Talking about environmental protection on a smoggy day: Why does Apple have such a "cleanliness obsession" in production?

It still has the same taste and recipe, but the concentration of smog has increased. The entire WeChat circle of friends is filled with wailing. Most of them are elites in the Internet industry. Looking at the various photos of smog in the circle of friends, and thinking that this may not be the worst time, it makes people sad.

From a certain perspective, our response to smog over the years has been nothing more than posting photos on social media and watching a movie called Under the Dome. Many people are discussing how to escape from smoggy cities, but they find that almost every city has already been smoggy. And technology companies, which are seen as important drivers of society, seem to be helpless. Even many companies are still in the early stages of environmental awareness.

In fact, controlling smog may not be something that a company or a department can accomplish alone, but it is time to pay attention to environmental awareness. In this regard, Apple, a foreign technology giant, is worth learning from.

Apple, which was once blacklisted by Greenpeace, fought back in just two or three years, and has since fallen into a state of "cleanliness" in production, which is out of control. This is definitely a compliment, for a company that uses clean energy for all its US business and more than 80% of its overseas business. Although thousands of Apple fans cannot tell the difference between phones made from renewable resources and non-renewable resources, Apple products with their own environmental labels look more stylish, and Apple's social image has become much greater.

As an important supplier and important market for Apple, China is naturally shrouded in this glorious image. Many people say that Apple has rigidly required Foxconn and other companies to use pollution-free materials and processes to manufacture products. Foxconn has also stated that it will increase investment in China by US$1.7 billion for energy-saving and environmental protection projects. After all, it indirectly reduces my country's carbon emissions, which is also a good thing that benefits the country and the people.

Apple has done a lot of practical things in China to promote its environmental and green philosophy, such as planting trees, generating electricity, and recycling old products. Now, by acquiring 30% of the equity of four subsidiaries of Beijing Tianrun New Energy Investment Co., Ltd., it will once again focus on wind energy development and improve its strategic goal of 100% of electricity in the entire production chain coming from clean energy.

Apple has always been known as an Internet technology company, and now it is not an exaggeration to add the word "environmental protection" in front of it. For two consecutive years, it has received full marks in the Greenpeace Clean Energy Index ranking. Yahoo, which ranked second, only scored 73 points, and other Silicon Valley companies did not even pass. Even Greenpeace, which once criticized Apple, praised its practice of bypassing power companies and directly building its own renewable energy facilities.

Moreover, the "spaceship" headquarters building designed by Steve Jobs during his lifetime and currently under construction also relies on solar panels and biofuel cells to support 75% of its electricity needs. In short, Apple's determination to make its global production and manufacturing 100% green and pollution-free is evident.

If you think about it carefully, Apple itself does not belong to the category of heavy industry that consumes a lot of energy and causes heavy pollution. So why is it so eager to stand on the commanding heights of environmental protection and go to great lengths to change the source of electricity for production and manufacturing? In addition to the corporate image and the values ​​of the people in charge, what other incentives that are in line with commercial interests led it to make such a choice?

How does Apple take environmental protection seriously?

First of all, it is necessary to understand Apple's efforts in environmental protection. Let's talk about its cooperation with China. This wind power development is not the first time Apple has invested in clean energy in the mainland. In April 2015, its subsidiary Apple Operations and Sichuan Shengtian New Energy Development Co., Ltd. jointly established two ecological energy companies.

Then in October, Apple announced the completion of a 40-megawatt solar project in Sichuan in cooperation with SunPower, and said it planned to build more than 200 megawatts of solar projects in the northern, eastern and southern power grid areas of China. The energy generated by the project is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of more than 265,000 Chinese households, which can offset the energy used by Apple's supply chain. In other words, all electricity supplies, including operating stores and suppliers, are disguised as coming from clean energy developed by Apple itself.

People who don't know the truth often mistakenly believe that the environmental protection cooperation reached between Apple and Chinese companies can contribute more technical and financial support to the country's green energy development, but the fact is that the electricity generated by the clean energy it develops is only used to offset the electricity consumed by Apple stores and suppliers. Nevertheless, compared with multinational companies that only pay money, Apple's consideration of energy consumption and carbon emissions in production is in line with the sustainable development concept that has been advocated in China. Moreover, many heavy industrial enterprises in China cannot do this. No wonder Apple was awarded the title of "China's Outstanding Corporate Citizen in 2016".

