By Erin Richey
When it was completed in 2013, the London Array was the largest offshore wind farm in the world, designed to produce a gigawatt of electricity. In April of this year,
One gigawatt was almost 20 percent of the wind power capacity for the whole state of Iowa in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Renewable energy seems like a natural solution for data centers, which are notoriously electricity hungry. Not surprisingly, the purchase of large contracts and certificates by big tech companies to green their images is driving a new wave of interest in renewable energy. But will utilities need to significantly expand their capacity to meet this demand?
Pressures for efficiency
Data centers accounted for 1.3 percent of global energy consumption in 2010, and 2 percent of electricity use in the U.S., according to research by Stanford University Steyer-Taylor Center research fellow Jon Koomey. Between 2000 and 2005, energy use by data centers worldwide doubled, but from 2005 to 2010 energy use increased by only 56 percent worldwide and 36 percent in the U.S. Koomey’s paper suggests that the cause is a lower than anticipated rate of server installations.
“Enterprise data centers are the biggest part of the issue [of excess energy use]: between 80 and 85 percent are in companies whose primary business is not computing. The Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles are the most efficient of all the data centers, and they’re the ones getting all of the attention,” says Koomey. In his research, Koomey found that Google's data centers' electricity use comprises less than one percent of all data center energy use globally.
As a result, Koomey says, demand from the companies with the most pressure to switch to renewable energy is tempered by their improvements in data center energy efficiency.
“These are customer-facing companies, and the customers care about this issue,” says Koomey. He adds that assuaging customers’ energy concerns has benefits for the companies in addition to benefits for the environment. “These companies also have very high margins. Data centers are highly profitable. That means that they’re willing to pay a little bit extra” to get green energy kudos.
Significant investments
In addition to Google’s goal of powering all of its operations with 100-percent renewable energy—the company claims to have achieved 34 percent so far—it has invested more than $1 billion in renewable energy projects, some of which supply residential energy demand or support renewable energy infrastructure overseas.
In 2013 Facebook purchased renewable energy certificates from a wind farm being developed by MidAmerican Energy to cover 100 percent of the anticipated energy consumption for a new data center in Altoona, Iowa. Facebook has also committed to a goal of 25 percent renewable energy for all of its global data centers by the end of 2015. It already has one data center, in Lulea, Sweden, powered entirely by hydroelectric energy.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Top 100 Partner Rankings, Intel uses 3.1 billion kilowatt hours of green power annually. This constitutes the entirety of the company’s electricity use, making Intel the top-ranked EPA green power partner. Microsoft ranks third, using 1.4 billion kilowatt hours of green power—50 percent of the company’s total electricity use.
Some of these contracts and certificates explicitly require extra output from utilities. Google’s power purchase arrangement with MidAmerican will be supplied by a wind project that is set to expand Iowa’s wind power by 1,050 megawatts by the end of 2015.
When the wind project supplying Facebook’s Altoona data center comes online, it will add 138 megawatts of new renewable energy capacity to the existing grid.
Even with these substantial agreements taking place, renewable energy capacity is growing at a far faster rate. Most contracts with major tech companies involve wind power, production of which grew almost 20 percent between 2012 and 2013 in the U.S., totaling 467 million megawatt hours last year. Meanwhile, wind energy consumption for the commercial sector has remained steady at around 293,071 megawatt hours since 2012.
So, while suppliers continue to expand their projects, steady demand isn’t likely to stress the market. On whether major contracts could someday pressure renewable energy facilities and suppliers to expand their capacity, Koomey says, “If enough companies do it, then, absolutely.”
Erin Richey is a freelance data and investigative journalist reporting on digital security and construction from St. Louis.
