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