Data Centers Africa and operator Orange both plan to use solar power for at least some of their data center power requirements in parts of Africa.
Africa Data Centers has announced that it has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with DPA Southern Africa Pty Ltd (DPA SA), a joint venture between Distributed Power Africa and French utility EDF.
Under the terms of the agreement, DPA SA will supply 12 MW of renewable solar power to data center facilities in South Africa.
Power will be supplied to the Africa data center facilities in part from a solar farm that DPA is developing near Bloemfontein to supply the first 12 MW of capacity needed for the ADC data centers.
Many estimates claim that data centers are responsible for 2% of the world’s energy consumption. Data Centers Africa itself aims to power all of its data centers with clean, zero-carbon energy sources.
DPA is a pan-African renewable energy company with core operations in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Through DPA SA, a 50:50 joint venture between DPA and EDF in South Africa, EDF intends to develop hybrid energy solutions for customers in Africa.
The announcement follows news late last week that Orange Côte d’Ivoire is partnering with SolarX Group to harness solar power for two major data centers in West Africa: Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
SolarX, part of investment firm Omnium Invest, provides solar panel deployments in West Africa. The company said the deployments will meet about half of Orange’s data center needs in Yamoussoukro and 37 percent of the telco’s facility in Ouagadougou.
Orange previously installed solar panels at its GOS (Groupement Orange Services) data center in Grand Bassam in Côte d’Ivoire, covering half of the site’s daytime energy consumption.