PORTLAND — Apple put the Deschutes River on the cover of its annual environmental responsibility report, highlighting a hydroelectric project it acquired in 2012.
The small facility near Haystack Reservoir won’t come close to meeting the energy demands for Apple’s data center about 25 miles away in Prineville, but the company held it up as an example of the work it’s doing to improve its environmental stewardship.
Apple hadn’t previously discussed its hydro initiative.
In Monday’s report, the company says the project is capable of generating 12 million kilowatt-hours of power — perhaps 5 percent of what a fully built data center would require. (Like large solar projects, the Oregon hydro project likely qualifies for tax incentives that Apple can use to offset its federal tax liability.)
Apple says it’s relying on wind energy for nearly all the rest. Like other big tech companies, Apple says it’s committed to fighting climate change by reducing its carbon emissions and relying on renewable energy sources.
In its most recent fiscal year, the Prineville facility used 27 million kilowatt-hours of power. That indicates the facility was still ramping up: Apple’s data centers in North Carolina and California used several times that.
Apple, like other major data center operators, was drawn to Oregon primarily by big tax breaks that cut the cost of powering and cooling the thousands of servers that store photos, emails, music and other digital material.
Lawmakers say Apple put its expansion plans on hold last fall when a state Supreme Court ruling created the possibility its data centers might someday be subject to an unusual Oregon tax, called central assessment. That tax methodology could have made Apple liable for property taxes on the value of its brand and other intangibles — potentially adding tens of millions of dollars to its Oregon tax bill.
On April 2, Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill exempting data centers from that Oregon tax. That same day, Apple filed a permit with Crook County to complete the build-out of its 338,000-square-foot Prineville data center.
The permit would allow Apple to build the final two of eight “pods” inside the facility, according to Prineville city planner Josh Smith.
Long-term plans call for a second data center building on the site and Apple has explored buying additional land for a large solar farm to offset the data center’s power use. Smith said the city has no sense of Apple’s build-out timetable.
After Brown signed the tax bill, though, Crook County Commissioner Mike McCabe said Apple plans a “major, major expansion.”
