Nothing less will do: Tech companies want 100 percent renewables
Facebook is working to keep up with its counterparts, Google and Apple, by investing in large amounts of renewable energy on their properties. These days, if you are running your data centers off anything less than 100 percent renewable energy, you are not keeping up with the industry.
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Credit: Maxi Gago/Wikimedia Commons |
Facebook's newest announcement has to do with their planned Fort Worth data center.
"Like its predecessors, we expect Fort Worth to be one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world," said Tom Furlong, Facebook vice president of infrastructure, in a statement. "Our continuing work on data center design is an important part of our overall infrastructure efficiency efforts, which have helped us save more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years."
Facebook has announced plans to power the data center with 100 percent renewable energy -- through 204 megawatts (MW) of new energy the company helped integrate into the Texas grid -- along with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corporation, and Starwood Energy Group.
Alterra and Starwood will each own 50 percent of the Shannon Wind Farm. Alterra spokesperson Peter Lekich told FierceEnergy that although a portion of the energy generated by the Shannon wind farm will be used to power Facebook's new data center, the tech company will not be their only client.
"Construction on the project is already under way on a 17,000-acre site in Clay County, just 90 miles from the data center, and we expect it to begin delivering clean energy to the grid by 2016," Facebook said in a statement. "200 MW is more energy than we will need for the foreseeable future, and we're proud to have played a role in bringing this project to Texas."
The 119 wind turbines for the project will each have an output of 1.71 megawatts (MW).
Facebook's overall goal is to run 50 percent of its operations with clean energy by 2018 -- with a 100 percent goal eventually. A similar data center in Altoona, Iowa, built by the company in 2014, is already powered by 100 percent wind energy.
"There is a growing trend of major U.S. companies (including WalMart, Amazon, Google and Mars) and other non-utility groups buying wind," the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said in a statement. "More than half of the power purchase agreements for wind signed in the first quarter of 2015 were from four companies."
In February, Google announced plans to purchase wind energy from a NextEra Resources farm to power their Mountain View headquarters. Google is involved in at least 17 utility-scale renewable energy projects to date, providing more than 1.1 gigawatts (GW) renewable energy.
Apple also announced in February plans to power two of their new data centers with 100 percent renewable energy, in Ireland and Denmark, to support nearly 40,000 jobs across the continent.
"As companies buy wind, Americans will increasingly see that this is not a futuristic ideal, but a mainstream, technologically advanced power source available for us today," AWEA said. "After all, if it's good enough to power Facebook's data center, it's good enough to power our homes and businesses."
AWEA added that it will be up to states to create policies to allow and incentivize renewables in order to attract large projects like this to their states.
"Thanks to our continued focus on efficiency and our investments in renewables in recent years, the carbon impact of one person's use of Facebook for an entire year is the same as the carbon impact of a medium latte," Furlong added.
The renewable goals are a part of the company's Open Compute Project, an initiative by Facebook that now has 200 members that collaborate on the development of efficient and sustainable data center technologies.