Amazon data center architect James Hamilton has serious doubts about the wisdom of building a solar power farm to provide electricity for Apple's North Carolina data center.

While solar is great for many applications, a data center needs a lot of power and solar is not particularly space efficient. Hamilton estimates that the 171 acre farm that Apple is installing will only provide about 4% of the power needs of the servers at best.

The work that companies like Facebook and Google are doing to design more efficient data centers will probably have a lot more impact than a solar farm that displaces hundreds of acres of forest.

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Perspectives – I Love Solar Power But…
I love solar power, but in reflecting carefully on a couple of high profile datacenter deployments of solar power, I'm really developing serious reservations that this is the path to reducing data…

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