There’s a new 1,300-acre solar farm coming to California’s Monterey County, and it has Apple’s name on it.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told an audience at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco this afternoon that his company will be working with First Solar to build the massive farm, which will cost $850 million. He called it Apple’s “biggest, boldest and most ambitious project ever.”
The new solar farm will provide enough energy to power Apple’s Newark, Calif., data center, its new campus, the company’s other offices around the state, and its California retail operations.
It’s a part of the company’s commitment to move towards powering all of its operations with renewable energy. Apple has already built smaller renewable energy facilities to go with its other data centers, like a 137-acre solar farm in Reno, Nev.
To hear Cook tell it, the decision to create a new solar farm made business sense, but that wasn’t the only reason why Apple chose to invest in the solar farm project.
“We know at Apple that climate change is real, and our view is that the time for talk has passed, and the time for action is now, and we’ve shown that with what we’ve done,” he said.
The announcement was hailed by environmental advocacy group Greenpeace.
“It’s one thing to talk about being 100% renewably powered, but it’s quite another thing to make good on that commitment with the incredible speed and integrity that Apple has shown in the past two years,” Greenpeace Senior Sector IT Analyst Gary Cook said in a statement emailed to GeekWire. “Apple still has work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, but other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook, whose actions show that he intends to take Apple full-speed ahead toward renewable energy with the urgency that our climate crisis demands.”
