The "green" is in the production not the consumption.
Had your center instead used a chunk of electricity from a coal plant, the windmill produced electricity instead would be consumed by someone else in the energy network leaving the environmental impact the same.
Had Apple instead sponsored a new windmill farm - then it would have been different.
> The facility is also designed to capture excess heat from equipment inside the facility and conduct it into the district heating system to help warm homes in the neighboring community.
Geography matters, as you can place your data centers where cooling is efficient and where there is lots of renewable energy available/possible to be harvested.
Also, a minor nitpick: please don't say windmill, wind power plants don't mill anything.
Ha, I'm adding that to my list of pedantic points, never thought of it that way.
Well, electricity production generally has to be close to consumption. So if you can move a serious part of consumption to somewhere where renewable energy is plentiful, that's great and a clear net benefit.
And the only way this happens is:
1) Government regulation mandating a certain percent of energy is generated from renewables
or
2) Enough consumers demand (through purchase agreements like this) renewable energy.
Apple is most definitely helping renewables in this way, and writing it off as "bookkeeping" is disingenuous.
I wondered if something special happened when a big company like Apple bought 100% wind energy. They could be paying above market price as you could do at some point if you were a simple private consumer. But more likely they are paying less.