Social Innovation: Can Apple become a Solar Game Changer?

There are rumours that Apple wants to embrace social innovation and build a big solar farm to power its newly built, $1 billion data centre in North Carolina, and that it will reshape the land to make it more suitable for solar panels. The late Steve Jobs said he wanted to make the North Carolina centre "as eco-friendly as you can make a modern data centre." In reality these computer places are extremely air-conditioned, making them gas-guzzling monsters; some require nearly 50 times more power than a comparable sized office space.

Apple has not made any formal announcement regarding these social innovation plans. Its data centre went live this spring. The 500,000-square-foot facility is five times the size of Apple's previous data place in Newark, California. It be will be used to power the company's new iCloud service, which offers up to 5 GB of free online storage to Apple users. However, in April this year, Greenpeace, the environmental group focused on energy practices in cloud computing (a new digital storage and syncing service) called out Apple for relying on "dirty" energy for its $1 billion data centre in Maiden, North Carolina.

Greenpeace published a report entitled, 'How dirty is your data?' in April 2011, which rated Apple as having the lowest clean energy rating and the highest coal intensity among tech corporate giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Apple, along with Facebook and Google, was criticised for contributing to a "dirty data triangle" in North Carolina, where substantial tax incentives from the state have attracted billions of dollars in data centre investments from tech companies.

North Carolina was also criticised by Greenpeace, which said that the state had no social innovation ideas towards renewable energy and therefore one of "the dirtiest generation mixes in the US," pointing out that it is powered mostly by coal (61 percent) and nuclear (31 percent) generators.

What if Apple did construct a solar plant, cleaned up its act and then decides to go further to create products that used solar cells? Well, it would revolutionise the market for solar energy. In fact, Apple has been exploring way of how to use social innovation and solar power to charge gadgets, including ways to implant solar technology in its devices. If Apple is able to make this commercial leap into renewable energy, it would become a solar game changer, making sunshine a commodity. Apple has always been a leader in embracing new technology—when the late Steve Jobs deemed the timing was right.

Photo Credit: pauldwaite