The same measures have been replicated in Apple's overseas business, with the goal of achieving the goal of completely using clean energy in all Apple facilities worldwide, and this goal is not far away. Of course, in addition to open source, Apple has also taken more practical actions in vegetation protection and recycling of old products. For example, the recently unveiled Liam robot can disassemble an iPhone in 11 seconds, and will surely contribute a lot to Apple's recycling and reuse of old products in the future.

In short, we can see from all aspects that Apple's environmental protection strategy is not just verbal, but covers all its overseas businesses at the fastest speed. Some people would say that Apple is wealthy and has no shortage of money to invest in environmental protection, but Apple is not the only one with wealth, and there are only a few that can do so.

Of course, we cannot attribute the reason for investing in clean energy entirely to Apple’s superior ecological awareness. Excluding value concepts, we should also see the commercial value behind it, which can be expressed in current and long-term benefits.

Emphasis on current benefits of environmental protection

The current benefits are due to the policy incentives of the United States. ITC (Investment Tax Credit) is a tax incentive policy launched by the federal government to encourage the development of solar clean energy. It stipulates that for solar power generation investors, 30% of the capital investment can be used to offset taxes; and about 85% of the assets of the project can use 5 years of accelerated depreciation to further offset taxes.

At the same time, there is the PTC, which has been implemented for more than 20 years. This is a tax exemption for wind energy investment. After several revisions and extensions, the latest extension is valid until December 31, 2013. That is, as long as the wind power project starts construction in 2013 or the investment in this year exceeds 5% of the total investment, it can enjoy 10 years of tax exemption based on the power generation after grid connection. Although there are reports that the ITC ratio will be reduced to 10% from January 1, 2017, it has indeed attracted a large number of companies with heavy tax burdens before that, such as Google and GE.

Apple has been troubled by taxes for a long time. In addition to the huge fines from the European Union earlier, the news of Trump's coming to power made things even worse for it. Therefore, it was undoubtedly a godsend for Apple to obtain tax exemptions by investing in clean energy earlier. In addition, this move is conducive to shaping a corporate image that takes social responsibility and invisibly increases the added value of the product. Why not do it?

In fact, Apple has already made corresponding profits from its investment in solar and wind energy, as the U.S. federal energy regulator has approved Apple's application to sell solar power at market prices. For this purpose, Apple has established an energy company, Apple Energy LCC, which is fully responsible for selling excess electricity generated by Apple's photovoltaic power stations to the entire United States. Thanks to the importance of clean energy in the future, this may become a long-term business.

Moreover, this profit is already clearly visible, because the cost of developing clean energy is falling rapidly. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) released a report saying that by 2025, the average cost of solar photovoltaic, offshore wind power, and onshore wind power is expected to be reduced by 59%, 35%, and 26% respectively compared with 2015. By 2025, the average cost of solar photovoltaic power generation and onshore wind power in the world will be about 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, and after 2025, the cost of solar and wind power generation is expected to continue to decline. When the cost of Apple's clean energy power generation is lower than the cost of gas-fired power generation, it will further reduce the company's production costs, and it can also make additional sales.

Environmental protection layout can obtain long-term benefits

Speaking of long-term benefits, of course, we should bet on clean energy in advance. From the continuous growth of global investment in renewable energy, power grid and energy efficiency in recent years, we can also see that the era of relying on the development of non-renewable resources to provide kinetic energy is no longer allowed by the environment and the future.

According to the report "World Energy Investment 2016", the global investment in renewable energy last year totaled $313 billion, accounting for nearly 1/5 of the total investment in the energy sector. Among them, renewable energy has become the largest source of investment in the power sector, while global gas-fired power generation investment has dropped sharply by nearly 40%. Therefore, from the perspective of power sources alone, renewable resources have become the mainstream, and Apple has gone further than other Silicon Valley technology companies in this regard, which is due to its judgment of the trend of clean energy and of course its own needs, especially based on concerns about power consumption and emissions of data centers.

Greenpeace once estimated that if the global cloud computing industry is compared to a country, its energy consumption ranks sixth, between Germany and Russia. Take China and the United States as an example. According to a survey by the New York Times, the power consumption of Internet data centers around the world may reach 30 billion watts, which is equivalent to the power supply of 30 nuclear power plants. For example, Google's data centers around the world have a power consumption of 300 million watts, which is more than 30,000 American households.

