The Internet giant and private-equity firm will become majority owners of four solar farms south of Sacramento, according to people familiar with the matter. Recurrent Energy, the project’s developer and a subsidiary of Sharp Corp., will remain a minority owner and operate the facilities, these people said.

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GigaOm, referencing a UBS research note, points out that $900 million will go into Apple’s retail outlets. The company says it will open another 40 stores in the next year.

Apple is vague, of course, about where the rest of the $7.1 billion will go, but references “product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.”

So: Lots of places.

It’s tempting to assume that the bulk of the money goes into more iCloud projects, like its North Carolina data center. And we do know, for instance, that Apple is now building a giant solar farm to help power that data center.

But Apple really isn’t in the habit of hand-tipping, and all we really know is that $7.1 billion is a lot more than $4 billion, which is what Apple spent on non-retail capex last year.

Alternate reading: Aysmco’s Horace Dediu.

The Charlotte Observer reports that Apple has been issued the permits necessary to prepare the 171-acre parcel of vacant land adjacent to the data center for a new construction project. The name of that undertaking: “Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded,” a riff on the data center’s original code name.

Details beyond that are slim, but sources close to Apple confirm that the Catawba County solar project is indeed under way.

Which makes perfect sense, really. A solar farm would be in keeping with Apple’s commitment to renewable energy. Apple’s manufacturing site in Cork, Ireland, is entirely wind-powered, and its Elk Grove, Calif., and Austin, Texas, facilities are now powered by 100 percent renewable energy resources, according to the company’s 2011 Facilities Report Environmental Update.

The Project Dolphin Solar Farm would advance this commitment even further by establishing an on-site resource for renewable energy generation and setting the bar a bit higher for an industry whose pollution-limiting efforts extend no further than purchasing renewable energy credits.

Last week, Google took a $168 million equity stake in the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a utility-scale solar plant being developed by BrightSource Energy in the Mojave Desert. Today, it announced it had invested $100 million in the Shepherds Flat project, an Oregon wind farm being developed by Caithness Energy.

When it’s finished, the $2 billion wind farm will be the largest in the world, producing 845 megawatts of energy–enough to power 235,000 homes.

Like all Google clean energy investments, this one is said to be geared toward lowering the cost of running the company’s operations, though now that it has won approval to enter the speculative energy trading business, it could potentially evolve into something more.

In a slight switcheroo from viral video, here is a cool infographic from the One Block Off the Grid solar energy blog.

As 1BOG notes:

“Facebook recently passed 500 million users. If the growth rate of the world’s largest and fastest growing social network could be applied to solar, it would only take 4.7 years to power the entire world with solar energy.”

And that’s without adding in all the energy expended poking, friending and throwing sheep!

Check out the graphic (click in it to make it larger)–1BOG explains that the green is the growth curve of Facebook since 2004 if it were applied to global solar energy. The x-axis is months and the y-axis represents additional terawatts solar energy generating capacity that would be added over the next decade.

So you don’t miss a video, here is the one that Facebook showed at the launch of its Places geo-location feature yesterday (and which seems to have been shot partly in Dolores Park in San Francisco, right near All Things Digital Worldwide HQ):

While in Los Angeles for a brief second on Friday, BoomTown motored over to the Brentwood home of puckish entrepreneur Jason Calacanis to talk to him about his prank tweets the night before the introduction of the iPad last week.

On Tuesday night before the much hyped launch of the newest device from Apple (AAPL), Calacanis let loose with a series of over-the-top posts to Twitter, claiming he had been a beta tester for the iPad tablet computer for 10 days.

Unfortunately, these were assertions that some in the mostly mainstream media took too seriously.

So was it a jump-the-shark moment for journalism?

It was certainly sloppy, given that Calacanis is well known for slapping Apple around and that the secretive computer giant does not even give its own employees access to new products.

All this might have sent off alarm bells.

But he followed up with a series of tweets on a myriad of features of the new iPad–one nuttier, pricier and heavier than the next, such as a built-in HDTV tuner, a solar recharging pad and more.

For example: “Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of u.”

The problem was that a few big media outfits, including CNNMoney.com and WSJ.com, posted reports on the tweets without much of a raised eyebrow or first checking on their veracity with Apple or with Calacanis.

While anyone can get caught in a prank–and this was a pretty elaborate one pulled by Calacanis, who claims he was just trying to point out how ridiculous Apple hype had become–it’s still an instructive moment for journalism.

Here’s my interview with Calacanis, explaining it all (with a little shot of his new baby girl at the end), as well as images of his faux iPad tweets below: