Schneider Electric says renewable energy use can create sustainability and resilience around data centres.
With their steady and predictable demand for power, data centres are part of the solution to providing a stable electricity supply to Australia as more renewable energy comes online, says Greg Boorer, the chief executive of CDC.
Data centres are often singled out as placing large demands on the electricity network, but Boorer says, “from a grid stability perspective, data centres are actually part of the solution, not part of the problem”.
Data centres have a stable and continuous need for power and so can sign long-term power contracts that can underpin the development of more renewable power.
“The contracts that we have with our customers actually provide amazing opportunities to co-invest in new renewable and clean energy generation development,” says Boorer, who founded CDC in 2007.
“It's important to recognise that data centres are a stable, continuous load on the grid, which actually provides a lot of stability when the grid normally has to manage a huge amount of variability over each 24-hour cycle.”
Their activities can also contribute to the cost of augmenting and building resilience into the power grid, he said.
Joe Craparotta, VP Cloud & Service Providers at Schneider Electric, says partnerships between data centres and grid operators are increasingly important as more organisations focus on resilience and sustainability.
Schneider is ensuring that the data centre technology it develops is sustainable, and so can help data centres meet their own and their clients’ greenhouse gas emission and sustainability targets.
“We have a technology roadmap that's incredibly sustainable in the way that we innovate, the way we manufacture, the way we bring more sustainable power systems, cooling systems and software systems to the market,” he told a roundtable discussion on the future of data and data centres hosted by The Australian.
“Equipment that is getting smaller but more powerful and performance standards that are getting higher and higher are reducing the carbon footprint inside the data centre assets.”
Data centre operators and their tenants are demanding more sustainable performance, and tenants are looking elsewhere if these demands can’t be met.
Boorer says sustainability is a non-negotiable aspect of discussions with potential clients, and even in more informal tenders it’s either mandatory or a “very, very nice to have”.
“In a lot of our larger customers and global customers, it's an imperative. So you have to have renewable energy, net zero energy all of the time. Otherwise, don't even put your hand up for new business,” he says.
Data centres have been criticised for using large amounts of water to keep their equipment cool, but CDC doesn’t consume any water for cooling.
Most data centres use water to cool the air inside the data centre, which in turn cools the equipment. But air is inefficient at transferring heat.
Instead, CDC makes use of the efficient heat transfer of water to directly cool its chipsets, with a closed-loop cooling system.
“We're a world leader in new cooling technologies,” Boorer says.
“We're seeing challenges in communities, both in Australia and around the world, around the availability and supply of water and the last thing we want to see is that directed to data centres and not the community.”
As data usage increases by more each year, electricity consumption by data centres is becoming a central focus for the tech sector and its customers. The introduction of mandatory reporting of Scope 3 carbon emissions – those of an organisation’s suppliers and customers – means companies and governments will pay more attention to their data centre providers’ emissions.
In a report earlier this year, the International Energy agency forecast that global electricity demand from data centres could double by 2023. It says that computing and cooling each account for about 40 per cent of the electricity demand from data centres, with the remaining 20 per cent coming from associated IT equipment.
It notes that a 20 per cent reduction in consumption can be achieved when operating with direct-to-chip water cooling and low-viscous fluids to cool all other components.
“Since 2010, data centre energy use (excluding crypto) has grown only moderately despite the strong growth in demand for data centre services, thanks in part to efficiency improvements in IT hardware and cooling and a shift away from small, inefficient enterprise data centres towards more efficient cloud and hyperscale data centres,” the IEA notes in another report.
Boorer says Australia’s geopolitical stability and rule of law, along with abundant clean energy resources such as wind and solar means data centres can become a major contributor to the renewable transition in this country.
“With the government leaning into energy transition and all of the work and investment that's going into that really puts us in an amazing place to be a real exporter of data centre capacity and for that to become another economic powerhouse or driver of our of Australia's future,” he says.
The amount of data governments and organisations store is growing at 80 per cent compound per year, he says.