African Data Center Firm Teraco to Build Out Giant Power Plant

(Bloomberg) -- Teraco Data Environments, Africa’s largest data center company, is building a utility-scale power plant to run its operations in South Africa. 

The firm raised an initial ZAR2 billion ($104 million) with Absa Group for the construction of a 120 megawatt solar plant and an 80 megawatt wind farm in South Africa’s Free State province, which will power its facilities and help deal with rolling blackouts.

“The plan is to get all of our power from renewable energy sources by 2035,” Chief Executive Officer Jan Hnizdo said in an interview. 

Almost daily outages in Africa’s most developed economy that often leave homes and businesses without power for more than 10 hours a day are forcing companies to invest in their own generation facilities. Data centers, in particular, consume a significant amount of electricity and Teraco expects the solar plant to provide eight hours of supply per day, supplementing power from Eskom Holdings SOC. 

Teraco expects the state-owned power utility’s coal dependency to decrease from 85% to 60% over the next three years as more independent power producers come on stream. 

Negotiations to secure agreements with the South African government and Eskom to connect to the grid took about three years, and the facilities are expected to come online in the next three years, said Hnizdo.

Related:The Pros and Cons of Wind Power for Data Center Sustainability