Reaching sustainable development goals
April 2023
News
Africa Data Centres, a business of Cassava Technologies group, has signed a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with DPA Southern Africa (DPA SA), a joint company of Distributed Power Africa and the French utility company, EDF. Under the terms of the agreement, DPA SA will supply 12 MW of renewable solar energy for Africa Data Centres facilities in South Africa. "Through this agreement, our customers will benefit from a sustainable data centre," says Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres.
As the demand for data continues to soar, the data centre industry is expanding rapidly, he explains. "However, while data centres are the foundation of the digital transformation process in Africa, they require reliable, cost effective, and preferably green power to operate. Our partnership with DPA will also help in reducing our reliance on the strained South African national grid, enabling us to play our part in alleviating the current energy challenges facing the country."
Energy will be delivered to Africa Data Centres' facilities partly from the solar farm DPA is developing near Bloemfontein to deliver the first 12 MW required for the ADC data centres.
Estimates claim that data centres are responsible for as much as 2% of the world's energy consumption, which is approximately the same as the aviation industry. While it cannot be denied that tremendous strides have been made towards carbon neutrality, designing and operating sustainable facilities is still one of the greatest challenges faced by developers, co-location operators, global cloud computing providers, and hyperscalers.
According to Durvasula, each year the data centre industry must try to accommodate two fundamental goals. Firstly, it must meet the demand for the capacity needed to support the ever-increasing range of high-performance computing, digital services, edge environments, and connected devices. Secondly, it must find ways to lower energy usage, and reduce its universal impact resources that are already stretched to the limit.
Africa Data Centres itself has a target to power all its data centres with clean, zero-carbon sources of energy. "This new deal will provide over 30% of our South African data centres with renewable energy, a great stride forward in our aim to reach carbon neutrality."
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