly finished building a 100-acre solar farm right across the street from its 500,000 square foot data center, but the company has promised to build two such arrays in Maiden. With this purchase, it looks like the second array has a home.
The company has been criticized by Greenpeace for situating its data center on Duke Energy's power grid. Greenpeace labels it a "dirty" grid because Duke's power comes from coal and nuclear sources. But Apple says that by year's end, 100 percent of the 20 megawatts used by the Maiden data center will come from renewable sources, and 12 megawatts will come from solar- and gas-powered generators built by Apple.
Apple isn't saying anything about the new land, but its new parcel comes with a bit of a mystery. The company has said that the second solar farm will take up 100 acres and have a peak capacity of 20 megawatts (in practice it will average a far lower power capacity; something closer to 7 megawatts). So why is it buying up more than 200 acres of land?
Maybe Apple has more Maiden building in the works. Maybe it's just to keep Apple-watchers like us guessing.
