Equinix looking to build sustainability program with new innovation facility
Equinix has opened up a Co-Innovation Facility in its North Virginia campus which is going to develop a number of ambitious sustainability initiatives. The ever-increasing power consumption of the data center industry is becoming more and more of an issue, and Equinix clearly sees developing expertise in building sustainable data centers as a worthwhile strategy.
Along with the announcement of the innovation facility, Equinix announced some partnerships to illustrate the projects CIF will work on. These include a partnership with Bloom Energy which aims to replace onsite diesel generators and UPS systems with solid oxide fuel cells and VPS and Natron Energy which hopes to grow power efficiency by over 30% through improved management. There’s also a partnership looking at the problem at the chip level: Zutacore has a direct-to-chip, waterless liquid-cooled rack system that can cool over 100kW a rack.
Bloom Energy Servers. Bloom Energy’s fuel cell technology is a part of the CIF program at Equinix.
Source: Bloom Energy
The data center industry is looking to improve its sustainability credentials. But governments are also becoming more actively involved. Recently, for example, the Netherlands halted a Facebook data center for sustainability reasons and the city of Amsterdam paused data center builds for a year in 2019. The question of how to accomplish ambitious green targets is viewed very differently in the US and outside. A recent Uptime Institute survey showed most European and Asian data center operators see regulation as the solution, whereas that is a minority view in the USA.
OneWeb inks deals – but launch date is pushed back
Epsilon adds AWS Direct Connect in Indonesia
Article Topics
battery | Bloom Energy | data center | DCIM | Equinix | ESG | fuel cell | liquid cooling | Natron Energy | software-defined power | sustainability
Comments