The South African business landscape is embracing more digital solutions, buoyed by the need for digital transformation in the pandemic era, more operations are moving to the cloud as organisations seek agility, flexibility and resiliency.

This in turn will place greater importance on the country’s data centre infrastructure, but given how energy-intensive these buildings are, a switch to renewable energy sources is something that needs serious consideration.

As Jaco du Plooy, product manager at Eaton South Africa explains, data centres could draw as much as a fifth of global electricity demands by 2025, along with accounting for 14 percent of carbon emissions by 2040.

If South Africa is to invest in its data centre infrastructure, it needs to do so with a view of renewable energy in mind.

For its part, du Plooy explains that Eaton has already begun to think about energy for its own environment.

“Rather than focus on the energy drain that is a reality for data centres, we can instead take a proactive approach to this challenge. Data centres could in fact lead the charge to help put an end to climate change by harnessing renewable energy to meet 100% of data facilities’ primary power requirements,” he notes.

“Eaton has always believed in the power of collaboration, which is why we have joined forces with some of the world’s leading experts to overcome the challenge of providing reliable power to data centres, protecting them from the potential pitfalls of intermittent renewable energy sources,” adds du Plooy.

One of the ways that Eaton is aiming to pioneer renewable energy application in data centres is with its DATAZERO Project.

“This collaboration saw the design of microgrids that combine renewable energy production with hybrid energy storage. Designing a middleware ‘negotiation loop’ as part of the project, that matches energy production and storage with data centre requirements, confirmed that it is possible to run a 1MW data centre with only local renewable power,” highlights du Plooy.

“With research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance highlighting that energy from new wind and solar installations will be cheaper than that from natural gas by the mid-2020s, the successor to DATAZERO, DATAZERO2, shows that data centres could even become green energy hubs that help intelligently balance supply and demand across the grid, through a bi-directional flow of power,” he concludes.

As the need for data centres shows no signs of decreasing, it will be organisations like Eaton that could play an important role in ensuring this infrastructures are less energy intensive moving forward.

[Image – Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash]