Meh. Apple is still greenwashing this. Nothing they are doing with solar or anything else in NC will come anywhere close to covering the facility power consumption. Even Facebook admits their solar array out west does nothing more than run the overhead lights for the building.

Overwhelming operational cost for an at-scale datacenter is power. Every other operating expense is pretty much noise when compared to power, cooling and power distribution. Apple (and many others) build in this area for cheap power and geological stability.

Basically this has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with big datacenters built in NC for an east-coast network position, cheap real estate and cheapest-possible electricity. Apple gets the hit because of their name and the fact that their latest and biggest DC is in this area. Everyone else does the same thing but they are often larger and NC is often just one of their big sites…

Just don’t fool yourself about the greenwashing. These building have multi-megawatt power loads and that’s going to come from the existing grid and nowhere else for a very long time to come.