“Apple has quietly created an energy subsidiary, ‘Apple Energy’ LLC, registered in Delaware but run from its Cupertino headquarters,” Seth Weintraub reports for 9to5Mac.
“The company was seemingly formed to allow it to sell excess electricity generated by its solar farms in Cupertino and Nevada, with plans to sell electricity across the whole of the US,” Weintraub reports. “‘[Apple Energy LLC] is a Delaware limited liability company and is a 100% wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Inc. [Contact is] Apple Energy LLC, One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014.'”
“Apple has alternatives for this at its campus… but if it wants to operate 100% renewable, it has to ‘trade’ overcapacity during the middle of the day for ‘net-metered’ energy during the evening or cloudy days.,” Weintraub reports. “But a set of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission filings suggests that Apple could have bigger ambitions in the power field… What Apple seemingly could to do… is sell directly to end-users at market rates. In other words, get paid retail prices for its excess power.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What do electric cars run on?
I love it when a plan comes together!
Now *THAT* is how Apple does things.
Sell the razor, and sell the blades.
Own the ecosystem, and save the environment.
Don’t get your hopes up too high for solar power to save the environment. It may lower the price but it is not carbon neutral. It requires a lot of (usually coal fired) power to make the aluminum frames that require 1600 degrees to melt and mold. Unfortunately we are only moving the carbon to China. We have one earth and having clean energy here with giant smoke stacks in China making them is not carbon neutral.
Unfortunately Nuclear power is the only abundant carbon free clean energy source that’s viable to save the planet in time. (If you believe in climate change is man made)
It seems we should invest heavily in nuclear with uranium reactors as an interim step to Thorium and hydrogen Fusion reactors replacing them over the next 40 years as the technology breakthroughs progress. Solar won’t do crap. It won’t even stop the growth of carbon. Our energy demands are growing way quicker than solar can slow it, and building millions (or billions) of solar panels will also add to the increase in carbon. —and let’s not forget utility scale “solar” plants get about 70 percent of the energy from gas. Whenever we build a “solar” plant we mostly are building a new class plant.
So if you believe global warming is man made and we should be seriously reducing our carbon emission, then we should rethink solar. If you believe solar is the goal, regardless of the fact that all projections with solar show our carbon fit print going up, then you will be proud of all the solar panels we built when the world ends.
I am sure I will get plenty of thumbs down for stating the truth. But give me all the thumbs down you want. Every time we cover a roof with solar panels we don’t power the house with solar. Nope we don’t. They never rip out the heat and hot water which is the biggest energy user. So we can cover every house in America with solar panels and we will still use mostly fossil fuel for our biggest home energy use which is heat and hot water not electricity.
Let’s not forget that the average home gets about 20 – 25 panels and each puts out about 200 watts peak power during peak sun. Six of them are what it takes to power the average blow dryer. This is why a roof top full of solar will never supply heat for a house. If you assume we have 150 million homes, each with 25 solar panels, we will need 3.75 billion panels coming out of assembly lines melting and molding aluminum at 1600 degrees to build them, not to mention mining and mineral separation energy as well for millions of tons of ore to get a small amount of aluminum. And if they are manufactured in China hopefully they build a couple of nuke plants (I mean coal burners) to make them. And when we are done what do we have, all our cities, trains and cars, and all the heat and hot water for all the homes burning oil or gas.
Do the math and keep giving me down stars, but what I am saying is absolutely true ad you can look it all up. There is nobody claiming otherwise and there are no energy projections Fromm anyone in the field who predicts more than a minuscule percentage of our energy from solar.
I would blame all these lies about solar on Exxon because they love it when we we switch to solar. More oil to sell to China to make them, but I can’t blame Exxon I blame us. We are the ones that choose to ignore simply math and lie to ourselves because we want to believe solar can also it. This “believe” based on fears of “radiation ” keep us lying to ourselves about solar and keep Exxon happy. The real lies are the phony fears and the dangers of radiation that are much lower than we are lead to believe and these lies are propagated by the media to prevent us from switching to the only true clean source of energy that can compete with fossil fuel.
Full disclosure: I worked at the Indian point Nuclear power plant in NY from 1987-1989, and I also worked at a gas trading company about 10 years ago. We moved natural gas in the pipelines. Natural gas is way more dangerous than oil to the environment. It is not cleaner than oil. Yes it burns twice as clean as oil, but a minimum of 10% (sometimes 20%) of all natural gas leaked out of the pipes and into the atmosphere. Methane gas is up to 100 times worse as a green house gas than carbon. The gas is under high pressure being pushed through the pipe with millions of joints under the ground subjected to freezing, thawing, rain and movement. It leaks like a sieve.
A utility scale solar plant backed up by natural gas (70%) is a lethal combination to our environment. So flame me some more and look up the facts. Everything I’m saying is true.
