The IT spokesperson from the same party as the former and current mayor of Viborg wrote a very critiqued article about making it attractive to build data centers in Denmark on the 6th of February[1].
Now when this deal is public he will surely boast about his brilliant foresight in the upcoming election...
There's of course no definite proof that he knew about this deal at the time of the article, but the timing couldn't be better.
I'm surprised they placed one in Denmark since Netherlands and West-Germany (ie near Düsseldorf) would be much more central Europe for internet connections.
Actually I believe Apple is going for a long term renewable energy strategy like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The additional electricity from wind(and maybe solar) can also be sold into the danish/European energy market.
The big picture I see, is that if you look at the Nordic countries, you see that Finland and Sweden has several (unpopular)nuclear power plants. Denmark has a mix of everything, mostly coal and wind. And Norway get most of its electricity from hydro.
Google has built a data center in Finland, Facebook in Sweden and now Apple will build one in Denmark. And I also believe Microsoft is building a data center in Finland.
But few are considering Norway and that may be because electricity in Norway is already very cheap and neither wind or solar can compete with hydro. And you want additional profit by selling energy to the energy market.
Selling electricity is a good sustainable long term investment.
There's wind and other renewables (wave/tide) in Denmark, but 48 % of electricity production is coal, so that's the marginal increase of production that Apple [edit: not Google] is actually going to use.
BTW, in Finland nuclear isn't that unpopular, there's currently a new site under construction.
(There is some trouble building it up, though: because the opponents of nuclear power will put just as much resistance to a site regardless of whether it is a 160 MW or 1600 MW plant, the planners make the site as big as possible, and the suppliers (in this case Areva) haven't considered this in the technology. The local nuclear safety authority is also ultra-safety-conscious, which is good in itself, except when slows down the deployment of a new, quite safe site so that the energy is bought off a Chernobyl-type thing near Leningrad).
It's flown under the radar, but Apple has gone big on renewable energy for datacenters since 2013. Idk why I sat on this article but I finally submitted today:
That might have a role, indeed. Denmark announced a few years ago that it intends to go 100 percent renewable over the next few decades (I think by 2040 or something).
Plus Denmark is able to buffer their unreliable wind energy with Swedish nuclear and hydro so even when the mills aren't turning they can import power to offset their coal when they're making green claims.
Might also be for economic/financial reasons. Denmark (unlike Germany and Holland) is not in the eurozone and also the German economy is looking like its getting a little bit unstable lately.
Interestingly, we don't even have Apple stores in Denmark yet, despite a wealthy and seemingly voracious market. Guess we don't promise enough growth opportunity.
I would have thought they would place it in Germany or the Netherlands, but in Denmark we can provide the datacenter with 100% green energy, and this is one of the main concerns for Apple.
I wonder what the 300 people would work with, since just maintaining the datacenter wouldn't require that many people. So hope they're moving other jobs to Denmark, and accumulate different job positions there.
Of course not - but Viborg has plenty of energy, and a brand new 400 kV connection [1]. Would be ideal by Apple to use that, and they've probably gotten a good offer.
Island country (at least partly) will have easier job to provide wind or even solar energy than Germany and Netherlands. There is also a benefit of pretty predictable wave and tide energy sources...
There's a number of datacenters being built in the Netherlands; one way up in the low-populated areas (actually closest to Denmark), IIRC bought by Google. They're even building a power line to Germany so that they can get power from there, where it's a bit cheaper than in the Netherlands itself.
The Danish plant is about an hours drive from me. There's not much IT related going on in that area so it's good to see that someone is willing to invest.
I guessing mainly construction/maintenance jobs (infrastructure related), network engineering and a few sysadmin. I don't think there is going to be much development. Apple is very California-centered for development.
And most definitely not a move designed to sweeten the European Union's mood after their investigation into Apple Europe's (allegedly) illegal tax deals :P
If you have money overseas that you don't want to repatriate because of tax rates (personal opinion: tax rates aren't too high for repatriation), would it not make sense to spend that money on renewables overseas for energy you're going to consume anyway?
What?! That's a good thing! Are you sure you read that right?
Frankly, we need more native tree cover, and that's what they're planning on doing, and getting rid of those damned ugly conifers that are only good for wood harvesting. Personally, I'd like to see more marginal land being returned into proper deciduous forests. The problem is that people have difficulty getting to the idea that more forest cover would actually be beneficial to the unforested land as it would protect it from the wind, thus preventing soil erosion, which is an issue, especially in the west and northwest. I'd a discussion about this in a pub over Christmas, and the arguments against boiled down to people not wanting to lose grazing land for sheep, which is reasonable enough, and that forest can be breeding grounds for midges, which is less reasonable.
