Apple has announced £1.25bn plans to build two data centres in Denmark and Ireland that will be powered entirely by renewable energy. “Chief executive Tim Cook said the developments in Galway, Ireland and Jutland in Denmark would be Apple’s largest-ever European project and would “introduce some of our most advanced green building designs”. At 120,000 sq m each, the centres will be among the largest in the world.
Apple offsets its data centres’ power use by investing in renewable energy capacity. At the Denmark site, some generation will be done on site. But in Ireland the offsetting will take the form of new projects in other parts of the country.” [The Guardian]
The steep decline in oil prices has claimed another prominent victim with Bill Gross’s $1.46 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund trailed its benchmark in the fourth quarter of last year primarily because it had plowed about five percent of net assets into debt. “Emerging market sovereign debt that Gross agreed to insure were all hit by the 42 percent collapse in crude prices during the period.
“Energy sector exposure detracted the most from the fund’s performance,” Janus said in the fourth-quarter commentary, adding that “exposure to U.S. dollar-denominated Russian and Brazilian corporate bonds” also hurt. “The sharp decline in crude oil prices” along with the declines of the countries’ currencies “drove underperformance here.” [Bloomberg]
The Dogger Bank wind development proposed for a site in the North Sea cleared a major hurdle this week, bringing it one step closer to becoming the world’s largest offshore wind farm. “The United Kingdom’s Crown Estate, a quasi-public entity that manages the UK seabed, granted the Forewind consortium a consent to begin the next phase of development of the behemoth Dogger Bank offshore wind project.
The Dogger Bank Creyke Beck would be the world’s largest offshore wind project in the world with 400 turbines and a total installed capacity of up to 2.4 gigawatts (GW). The proposed site for the project is located in the North Sea about 80 miles off the east coast of Yorkshire. It would cover an area spanning about 430 square miles.” [Forbes]
