November 13, 2013
If there’s one major downside to our digital lives, it’s the enormous amount of power needed to keep massive data centers running. Thankfully, tech companies are increasingly focusing on ways to power those centers with clean energy. As Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm reports, Facebook is the latest to make a major commitment:
On Wednesday Facebook will announce that when its fourth data center is built in Iowa, and starts serving traffic in 2015, it will be entirely run off the power of a nearby wind farm.
Local utility MidAmerican Energy will build, own and operate the 138 MW wind farm, which will be built in 2014 in Wellsburg, Iowa. The data center, which will be built close by in Altoona, Iowa, will use a similar energy efficient design as Facebook’s other data centers based on its Open Compute architecture in Oregon, North Carolina and Sweden.
All told, Facebook is aiming to have a quarter of all its energy consumption come from clean energy within the next two years. Good on them.