Yeh but in my experience in Ireland, the midges are mainly a problem in the non-native and fast growing species found in the "managed" Coillte forrests.
It's refreshing to go to the few forested areas and see what almost all of the island looked like a thousand years ago. There's some beautiful places in the Bearagh peninsula.
That being said, some of the planted forests are pretty obvious. I still like the trees, but it's definitely a different feel.
Coillte, the state forest management company, discontinued some less critical operations during the economic crisis. Looking at their website, this was never a particularly large-scale operation.
Unless of course the forest is non-native tax-haven pine, the kind of stuff planted in the 70's to allow rock stars, actors and comedians to avoid paying tax.
These types of forests generally aren't native and are they're not particularly great at supporting a diverse range of flora and fauna.
Re-planting with native deciduous species is a much better thing in the long run environmentally speaking.
"100% renewable" in Denmark usually means a mixture of Danish wind and Swedish/Norwegian hydro. The wind power is highly variable so only fills Danish energy needs on some days, but Denmark has the fortune to be near very large hydro installations further north, which are relatively easy to flex, and provide the remainder via high-capacity links. (For customers not needing "100% renewable", the load is also managed using Denmark's thermal power plants and Sweden's nuclear plants.)
This somewhat unusual arrangement does mean that wholesale spot electric prices are hugely variable, ranging from near-free on high-wind days, to around €0.025/kWh on normal days, to above €0.04/kWh on low-wind days [1]. But you can reduce that risk through long-term contracts.
>>> Apple supports nearly 672,000 European jobs, including 530,000 jobs directly related to the development of iOS apps.
A bit off topic and NOT just Apple related:
When corporates list such achievements as above, they need to do full disclosure like how many old type jobs are destroyed due to their actions/products/services and how much time it took for the effected people to readjust to new reality.
Press statements as above -which we see from several organizations- give the impression of all positives and no negatives which is not true. Public companies are supposed to inform complete truth to public (since some of them are shareholders) and statements as above are not complete truth. Their actions may be innovation to the organization concerned but it is not for the affected. Personally, I feel, now-a-days, modern organizations and their executives are showing the habit of abusing the word of innovation[0] for whatever they do.
This is not just applicable to Apple only but to every other organization in the world. Amazon has to list how many brick and mortar stores are effected in addition to creation of new jobs and similarly vehicle, energy companies has to list the pollution they/their products caused across the world. Cities like Beijing has polluted air and is it not human made through innovated products developed few decades before? If they are proud of positives, they should feel sorry and/or pay for negatives as applicable. Is n't it?
In some cases, measurement may not be easy or indicators/metrics are not defined yet like "number of jobs ...etc". Governments and other competent organizations need to define and enforce them just like enforcing in the cases similar to harassment/discrimination/workspace issues/environmental issues. Even reference year also needs to be defined.
Jobs alone is not indicator and it is just tip of the iceberg of the total effect due to the actions of organizations.
> they need to do full disclosure like how many old type jobs are destroyed due to their actions
Except that in the case of Apple, they single-handedly created a whole new industry (app development), empowering individuals to be able to write software without support of, for example, an investor, publisher, or major company backing them.
As far as I can tell, the only things that Apple and smartphones and whatnot helped out of business was those crappy ringtone and text message subscription services. Of course, new laws also helped with that.
You also mention Amazon, who did introduce a ton of new entry-level jobs, yes, but if the stories coming from the order pickers are correct, they're not really great jobs. Plus Amazon is working on making those positions obsolete with further automation (robots and stuff).
Smartphones also totally marginalized GPS devices, portable music players, point and shoot cameras, portable gaming devices, heck even flashlights are less commonly used than a decade or two ago. (of course all of these products still exist in meaningful ways, but they are certainly a fraction of their former market size)
You could also say that the iPhone had a direct relation to the loss of millions of jobs at RIM/blackberry and Palm.
I don't think i agree with the parent, however, that a company should ultimately be responsible for the losses a product can create in the economy, that would create a huge disincentive for any kind of innovation. and frankly, the effects of products in this way are likely incalculable.
Certainly, but an old cell phone camera wasn't a threat to a point and shoot - with features like facial recognition, flash, zoom (whether its optical or digital), video capabilities, expandable storage, ease of syncing with computer, night and other various modes.
Smartphones ushered all of those features into the device you already always carry with you.
And as i said, these markets still all exist in significant ways, but are a fraction of what they were at their height before strong competition from cell phones.
When corporates list such achievements as above, they need to do full disclosure like how many old type jobs are destroyed due to their actions/products/services and how much time it took for the effected people to readjust to new reality.
How could anyone put a definitive number on that? It would be an exercise in creative economic writing at best. Plus another stack of papers no one read beyond the abstract in the press release.
And what would be the goal, the desired outcome? Should we not pursue innovation that leads to increased productivity in existing sectors? Would those jobs not disappear if Apple built a datacentre in Iceland or on the east coast of the US?
>>> How could anyone put a definitive number on that?
If existing metrics are not sufficient, then we need to innovate :) and define new set of metrics to get complete picture.
Actually it is not difficult. Let us register all existing people jobs and one year later register again and you can get the list of jobs that got changed and if you can survey the reasons for change, then you can measure negative/positive impact. There may be refinements to this idea and there can be new ones too.
>>> should we not pursue innovation that leads to increased productivity in existing sectors?
Definitely, you need to pursue innovation but what I call "responsible innovation" which is inclusive of society and environmental concerns rather than mere profits.
The problem is, it just doesn't matter. Even if 90% of the people making apps came from different industries, if those industries are decreasing, that's hardly Apple's fault. To use the old analogy, the sales of whips and saddles went way down after the invention of the car. What does it matter by how much the sales went down? It doesn't matter.
There's no negative impact. There can't be. If Apple destroyed any industries with their products, that just means those industries aren't things people want anymore. It's not like Apple is giving their products away or forcing people to use them. They're high-end, premium products. If people still wanted a GPS unit, they would buy one. If people still wanted whatever Apple replaced, even if people left their jobs to create apps for Apple, others would fill in the old jobs.
The number isn't counted because it doesn't matter.
Why does it matter that your data center uses green energy?
The "green" is in the production not the consumption.
Had your center instead used a chunk of electricity from a coal plant, the windmill produced electricity instead would be consumed by someone else in the energy network leaving the environmental impact the same.
Had Apple instead sponsored a new windmill farm - then it would have been different.
> The facility is also designed to capture excess heat from equipment inside the facility and conduct it into the district heating system to help warm homes in the neighboring community.
Geography matters, as you can place your data centers where cooling is efficient and where there is lots of renewable energy available/possible to be harvested.
Also, a minor nitpick: please don't say windmill, wind power plants don't mill anything.
> The "green" is in the production not the consumption.
Well, electricity production generally has to be close to consumption. So if you can move a serious part of consumption to somewhere where renewable energy is plentiful, that's great and a clear net benefit.
Usually, the energy company is already producing both energy by both renewable and non-renewable means. You can pay them to say that your energy is only coming out of the renewable side. This does not really affect anything in the actual energy production, it is just bookkeeping. It's still fed into the same power grid. The only real way it affects the energy production is if the demand for renewable gets high enough that it exceeds the actual renewable production.
I wondered if something special happened when a big company like Apple bought 100% wind energy. They could be paying above market price as you could do at some point if you were a simple private consumer. But more likely they are paying less.
A while ago, as a consumer, you could get 'green energy' for a small extra fee. This was compensated again with government grants, so that 'green' energy was the same price as 'gray' energy; the government-funded surplus was then used (in theory) by the power company to build wind farms and whatnot.
This is still the case in some markets, e.g. in Texas's partially deregulated electric market. Consumers can sign up with any of 20 or so electric providers, some of whom provide "100% green electricity", usually for a price a bit higher than the cheapest providers.
I wonder what all that tax avoided money could have bought in society, and what the 3 billion 30% cut they took from developers could have done for those developers. Better apps?
Compared to other electronic manufacturers Apple products do seem to have a much longer life. Lots of people seem to use second hand Apple phones, and laptops... but not so much for other brands.
I wonder why they didn't choose colder countries? Both Denmark and Ireland do have some pretty cold parts. Since cooling is the main energy use, choosing colder countries over ones where they pay less tax would have been a better choice for the environment.
Athenry, Ireland is as far west in Europe as you can go. Meaning it is as far away from most Europeans as possible. But I guess closer to the USA. I wonder about why they chose there if they want to serve their communities best.
Viborg, Denmark makes more sense from a power generation point of view. However, since the power generation is inland it is wasting land which could be used for people and food.
Aye, I'd concur with that. Pretty unusual/interesting that they chose Athenry Co. Galway though - I guess specific location is pretty irrelevant in a tiny country like Ireland but I would have imagined that Cork would be the default choice, since the EMEIA HQ is there too. Good news for Athenry in any case!
Nah, Cork wouldn't be a good place for something like this, other than the fact that a good amount of submarine cable lands there. But then by that, Wexford would be even better.
The big reason for putting stuff on the west coast is wind and cooling.
Doesn't hurt that Athenry is close enough to Galway City, and that makes it a great place to live. Frankly, if I was a network engineer, I'd totally be down for moving to Galway.
Galway is a great spot alright, although I have to admit I do prefer living in Cork ;)
I don't know anything substantial about data centres so I wasn't basing my assumptions on their real-world requirements.
