Digital world drives growing demand for renewable energy – pv magazine Australia

From the 24.06. print issue of pv magazine.

Data centers come in many sizes. The largest, China Telecom’s Inner Mongolia Information Park, spans 100 hectares and uses up to 150 megawatts per hour. Northern Virginia in the United States houses about 300 facilities in a group known as Data Center Alley, each of which uses about 10 to 50 times more energy per square meter than a typical commercial office. U.S. utility Dominion Energy was forced to suspend grid connections to new Data Center Alley members in 2022 and is currently building new transmission lines to meet demand.

There are more than 5,000 data centers in the U.S., and consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that data center energy consumption will increase from a peak of 17 GW/hour in 2022 to 35 GW/hour in 2030.

Scaling

Data centers are becoming more dense and energy-intensive, but at the same time more efficient.

“Hyperscale cloud providers seem to be locked in an arms race to build as much infrastructure as possible as quickly as possible,” said Dan Thompson, principal research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “Some of that is high-density, high-performance, compute-type deployments, but a lot of that is also cloud providers building for scale. The densities in watts per square foot are going up, but I think what we’re seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Data centers have a power usage efficiency (PUE) rating, which measures how much energy is needed for computing compared to other activities such as cooling, lighting, and power losses. A PUE of 1.5 would mean that the data center requires 500 kW of additional power per 1 MW needed for computing.

S&P’s Thompson said power densities fell from an average of 1.58 in 2020 as power density and cooling efficiency improved. The lows, however, come with some tradeoffs.

“Currently, data centers being built are designed for a PUE of 1.3 to 1.4, so there’s some improvement,” Thompson said. “That said, while they’re designed for that PUE, there are a number of factors that can cause a building to never achieve that PUE, depending on the climate and operations. We’ve seen some designs with a PUE of 1.15 to 1.2, but those facilities require a lot of clean water to achieve those numbers. Given the challenges of access to clean water, hyperscalers and the companies that build data centers for them tend to build slightly less efficient data centers in order to use very little or no water.”

Green computer technologies

Global tech giants are the largest buyers of power purchase agreements (PPAs) for renewable energy. On March 1, 2024, Microsoft and asset manager Brookfield signed a record 10.5 GW deal to provide solar, wind, and “emerging or impactful zero-emission power technologies” to Microsoft between 2026 and 2030.

Microsoft says its CO₂ Emissions have now increased by 30% since 2020, when the 2030 net zero emissions target was set, largely due to the growth of data centres.

“The increase in our Scope 3 (third-party, supply chain) emissions is primarily due to the construction of more data centers and the associated embedded carbon in building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks,” Microsoft said, adding that the 10.5 GW of renewable PPA is in addition to its 19.8 GW of clean energy portfolio.

Simon Maine, Managing Director, Communications, Renewable Energy and Transformation at Brookfield, said: pv magazine that the deal was eight times larger than any previous PPA.

“We have a very large renewable and transformation business, with over $100 billion in assets in that business alone and over 30 years of experience in that sector,” Maine said. “We’re going to either buy assets or, more recently and more likely, buy companies. The companies will have high-quality management teams that have the full spectrum of capabilities. We’re looking at somewhere between 5GW and 7GW per year (by 2030). The Microsoft deal is probably about 30% of that growth, and that’s before we take into account any additional acquisitions.”

Brookfield has acquired a majority stake in Indian company Leap Green Energy for $US740 million ($US500 million), sources said, and is also said to be preparing to acquire Australian renewable energy developer WindLab, which has 24 GW of projects under construction or in development.

Anas Papazachariou, Senior Manager of PPAs at Cero Generation, a renewable energy developer, explained how colocation can meet the energy needs of data centres.

“A single solution where solar meets all the growth in the number and size of data centers is probably not optimal, and I have to be honest about that,” he said. “So a lot of buyers want to create virtual portfolios, while wind and solar and combined batteries are part of their portfolio because they’re actually optimizing their profiles based on that.”

According to Papazachariou, combining solar with storage means more expensive offtake contracts but also lower risk.

Effective clusters

“Hyperscale” data centers are clustered together to increase performance. When it comes to latency, many other data centers, especially those supporting Internet and network services, are distributed closer to population centers. They are smaller and experience greater demand variability.

Mike Bates, general manager of the Intel Energy Center of Excellence, said data centers are using workload management software that can respond to energy conditions in real time. Intel deploys the software in data centers to manage workflows and workloads, as well as track the carbon footprint of workloads for audits by companies that claim workflows are low-carbon or net-zero.

“One of my customers is (internally) Intel Data Center Group, and we’re working to implement the same solutions that we’re taking outside the market, making sure that we’ve hardened data centers for climate impacts while also opening up new opportunities,” Bates said. “For example, our software is also able to adjust loads to certain conditions. If I can shift a load inside the data center to a time when there’s an excess of energy, I can actually get paid for that energy usage.” He added that energy resilience also includes outages, taking into account climate impacts.

Ben Levitt, associate director of gas, power and climate solutions in the North America Energy and Renewables research team at S&P Global Commodity Insights, highlighted the financial benefits of flexible data center operations.

“Data centers with agile operations, meaning interruptible, price-sensitive operations, are cheaper to deliver than those that are less agile,” Levitt said. “Data centers that are interruptible can even get faster network connections. Additionally, and independently, it’s possible that big tech will drive investment in developing and scaling new, ‘clean enterprise’ technologies needed for 24/7 clean energy for their data centers.”

Levitt said new loads will drive new investment in renewable energy, but fossil fuel generation and, increasingly, batteries will also create additional demand. Ultimately, much will depend on local bureaucracies and permits.

Levitt added that it’s possible that big tech companies could play a role in scaling new, clean technology. “These efforts could accelerate the development of newer technologies that could change the energy mix at a faster pace than previously thought,” he said.