The New Paradigm Shift in Data Center Development: Green Renewable Energy
By: Jason Bell
techrealestatetrends.com
The world is becoming a more crowded place. About 7.5 billion people currently populate the earth and the United Nations estimates this figure will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050. With this population expansion comes continued and unprecedented erosion of our natural resources. While the idea of sustainability has moved further up the global agenda, the main consideration for many data center providers is how to incorporate renewable and sustainable energy into their facilities.
We are seeing this with the current growth in data center construction projects by internet and cloud giants with a surge in investment in renewable energy generation capacity to compensate for much of the energy the future data centers will consume. The following examples are recent renewable energy projects by Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon:
Facebook recently announced their plans to build a 22 acre, exclusively renewable energy powered data center in New Albany, OH.
Apple announced the completion of a 50MW solar farm in Arizona, which will offset energy consumption by the company’s new data center in Mesa, Arizona. Apple also has contracted for the output of 130MW of capacity from a solar project in Central California.
Amazon announced the completion of a 253MW wind farm in Texas, which is also meant to offset grid electricity that powers its massive cloud.
Google has taken a leadership position in procuring renewable energy to power its data centers, lining up power purchase agreements (PPAs) totaling more than 2.6 gigawatts of wind and solar energy capacity.
This is also leading to a new paradigm shift in the location of these large deployments. New secondary markets such as Ohio, New Mexico, Nebraska and others are being considered based on the capability to develop large scale, renewable energy.
We also expect the data center REITs, developers and operators to soon follow suit as their enterprise clients will be required to follow the same green sustainability prerequisites.