That said however, isn't Athenry a bit inland itself? You'd imagine far west Galway would be better again, with the added potential - I assume - to create infrastructure their own offshore wind energy.
'tax reasons' are actually why I find this most surprising. The "Double Irish" tax arrangement is being phased out, which has led some to worry that companies that are only here to take advantage of it, may move on.
Seeing the complete opposite happening is very reassuring (as a local).
The double irish is under pressure but core Corp Tax is still 12.5%. Much lower than anywhere else. so tax is a good reason to do this in Ireland.
In addition, Irish gov are talking about new R&D scheme which will be like 6-7% corp tax on companies that focus on R&D. Alot of European companies have such schemes and Ireland can't be singled out for being "dodgy" with this. I suspect Apple will benefit from this.
Of course we (being Ireland) wouldn't get all this investment if Apple (and all the other US multinationals) was allowed to repatriate profits back to the US without paying the draconian US corp tax of 35%.
Companies like Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Cisco have huge amounts of cash sitting there in their balance sheets. They spend it in other countries (and/or issue new bonds) to avoid paying the stupid 35% US corp tax.
Once the Republicans and Democrats get their act together on this, Ireland will be screwed.
I'm sure the tax makes it competitive compared others in the same time zone like London, Amsterdam or Berlin, but to me it seems to be succeeding in creating a critical mass of tech skills around Dublin that can stick beyond the taxes. If it was purely down to tax, a lot of companies could have just moved shop to Gibraltar 4 years ago.
I'm wondering if this is partially a play by Apple to sway Irish public opinion away from the notion of putting a stop to these manipulations of International tax law.
> and what the 3 billion 30% cut they took from developers could have done for those developers. Better apps?
More money for the 1% of top apps actually making money (Rovio, King, EA, etc), more like. A 30% cut is not bad at all, especially if you compare it to traditional software - retailers often charge an easy 40% markup over wholesale prices, and that's the last step before it reaches the consumer.
Re: colder countries, what is the environmental impact of internet signals having to travel a longer distance? higher latency for each request, times a billion phones? These are probably trivially small figures, but there's a lot of factors to take into consideration.
> However, since the power generation is inland it is wasting land which could be used for people and food.
Really? You know how much surface area a datacenter takes up in comparison to everything else, right? (hint: not much). And people generally prefer to live in the city anyway (else there wouldn't be any cities, just a big sprawl of suburbia)
(1) Ambient temperature is not very important. In a data center, you want to cool large arrays of small machines -- for that purpose, whether it's cold or hot outside the building doesn't matter very much. The 10-degree difference in outside air temperature is basically irrelevant you're trying to stop components from overheating.
(2) If you want places that are substantially colder, then you're looking at places that are far more "off-grid" i.e. remote. That may create substantial infrastructural difficulties (internet access, hardware supply, electrical supply, etc.). There's a reason why Google hasn't put all their datacenters on Antarctica.
(3) Denmark and Ireland already have good environmentally sustainable energy sources in place, more so than many other alternative locations. This move is about environmental policy.
Well, one of the big advantages of Ireland is that it's the coldest country in Europe with a decent amount of transatlantic fibre running by its coast, and it has pretty stable temperatures.
Ambient temperature can be very useful if you're building a datacentre. I work for the largest hosting provider in Ireland, and our new datacentre uses the temperature differential between the inside of our pods and the outside air to do energy recovery and cooling, and it's pretty effective . I'm a developer, so I don't have all the details, but I'll ask our CTO later for the details, if I've time.
> Well, one of the big advantages of Ireland is that it's the coldest country in Europe [...]
Perhaps you are confusing Ireland with Iceland? (seems improbable since you work in Ireland) Even then, Finland is colder than either of them although its coldest parts are not so easily accessible.
Coldest country with transatlantic fibre running by its coast... though a fibre running by a coast is not good in itself, you actually need to terminate the fibre in your country.
(Like at my home, the council built a fibre to a nearby facility, but I can't plug into a fibre as it passes the house on the nearby street, underground...)
> Well, one of the big advantages of Ireland is that it's the coldest country in Europe with a decent amount of transatlantic fibre running by its coast
Ireland isn't actually a bad spot for this kind of infrastructure. Transit options are great because major transatlantic links actually make landfall in Ireland on the UK->US span. And the Atlantic seaboard has more wind than you could ever want (as my hair this morning will attest to ..)
Now when this deal is public he will surely boast about his brilliant foresight in the upcoming election...
There's of course no definite proof that he knew about this deal at the time of the article, but the timing couldn't be better.
[1] = http://www.version2.dk/blog/tid-til-danske-datacentre-76979 (in Danish)