The situation is even more serious in my country. The advent of the big data era has caused the number of data centers to increase exponentially, and now exceeds 600,000. In addition, the average electricity utilization efficiency of most data centers in my country is far from the international advanced level. This high energy consumption and inefficient electricity consumption has attracted the attention of the government many times.

Apple is more foresighted in this regard. As early as 2013, Apple pointed out in a report that the company's data centers are currently fully using renewable resources such as solar energy, wind energy and geothermal energy. Despite expanding its business globally, Apple has been trying its best to practice this environmental protection concept. In short, compared with Google, Microsoft and other data center giants who have begun to build data centers in cold areas to reduce power consumption, Apple has taken a step ahead in energy conservation and has an advantage.

In fact, Apple's emphasis on data centers is also in line with the company's business needs to expand online cloud services. Hardware equipment revenue certainly accounts for a major part of Apple's total profit, but in a market with saturated smartphones and sluggish PC sales, this part of the profit has continued to decline.

According to Apple's fourth quarter performance report, the company's revenue for fiscal year 2016 was $217 billion, while last year's revenue was $233.7 billion, a year-on-year decline of 9%. This is the first time that Apple's annual revenue has declined since 2001. Revenue from iPhone, Mac and other products have all declined sharply, with only revenue from services reaching $6.325 billion, up 24% from $5.086 billion in the same period last year, which is the only bright spot in Apple's profits this year.

The servers in Apple's data centers are mainly used to store songs, applications and other content from services such as iTunes, iMessage and iCloud. By solving the problem of high power consumption in data centers in advance, Apple is likely making corresponding preparations for the future big data era to achieve business transfer.

What we should learn

Apple is a pioneer among US Internet technology companies in solving the energy consumption and pollution problems of data centers, and it also represents their basic attitude towards this problem. As a country with a large amount of data, do we have the same foresight? It can be seen from relevant reports that the topics surrounding big data and cloud computing are all limited to the market size of several billion yuan, and rarely pay attention to the power consumption of data centers.

In recent years, my country's Internet companies have successively established their own big data platforms. However, the fact is that the use of electricity is not a typical design standard for data centers, nor is it effectively managed as an expense. As for how much pollution will be generated by power generation, it is not taken into account. Once the power demand of other utilities in the data center's location suddenly increases sharply, the data center that cannot be stopped for a moment will face a "power shortage" situation, and the company will have to spend more expensive costs to meet the power demand.

It is understood that Alibaba's computer rooms are mainly distributed in Beijing, Qingdao and Hangzhou, and these three cities are not areas with sufficient electricity. In addition, people familiar with the matter revealed that the Alibaba data center in Hangzhou, which consumes a huge amount of electricity, has posed a serious threat to the city's daily electricity consumption, so considering the development of clean energy is imminent, not just a far-sighted strategic goal.

Perhaps Jack Ma has realized the seriousness of the energy consumption problem. According to news today, the Breakthrough Energy Alliance announced the establishment of a new energy investment fund with a total amount of more than US$1 billion, jointly invested by 20 global business leaders and innovators including Bill Gates, Jack Ma, and Bezos, to invest in start-ups and growth-stage companies to provide the world with the next generation of reliable, affordable, zero-emission energy, food and products.

Jack Ma, a member of the fund's board of directors, said, "When it comes to energy, people will say that you can't make a profit from energy projects while meeting demand and protecting the environment, but we can and we will do it." It is hoped that the new energy investment fund can provide support for Alibaba's data center's solution to the problem of power consumption. In this regard, my country's major data centers can fully learn from Apple's practice of converting power sources and label it as environmentally friendly and green.

In general, from a macro perspective, learning and drawing on the mature experience of foreign countries in environmental protection and legislation can help us avoid many detours. From a micro perspective, learning and drawing on the environmental protection experience of foreign technology giants can make domestic companies more socially responsible and gain better commercial benefits.

Although our economy is in a downturn and we have seen the difficult situation of many enterprises, this should not be an excuse to ignore smog and environmental awareness. Zhou Mouping said in his article, "In fact, in terms of air quality, China today is definitely much better than in the 1980s. The concept of PM2.5 that has been hotly discussed in the past two years is actually misleading, because PM2.5 cannot represent the pollution index." The reason why such self-deceiving remarks are believed by many people is not only the result of some anti-intellectual brainwashing, but also the weak environmental awareness.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.