I can smell the tax breaks and subsidies all the way from Indiana......
This is the future???? Where will we all live?
Looks good. How is it an “eye sore”? I won’t bash Apple for something I pined for 20 years ago. Solar is awesome. It is a shame that Democrats have to enforce it and wind power at the point of a gun. ALL energy has its place. When the gov’t picks winners and losers, everyone loses.
iSore? Now that’s funny...
So, the lefties tell us that eating animals is bad because, for starters, it takes too much land to graze animals, land better suited to growing crops. OK, but what about using 100 acres of arable land to not grow food but, instead, cover with solar arrays to make electrical energy? Not energy for general use, but energy used for a non-critical purpose like pimping yourself on Facebook?
I know, I know--it's tough being a hippy/hipster.
How much water will they waste keeping the panels clean?
How much desertification will be created because plant roots won’t keep the soil from blowing away?
What about the freaking sun snake or min-snail or some other godforsaken trumped-up animal this will supposedly devastate? Where were the eco-nazis protesting 100 acres being taken out of circulation by an evil corporation who already makes billions and billions of dollars and causes massive environmental damage on a huge scale due to its use of plastics and batteries?
It’s easy to be a liberal, consistent thinking is not allowed.
It would seem that since Apple is only worth 700 Billion Dollars that they would have little money for a solar project.
Wait for the first good hurricane or Nor’ Easter snow storm and watch Apple cry ...
That's what serious solar looks like. It's a gray grid on a large field, little different than a food farm. You can't see it save from an airplane. The surrounding area is largely unused, untouched forest. Its look is not much unlike the appearance of the inside of Apple's rMBP.
And Apple could surely use something much, much smaller and get a similar result. For about $100k and a hundred square yards, they could get a 135MW nuclear reactor.
None of the complaints surprise me. I long predicted that once solar was taken seriously, the environmentalists who advocated it would turn on it with the same basic complaints.
Solar strip-mining ain't pretty, folks.
Well he was till I showed in the estimate for our building and the area we would need to have enough solar panels to totally power our building (It was designed with all the environmental issues factored in like where we are on the planet and normal weather patterns like clouds and snow and rain etc.)
The area needed to power our entire building (And that is without AC in several parts of the structure) would require something like 4 times the roof area of the building. And then of course there is the batteries and converters and such.
100 acres at about 50% coverage from the picture producing 20-megawatts = 100 watts/m^2, or about 10% maximum efficiency in solar conversion.
42 million kWh at about 10¢ per kWh = $4.2 million of electricity for hundreds of millions of dollars of investment? Even at $200 million that will take a 50 year payoff, not counting maintenance. Environmental smugness better be worth it for Apple because the electricity isn't.
Although it is nice that solar power is beginning to get into the right neighborhood on cost. Drop it by a factor of 4 and it will be worth it for supplemental power for the house.