Huge 1MW rooftop solar system to take the sting out of data centre power costs

Digital infrastructure company Equinix’s has launched a 1 megawatt (MW) solar rooftop power plant at its data centre in the industrial Fisherman’s Bend suburb in Melbourne, with an expected payback period of 6.6 years.

The short payback period for the huge solar photovoltaic (PV) installation is reduced from 8.7 years thanks to funding from selling Victorian energy efficiency certificates (VEECs).

The kind and cost of electricity is forefront in the company’s energy strategy, as Equinix seeks to defray some of the enormous energy consumption involved with running data centres and meet a renewable energy target.

The 1MW Fisherman’s Bend solar array is designed for a capacity of 16MW across two buildings.

All of the power from the new solar system, which was finished late last year, will feed the smaller building which is designed at a capacity of 6MW. The company, which has 260 data centres around the world, has another 0.8MW of solar arrays at data centres in Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney.

Last month, Equinix also closed a power purchase agreement with Portuguese clean energy company TagEnergy for the Golden Plains Wind Farm, to take 20 per cent, of 151MW, of the energy and green certificates (LGCs) generated from the 756MW first stage of the mega project, from 2029.

That deal is enough to cover Equinix’s 17 IBX data centres across Australia, and will get the company to its 100 per cent renewable energy goal.

Equinix’s large-scale energy purchases and investments is a rarity in the data centre industry, where energy consumption is something of a black box, as RenewEconomy reported last year.

There is no obligation on companies to report their centres’ capacities, despite the colossal ramp up in data centre capacity in the last decade.

The rule-of-thumb-guesstimate often reported in the Australian media is that data centres eat about 4 per cent of generated electricity, although engineering company Aurecon suggests that globally that figure is closer to 10 per cent.

Still needs financial support

Equinix’s new solar array is one of the largest of any sitting atop a data centre in Australia, says the company’s managing director Guy Danskine.

“In 2015 we made a commitment that [our data centres] would all be running on renewable energy by 2030. The other part that’s important is that today our facilities run on 96 per cent renewable energy.”

But despite its renewable energy goals, Danskine says it still needed the VEECs to make the system possible.

Despite the VEEC program going back to 2009, Victoria energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio says the government is not having to prod any holdout companies to engage with it, because employees are doing that for them.

“More and more companies have employees that want them to have a strong commitment, want them to have renewable energy targets, want them to push on climate and reduce their emissions,” she told RenewEconomy.

“It’s a very skilled workforce, very mobile and it’s becoming more typical that questions that prospective employees are asking of their prospective employer is what are your goals? That’s something that just five years ago was more on the margins but now it’s about these businesses really stepping up.”

“Certainly we’re very pleased that our Victorian energy upgrades program has assisted in Equinix deciding to install this massive solar system here at this site.”