We are faced with a bad choice and a worse choice. The bad choice go nuclear and invest heavily in future energy advances such as thorium and fusion along the way to move away from uranium, or the worse choice, keep “believing” that solar and natural gas are clean and watch as our projected carbons use goes up over the next 35 years and hope for the best.
The choice is ours. What will we tell our kids?
You mean to say that sunlight can not heat up the water for showering and warming my house? Thank you so much for your insight! I will immediately sell my sun boiler.
Collectors on our house warm u the water in the sun boiler which supplies water to the warm water heater. Guess what: That thing consumes less energy because the water it gets is pre-heated. Works even in winter…..
While I can appreciate that you might have a point regarding the production of aluminium etc, you disqualify yourself with the other statement.
If you are using sun for hot water you are not generating electricity. They are two different technologies, and I stand by what I said. You can not generate enough heat with Photovoltaics to heat your house. Not even close.
Further more, your argument now just raises the bar. Now we have to have two forms of Solar with double the panels. Photovoltaic AND Hot water piping through hot water panels?
I stand by my original argument. You just made my case.
Thank You
SouthRoad = ConfusedCountry. I am he.
Yeah, the goal is a long way off still, and further still where I live (northern Alberta.) But even here net-zero homes are possible with heat pumps. Expensive, but possible. Solar can be used to heat a home, especially if the house is well designed.
So we will rip down all the other homes? I don’t get your point, especially if a “new” house is well designed to make it work?
PS: if you don’t believe we have been lied to for years about the dangers of radiation, just remember how much institutionalized lies we have been told about the dangers of Marijuana. If you are afraid of radiation you have been brainwashed. Those are not your opinions. You have never been hurt by radiation and you know nobody who has, all your opinions come from someone else. The classic definition of brainwashing.
Go ahead, ask yourself why are you afraid of radiation. Compare all your experience with all your “knowledge”. How much is your own? None!
I’m not saying radiation is not bad. I wouldn’t want to take a stroll through fukishima, but most of you wouldn’t take a stroll through a blast furnace either. So what!
so far there have been no deaths from radiation at fukishima, none of the estimated 50,000 cases of leukemia ever occurred in Chernobyl, and let’s not forget Hiroshima is a beautiful city now.
Oh, and what about those 8 underwater nuclear bomb tests in the ocean until it was elimiminated by treaty? Fish anybody?
Yeah I thought so. The ocean healed which is more than I can say for the BP oil spill!
25 years later the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill is still causing lawsuits.
Wake up. Nature is more resilient to radiation than it is to all these chemicals. Look around. Stop believing the bullshit. Use your own brain before it’s too late!
—and don’t forget to down vote me for having the courage to tell the truth. Is anything I said wrong?
That’s literally the best thing I’ve read in a long time. Finally, some else that’s not brainwashed. The whole global warming, global cooling, or currently called climate change, is so hilarious. I love it when someone asks me if I “believe” in climate change… Believe!?! That’s what you say when you have no facts to back up what your selling.
I am not denying climate change. I am denying Solar power can lead to zero carbon. Not a chance without Nuclear power, however I do believe man made climate change is real.
Oh boy, this gets better…..
Do you know how many people develop mental problems due to marijuana? If you are susceptible to psychotic illness, marijuana will help develop it quite happily….
OK, so Alcohol is better? Are you saying that you believe that Marijuana is dangerous enough to be illegal and Alcohol is safe enough to be legal? What are you saying?
Subscription driving?
Just like gasoline “subscriptions” for regular cars.
We now know where the electrons for the apple car will come from. It’s all very interesting.
What do electric cars run on?
Roads!
And subsidies!
Electric cars run on solar power even if carbon fuels are involved.
All carbon fuels store ancient sunlight, solar and wind just do it cleaner.
Indeed some very interesting possibilities here regarding the car if certain agreements could be made re the grid. No idea what could be agreed in that regard right now, but the dynamics will change anyway as/when electric cars become the norm down the line. Who knows what energy off-put opportunities may be negotiated with various bodies and potentially you would not need to go the Tesla way by building specialised recharging points to get cheap/free charging.
Will Apple reveal the profitability of Apple Energy or will Apple merely use this as a means of promoting its image as a corporate do-gooder?
Now this is an industry ripe for disruption. Needs energy storage solution to really work well but if Apple wanted to put its billions to use, there is massive potential to “change the world” in energy production and retail sales. Here is to hoping for something special somewhere down the road.
They need to invest in Zero Point Energy.
Haha!
If Apple sold personal nuclear reactors with 25 to 30 year shelf lives and renewable cores I would buy one.
http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/portable-backyard-nuclear-reactors-ready-to-be-installed-by-2013.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nuclear-reactor-to-replace-your-water-heater/#1638890b3ba3