Apple Inc. Planning Solar Farm for Reno Datacenter

          As part of Apple's plans to meet all power needs with renewable energy, Apple is setting its eyes on its third solar farm. The new farm is planned to power Apple's data center in Reno, Nevada and also aims to provide energy for the surrounding community. Apple currently has two solar farm projects underway at a datacenter in North Carolina. 

         Working in partnership with the Nevada utility company NV Energy, the solar farm should be able to produce "approximately 43.5 million kilowatt hours of clean energy, equivalent to taking 6,400 passenger vehicles off the road per year," according to a statement released by Apple. NV Energy CEO Michael Yackira responded in a statement, "We're excited to be in partnership with Apple on a new solar energy project, the first project under our new Green Energy Program. This program allows customers such as Apple to choose to have a greater proportion of their energy coming from renewables than the law requires, without having a cost impact on our other customers."  

Investments towards renewable energy

      European investors in the next five years are withdrawing their finances from the construction of facilities generating fossil fuels and inserting them into better use: development of renewable energy sources, known as the RES. These claims were made from representatives from gas companies surved by the British-based Gas Strategies Group at the European Autumn Gas Conference, known as EAGC 2012.
        According to this survey, it was claimed that 42% of gas industry representatives believed that the whole share of investments would go to the wind power sector, 28% believed it would be towards the solar power industry, 13% thought it to be the coal-fired industry,  11% to the gas industry and 7% to the nuclear power industry.
       From last year, it seemed that opinions have indeed changed dramatically: support of solar energy has grew from 4% to 28%, coal-fired industry has grew from 2% to 13%, nuclear energy from 5% to 7%, wind power sector from 52% to 42%, and lastly but not least the gas industry from 37% to 11%.
       There have been reports in the Bloomberg New Energy Finance, that global investment in renewable energy development in 2012 was $268.7 billion, whereas there was $142 billion in investments towards solar power energy as well as the remaining $78.3 billion in the wind power sector.

      Ukraine has also been increasing their involvement in renewable energy. At the beginning of this new year, the total number of companies operating power plants, derived from renewable energy sources has increased to 80, and the number of the power plants has increased to 133, in which 39 are used for solar power energy.
     Ukraine actually has what is known to be the largest power plant in Europe.

Once construction is completed in 2015, this solar power farm is said to be equivalent to 207 football fields. It is expected to produce 100,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, meaning it can be enough to power 20,000 average-sized households.
Even today, Ukraine ranks 12th in energy rankings with installed renewable energy capacity of 54 GW.