Apple’s fuel cells will be powered by landfills
We were wondering where Apple and Bloom Energy were planning on getting all that biogas to run the large fuel cell farm at Apple’s North Carolina data center. According to a filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Apple will get the biogas — which is methane from decomposing organic material — from landfills (hat tip Data Center Knowledge). Apple will actually use “Directed Biogas,” meaning that the biogas from the landfills will be cleaned and injected into the local natural gas pipeline, and the fuel cells won’t be directly running off of the biogas. But Apple’s biogas supplier will inject the equivalent amount of biogas that would be used by the 4.8 MW of fuel cells.