Apple is celebrating Earth Day this week by shining a spotlight on its clean energy and carbon footprint reduction initiatives. While Apple has been working on having 100 percent of its data centers run on renewables for a couple years, the company on Monday is showing off an environmentally-themed video narrated by CEO Tim Cook, accompanied by some awesome solar photos on Apple.com, and a long feature in Wired on its clean power projects.

Why now (beyond the somewhat contrived Earth Day event)? When I published this investigative piece last November on Apple’s solar projects, it was difficult to get information from Apple on the projects. Now about a half year later, Apple is ready to talk.

Apple’s solar farm in North Carolina

One of the reasons for Apple’s new willingness to talk is that many of Apple’s clean power projects are now far beyond the experimental phase. I