Data centres ditching Eskom

Some of the biggest challenges faced in the cloud and hosting sector are energy costs and ensuring constant electricity supply, with many data centre providers in the country ditching Eskom for more reliable power sources.
Despite the continued suspension of load-shedding since 26 March this year, Eskom still implements load reduction in many parts of the country, and some areas are prone to unplanned power outages.
This means that backup power costs significantly impact data centre providers’ operating costs, as their business models require uninterrupted power.
Unlike physical retailers and other traditional businesses, data centre providers don’t have the luxury of shutting down their equipment after business hours.
Open Access Data Centres (OADC) told MyBroadband that it launched a 330kW pilot grid-tied solar project at its Durban facility in 2024.
“The system ties directly into the A and B stream IT loads, directly offsetting energy usage at the rack level,” it said.
“Data hall 1’s IT design capacity is 330kW, allowing the solar system the ability to offset the entire load during peak sun, realising green energy during daylight hours.”
It said the move marks the start of OADC’s broader renewable energy rollout plan, through which it wants to install solar systems for its Isando phase two and three builds. The facility is expected to launch in Q2 2025.
“We are also investigating other forms of renewable energy initiatives in a drive to reduce PUE ratios across all sites, including but not limited to chilled water and potential ice storage, gas power generation and heat reuse for our Nigerian site,” said OADC.
For reference, PUE is the ratio of the total amount of power used by a data centre facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.
Absolute Hosting managing director Jade Benson recently told MyBroadband that backup power costs escalate rapidly with demand reduction mechanisms like load reduction.
“Data centre providers are expected and required to increase capacity to cater for these outages,” he said.
Local providers like Open Access Data Centres, Africa Data Centres, Amazon Web Services, and Teraco have all started reducing their reliance on Eskom.
Africa Data Centres broke ground on an off-site solar power plant in the Free State in April 2024, designed to provide power to its facilities nationwide.
It partnered with Distributed Power Africa (DPA) on the project.
The project’s first phase involves procuring 12MW of production capacity from DPA to supply its Cape Town data centre CPT1. The facility was recently upgraded to support 12MW of IT load.
Its power purchase agreement with DPA will help Africa Data Centres increase its use of renewable energy to over 33% of its total demand.
The project’s second phase will procure solar power to supply its Johannesburg-based JHB1 and JHB2 facilities.
Africa Data Centres also has rooftop solar on-site at the JHB1 data centre, which supplied 4% of its demand in the 2023 financial year.
It wants to improve this contribution to 10% in the 2024 financial year and achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) established a solar power plant in the Northern Cape in early 2022. It provides up to 10MW of capacity to the AWS data centre in Cape Town.
Amazon says the solar power plant can produce as much as 28,000MWh of energy annually. It also plans a second 18MW solar farm, the Springbok Solar Farm, for the Free State.
The international hosting and e-commerce giant already procured or installed enough renewable energy to meet 100% of its demand by 2023. This was a target it had set to achieve by 2030.
Teraco is the country’s biggest data centre operator, and its power requirements put the size of its operation into perspective.
The data centre provider plans to procure at least 200MW of solar power capacity, with it recently announcing that it had secured 120MW of transmission grid capacity from Eskom.
The transmission capacity will be used to wheel electricity from a solar farm in the Free State to Teraco data centres nationwide. It wants to procure at least another 120MW in the coming years.
The new solar capacity will be additional to its on-premises rooftop solar installations at its data centres, which provide up to 6MW of capacity. It aims to increase this to 10MW as it expands its IT load capacity.