Apple is cleaning up its energy act.

The computer company says that by early next year, the energy used to power its worldwide data centers will all come from renewable sources, such as solar, wind power, or hydroelectric dams. It announced the news Thursday in a post on its website.

That’s a victory for the environmental activists at Greenpeace, who have been pressuring Apple for more than a year to clean up its act and commit to renewable energy.

A major sticking point has been Apple’s Maiden, N.C., facility, which is on the inexpensive but partially coal-powered Duke Energy grid. Apple had already started building a 100-acre solar array and a biogas energy plant on the site, but was still using Duke for a large chunk of the power at the 500,000-square-foot data center.

Now, the company says it will instead use local power providers who use renewable energy: “By the end of 2012, we’ll meet the energy needs of our Maiden, North Carolina, data center using entirely renewable sources.”

The company now plans to build a second 100-acre solar array a few miles down the road from the facility, but it isn’t saying when that will come online.

By year’s end, about 60 percent of Maiden’s energy will come from the solar farm and biogas plant. The other 40 percent will come from those unnamed renewable energy providers.

Greenpeace has stepped up its campaign against Apple in recent months. It sent cloud-cleaning activists to Apple stores in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto last month, and on Tuesday, two Greenpeacers were arrested after setting up a giant iPod in front of Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

Greenpeace is happy with Thursday’s announcement, but it’s not stopping its campaign. “Apple’s announcement today is a great sign that Apple is taking seriously the hundreds of thousands of its customers who have asked for an iCloud powered by clean energy, not dirty coal,” a Greenpeace spokesman said in an email message.

Greenpeace wants Apple — and Microsoft and Amazon too, for that matter — to promise to make renewable energy a priority even as it builds new data centers. “Only then will customers have confidence that the iCloud will continue to get cleaner as it grows,” Greenpeace said.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment, but referred us to the company’s new web page.

Apple says that another of its data centers, this one in Newark, Calif., will be 100 percent renewable by February 2013. A third data center, located just down the road from Facebook in Prineville, Ore., will use wind, hydro, and geothermal energy when it comes online. The company also runs data facilities in Austin, Texas, and Sacramento, Calif., both of which are plugged into the renewable grid, Apple says.

This story was produced by Wired as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The utility company that supplies power to Apple’s Maiden, N.C., data center has pulled a paper from its website that bragged about Apple’s energy-guzzling ways.

The paper was a puff piece talking about the reasons that Apple chose to hook its iCloud data center up to Duke Energy’s power grid. It lays out the backstory of an Apple lobbying effort, dating back to 2006, that ultimately landed a 500,000-square-foot data center — code-named Project Dolphin — in the wilderness of North Carolina.

“This was the best-kept secret in the data center world,” said Duke Energy Director of Business Development Stu Heishman, according to a copy of the report [PDF], which had formerly been located on a website run by Duke’s business development group.

The report also talks about Apple’s power consumption, a subject that has suddenly become controversial as Apple has come under fire for using too much energy from non-renewable sources at the Maiden data center. We don’t know why or when the report was pulled — reached last week, Heishman said he didn’t remember the report — but some of the statements in the report seem to be at odds with Apple’s image of Maiden as low-power consumer.

“We fully expect Apple to be one of our top 10 customers in the Carolinas,” Heishman said in the report.

Data center operators such as Apple are “the type of customer where the meter spins and spins at an exponential pace,” said Clark Gillespy, a Duke vice president of economic development, according to the report. “It may be the most ideal customer we could have.” Their top concerns include “power cost and reliability,” Gillespy said. “We were able to convince Apple that we were capable of providing the low cost and reliability they needed for their operations.”

That isn’t 100 percent on-message with Apple, which says Maiden will be “the greenest data center ever built,” gaining 60 percent of its power from on-site renewable sources.

Duke’s business development team has had a lot of success in North Carolina. It’s also attracted Google and Facebook to its cheap, reliable power grid.

Duke’s grid, which gets 98 percent of its energy from nuclear and coal plants, has also attracted the attention of Greenpeace, which calls this energy mix “one of the dirtiest in the country.” Last year, Greenpeace singled out Duke Energy in its 2011 report, saying that three companies with data-center projects in the area — Apple, Google, and Facebook — made up a “dirty data triangle.”

