South Africa’s biggest data centre company kissing Eskom’s coal power goodbye

Digital Realty’s Teraco, South Africa’s biggest data centre operator, plans to source all its power from renewable sources over the next decade, significantly reducing its reliance on Eskom in the process.

Teraco is Africa’s leading carrier-neutral colocation provider. It is well-known for hosting the continent’s biggest Internet exchange — NAPAfrica — critical for delivering fast access to online content and services in South Africa.

Teraco’s seven data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban currently have a critical load capacity of 186MW.

An additional 90MW capacity is currently under construction, which will take these facilities’ total potential power draw to 276MW.

That is more power than a single coal-fired unit at Eskom’s older Grootvlei or Hendrina power stations can supply.

Teraco aims to power 50% of its colocation sites with renewable energy by 2027 and have 100% of these facilities running on clean sources by 2035.

To achieve this, the company will use a mix of Eskom or local utility-supplied clean energy, energy generated from its own solar facilities, third-party renewable energy suppliers, wheeling, and renewable energy certificate purchases.

A big chunk of its capacity will be served by its own 200MW utility-scale solar programme, for which Teraco has set aside R3 billion in capex in the next five years.

The company secured grid capacity on Eskom’s network to construct a 120MW plant in the Free State in February 2024.

Power from this facility will be wheeled across Eskom’s transmission and municipalities’ distribution networks to Teraco’s data centres across the country.

The company expects the plant will produce about 338,000MWh annually, playing a significant role in meeting Teraco’s power demands.

Once online, the power plant will be among the biggest single solar facilities in South Africa.

Teraco plans to build another 80MW of utility-scale solar, although the details of that plant remain to be confirmed.

In addition to the larger power plants, local rooftop solar panels is supplementing power requirements directly at the site.

The company has already deployed 6MW of rooftop solar at its JB1, JB2, JBD3, and CT2 data centres. It plans to increase this capacity to 10MW as more facilities become operational.

The massive rooftop solar system at JB2

Another major data centre provider — Africa Data Centres — recently began construction of a 12MW solar power plant in the Free State to power its Cape Town data centre.

Subsequent project phases will see capacity added for its data centres in Johannesburg.

The Amazon Web Services data centre in Cape Town has also sourced some of its electricity from a 10MW solar plant in the Northern Cape since 2021.

The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies’ National Policy on Cloud and Data demands that data centre operators have additional alternative energy sources to prevent disruptions to online services.

Many data centres in South Africa already have backup systems, but these are diesel-powered, which means they cause pollution and can have expensive running costs.

Reducing reliance on the national grid — which is highly coal-dependent — and fuel-based backup generators is not only an issue of environmental responsibility but could also significantly reduce data centres’ electricity costs in the long run.

Utility-scale solar is already cheaper to construct than coal power per MW of capacity.

In South Africa, the total power demand of all data centres is around 652.29MW, enough to power over 2.2 million average South African homes.

Not only does their high-end processing and storage hardware consume lots of electricity, it also generates plenty of heat.

Alongside its power capacity expansion, Teraco is implementing more efficient data centre designs to improve its power usage efficiency, including deploying centralised cooling plants with improved cooling density and capacity.

It has also replaced electrode humidifiers with ultrasonic humidifiers, significantly lowering the energy required to maintain humidity levels with service-level agreements.