Apple Quietly Patents New Wind Turbine Concept

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Though it happened in the summer of 2011, reports only recently surfaced that computing giant Apple quietly stuck its toe into the green energy market and tested the waters. We’re used to seeing Apple work on smaller scale technologies, but this time the company applied for a patent involving a wind turbine that generates electricity from heat energy rather than from the rotational motion of its blades.

The idea makes a lot of sense for a company with a massive amount of real estate tied up in data centers. Many of the major tech companies have been investigating possible ways to decrease the cost and carbon impact of their data centers because the facilities have to run at nearly full capacity at all hours of the day and night. The nightmare for most tech companies is having a sudden unpredictable surge in traffic overload their servers. The cost of running servers at full capacity, even when only 10 percent of their capacity is projected to be necessary for a given period, is much lower than what companies would incur from losses in sales or the negative impact on the company’s image that could result from one major server crash.

In addition to the cost of operating huge buildings stuffed to the brink with servers, all that equipment makes data centers extremely hot, meaning more carbon dioxide emissions and funding are needed to cool the structures. Facebook has addressed this issue by placing data centers in successively colder climates, first in Oregon and now in the near-arctic conditions of Scandinavia.

Conventional logic suggests companies with large data centers would want to install green utility options near these facilities to cut down on the amount of funding dedicated to powering them. The problem is that many green sources of energy fluctuate in output from season to season, day to day and even moment to moment. The rotational energy from wind turbines typically powers a generator that pumps electricity into the grid, but that means when the turbine stops spinning, the generator ceases to put out power soon afterwards.

Apple’s new idea is to convert the rotational energy from wind turbines into heat energy, which can be stored in low-heat-capacity fluid. Heat can be stored and released at the beck and call of the user, meaning this model could create a much more stable source of power, evening out the peaks and valleys associated with renewable energy options.

Though the patent application has raised a lot of eyebrows, Apple has yet to reveal whether it plans to put this concept into actual practice anytime in the near future.