In fact, Greenpeace cherry-picked Gillespy’s quote and highlighted it in its 2011 report. That may have upset some of Duke’s customers, says Gary Cook, an IT analyst with Greenpeace. “I could imagine why some companies wouldn’t want that to be out there so boldly,” he says.

Greenpeace slammed Apple again this year for going with Duke, but this time Apple fought back, saying that Greenpeace’s data consumption estimates were way off. Last week, Greenpeace launched protests at Apple stores in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto.

But according to Cook, the real question is what Apple will do as it expands its Maiden facility. It has spent $500 million of a planned $1 billion on Maiden, which is home to Apple’s fast-growing iCloud backup service. If Apple expands the Maiden data center, will it continue to get 60 percent of its energy from renewable sources? Or will it simply go for the cheap coal-and-nuclear power from Duke?

Cook would like to see Apple commit to using renewable energy even as Maiden and its other data centers grow. That’s something that’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s possible, he says. After all, two of the other data center operators highlighted in Greenpeace’s 2011 report promised to use renewable sources for their future energy needs. “Both Google and Facebook have a real commitment to powering their platforms with renewable energy,” Cook says.

This story was produced by Wired as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Call it the battle of Maiden. This week, Apple and Greenpeace traded very public barbs over how much clean power is used by Apple’s $1 billion state-of-the-art data center in Maiden, N.C.

But it appears that much of the arguing stems from their inability to agree on what they’re arguing about.

On Monday, Greenpeace released a report calling Apple’s data center a power-hungry threat to the environment, but Apple responded by saying Greenpeace got its facts wrong. The key sticking point is a simple question: How much energy is Apple’s data center burning? Greenpeace says 100 megawatts, while Apple says it’s only 20 megawatts.

The truth may be somewhere in-between.

According to Greenpeace, Apple’s data center relies too much on coal-produced electricity, and the company hasn’t done as much as it could to secure other, more environmentally friendly sources of power. They’ve even produced a video to make the point:

Apple is clearly unhappy with the report. After all, it’s adding some unprecedented green-energy generating features to the site, including a massive solar array on the site along with a five-megawatt biogas generator. “We believe this industry-leading project will make Maiden the greenest data center ever built,” said Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet in an email message.

She added that 60 percent of the 20 megawatts used by the facility will come from the site’s solar farm and biogas-powered fuel cells. About five megawatts of that will come from the fuel cells, and the other seven from the solar array.

So why the disconnect? Greenpeace says it got the 100 megawatt number by doing a simple calculation: one megawatt of power demand for every $15 million spent on the data center plus 50 percent extra for non-computer energy demands. Apple, they add, has said it plans to spend $1 billion at Maiden over the next decade.

But that $1 billion figure isn’t exactly the right number to use when compared to Apple’s 20 megawatt figure. When it announced the Maiden facility last year, Apple pegged its investment at $500 million. The company has reportedly told local officials that it expects to invest a total of $1 billion on the site over the next decade — presumably to pay for the green energy initiatives and maybe even building a second data center when the need arises — but that hasn’t happened yet.

So Greenpeace is talking about an imaginary $1 billion facility, to be built sometime in the future. Apple appears to be talking about the $500 million facility that’s up and running today.

That makes the difference less stark. Using Greenpeace’s same metrics, that would put the current Maiden facility at 50 megawatts.

Even so, Greenpeace’s Gary Cook questions Apple’s power consumption figure. “It seems low even for the size of the existing shell they have there if you look at other facilities” he says. “I would expect as they continue to ramp up that facility, it will continue to go north.”

What he’d like to see is a commitment from Apple to keep buying renewable energy, even as it expands the data center.

That’s what Google has done, he says. “They’ve actually put data centers in locations where the grid’s not very green, but hey have matched this with long term 20 year contracts for big chunks of wind,” he says. “Companies like Apple and Microsoft could be doing this as well. There are wind developers who would like to bring their power to market. If they had forward-looking companies signing long-term contracts, that would help bring more power on the grid.”

This story was produced by Wired as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.