Apple goes solar — Aussie sunshine to power your iPhone

Apple’s bringing a little bit of Aussie sunshine to your iPhone charge, announcing a new solar project in Victoria that’ll feed green energy into the national grid, all to cover the power used by Apple products across the country.

Apple’s head of Environmental Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, is in Australia to announce a bunch of new sustainability projects as part of the company’s 2030 carbon-neutral goal. Apple already runs its stores and offices entirely on renewable energy, but now it’s taking it a step further by making sure the power used by your iPhone, Mac, or iPad is offset with clean energy too.

The new solar farm is being built in Lancaster, Victoria, and when it’s up and running in 2026, it’ll generate more than 1 million megawatt-hours of renewable energy every year, enough to balance out the electricity used by millions of Apple devices across Australia.

Of course, Apple can’t control what’s coming out of your wall socket, but the idea is simple: for every watt you use, Apple pumps the same amount of renewable power into the grid, pushing the balance further toward clean energy.

Lisa Jackson says, “By 2030, we want our users to know that all the energy it takes to charge their iPhone or power their Mac is matched with clean electricity.”

Apple has teamed up with European Energy to get the solar farm built, and this is just the start. Another project announced today will see 1,700 hectares of old sugarcane land near Bundaberg transformed into a macadamia orchard, part of Apple’s “Restore Fund”, which invests in nature-based carbon removal projects around the world.

More than 800,000 trees will go in, helping restore native biodiversity while offsetting the parts of Apple’s supply chain that can’t yet be made carbon neutral.

So next time you plug in your iPhone, remember, somewhere in regional Victoria, the sun’s doing its bit to keep your tech guilt-free.