Portland — Apple said it has agreed to buy hundreds of megawatts of wind and solar power to help run its growing complex of data centers in Prineville, Ore.
In its annual environmental progress report, issued late last week, Apple disclosed that it has a deal to buy 200 megawatts of power for the Montague Wind Power Project in Gilliam County. Apple said this is the first wind project the company created itself. It’s due to begin generating energy late next year.
Separately, Apple said it has a deal to buy power from a 56-megawatt project called Solar Star Oregon II, under construction a few miles from the Prineville, Ore., complex.
Apple had previously disclosed it also is generating a small amount of electricity from a hydroelectric project on the Deschutes River. And the company said it’s also buying solar power from a collection of smaller Oregon arrays.
Prineville, Ore., has just 9,200 residents, about 30 miles northeast of Bend, Ore. But it’s become a go-to locale for two of Silicon Valley’s largest companies, Apple and Facebook, because of large property tax exemptions that save those companies several million dollars annually.
The data centers themselves aren’t huge employers — each company has several dozen Oregon employees. But they’ve brought hundreds of temporary construction jobs to the city, creating a housing crunch. And franchise fees generated by their electricity use have provided a substantial boost in city revenue.
Apple has two data centers in Prineville, Ore., and is building a third. The site used 115,000 megawatt hours of electricity last year, according to the report, more than double what it used the prior year. It’s now Apple’s third-largest data center by energy consumption.
Overall, Apple’s data centers — including facilities the company leases — used 778,000 megawatt hours of electricity in 2016.
Pressured by environmentalists, concerned about the effect of that energy consumption on global warming, most large data center operators have committed to using clean electricity to power the facilities. Apple said nearly all its data center power came from renewable energy.
Data centers also use huge volumes of water. Apple said it used 630 million gallons of water last year, a third of that at its data centers, which require extensive cooling to keep tens of thousands of computers from overheating. Last year, Apple reached a deal with Prineville, Ore., to use treated water from the city’s sewage system to cool its facilities there.
