Telehouse International Corporation of Europe, a global data centre service provider, has signed a 10-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with power generation firm RWE.
Covering the 630MW London Array offshore wind farm in the outer Thames Estuary, the PPA will provide a ‘substantial amount’ of the energy used at Telehouse’s London Docklands campus. How much of the wind plant’s capacity the PPA accounts for is not public information, Current± heard.
The wind power plant is operated by RWE and owned by a consortium of four partners: RWE, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Greencoat UK Wind PLC and Masdar Energy UK Limited.
London Array comprises 175 turbines and, at 630MW capacity, was the largest wind Power station globally when it went operational in 2013, a title it held until 2018.
Mushtaq Choudhary, head of procurement at Telehouse Europe, explained that the data centre firm is “committed to enhancing energy efficiency, promoting green procurement, and reducing our carbon footprint”. The company powers all of its data centres with electricity from 100% renewable sources.
Data centres’ power drain
Ireland can stand as a case study for the impact of data centres on energy usage. Metered electricity consumption statistics for 2023 showed that data centres in the country took a 21% share of the total usage, more than the total amount for urban dwellings (18%) and for rural dwellings (10%).
The load taken by data centres has rapidly increased: in 2015, data centres used 5% of metered electricity, rising to 18% in 2022, rising 3% in the year to 2023.
As well as threatening the decarbonisation of electricity and putting additional pressure on the already constrained electricity grid, the cost of powering a data centre for the operator is incredibly high.
Globally, this has seen data centre providers turn to renewable energy as a more cost-effective and sustainable solution.
GridBeyond has provided battery energy storage systems (BESS) for two Irish data centres owned by Singapore-listed Keppel DC REIT, while Greek Metlen Metals (formerly Mytilineos) has two long-term PPAs with Keppel, covering two solar PV plants that provide power for two Dublin data centres.
Last year, Cardiff City Council unanimously approved a 1,000MW BESS to be co-located with a data centre in Splott, Cardiff, meanwhile cloud services provider iomart announced it would power its Maidenhead data centre with a 560-panel solar PV installation.
Earlier this year, tech giant Google signed a PPA with US solar developer Leeward Renewable Energy, covered in detail on our sister site PV Tech, supporting over 700MW of solar PV in Oklahoma.
