Carbonzero power for data centres
WELLINGTON: Microsoft’s three new data centres in New Zealand will be powered by certified carbonzero power electricity as industry leaders rush to show off their green credentials.
The data centres are being powered under a deal with Auckland company Ecotricity.
These are among several large cloud data centres being built in Auckland and the South Island.
Auckland company Datagrid has marketed a centre it is building outside Invercargill as ‘‘Australasia’s first carbonneutral hyperscale data centre’’.
Microsoft said its centres would use air cooling, not water, and therefore be cleaner.
Businesses using ‘‘sustainable cloud’’ data centres, instead of their own ‘‘less efficient’’ infrastructure, would help the whole country, Microsoft said in a statement.
The pandemic has increased demand for data centres but they are power hungry.
Singapore this year lifted a threeyear moratorium on building data centres but has set strict new standards around energy use.
In Ireland, data centres now consume more power than all rural homes in the country and have complicated its efforts to combat climate change.
A 2021 estimate is by 2030 they will represent 1.86% of global electricity consumption, up from 1.15% in 2016.
data centres are becoming much more efficient, studies showing data storage has risen 25 times with only threefold increase in energy use. Data centre computing has risen 6.5 times with just a 25% increase in power use. However, researchers have suggested the efficiency gains might start to slow down.
A recent New Zealand Trade and Enterprise study found sustainability was an increasingly big factor for customers choosing a data centre and that within five years, more than half of customers would put a lot of store in it.
It concluded data centres provide a great economic opportunity — but it did not look into how many or what kind of jobs might be generated by them.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said in response to an RNZ Official Information Act request that no briefings to ministers existed about the major data centres being set up here, by Microsoft, Amazon, Datagrid, DCI Data Centres, Lake Parime and Australia’s CDC Data Centres.
The ministry also said it had no internal reports that address the risks, costs and benefits of them.
It transferred the OIA request to the Department of Internal Affairs, which looks after many digital and data initiatives.
The Datagrid project is to create up to 700 jobs during construction — and perhaps 25 to 70 jobs once complete — and use up to 150MW of power, way more than existing smaller data centres here.
A global study said cloud data centres would require the most staff ‘‘by a significant margin’’, compared with other types of data centre, but warned ‘‘technical staff are notoriously difficult to recruit for data centres’’.
‘‘Mechanical and electrical engineers in strategy and operations roles, and all types of controls and monitoring employees, are among the technical staff that will be increasingly needed through (at least) 2025,’’ the forecast said.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft account for more than half of the world’s 600 hyperscale data centres.
The data centres require big, fast links. A new submarine cable to Asia, Australia and the US, called Hawaiki Nui, is being built by Datagrid’s parent, Singaporean company BW Digital.
It is expected to be completed by 2025, adding to the Hawaiki Transpacific Cable that began service in 2018.
The University of Otago recently signed up to Datagrid.
BW Digital said it was spending more than $1 billion on the data centre and cable. — RNZ