Facebook reported that it’s building a large $1 billion data center in Ft. Worth, Texas. The facility is already being constructed and will be Facebook’s fifth data center. The data center will utilize wind power from a large wind farm that is also under construction on 17,000 acres of land in Clay County about 90 miles from the data center. This data center will be 100% powered by clean energy.
Presently, Facebook’s
Iowa Data center is also being powered with energy from a nearby wind farm. Wind
energy is the cheapest and most widely deployed form of clean energy around the
world. One
gigawatt is the equivalent to a large coal or natural gas plant. Facebook isn’t
just focused on clean energy for its data centers, Facebook has also
constructed its data centers in ways that make them very energy efficient. This
was achieved by using outdoor air for cooling (instead of power hungry air
conditioners), and also energy-efficient servers and facility designs.
This Facebook’s strategy
is one of the few examples of an Internet company making use of clean power to
run web services. Facebook will most likely purchase the wind power at a fixed
low rate over several decades. If grid energy prices rise, this will help
Facebook curb expenses on its energy bill. Facebook is also aiming to achieve a
new goal of powering its operations with 50 percent renewable energy by the end
of 2018. This data center will also utilize the latest OCP (Open Compute
Project) technology, including Yosemite for compute and fabric, Wedge, and
6-pack at the network layer.
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