Green House Data Launches 100-Percent-Renewable Wyoming Data Center

Hosting and colocation service provider Green House Data held a grand opening for its data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Wednesday, whose entire energy consumption is offset through renewable-energy credit purchases. One-quarter of the facility’s data center floor was occupied by the day of the event, the state of Wyoming signed as its first customer.

Green House Data uses sustainability as a differentiator. The company buys renewable energy credits to offset energy consumption of its facility in Portland, Oregon, and its Newark, New Jersey, facility has a 2-megawatt solar-panel system supplying a portion of the massive data center’s energy needs.

The 35,000-square-foot Cheyenne facility provides 5 megawatts of power, expandable to 8 megawatts. It supplements an existing 10,000-square-foot data center on the property.

Green House Data built the data center together with developer fifteenfortyseven Critical Systems. Construction crews broke ground on the site about one year ago.

Green House Data CEO Shawn Mills documented every step of the project, from idea to ground breaking, in a series of articles on Data Center Knowledge last year.

“It's really exciting to see this new industry start to burgeon here in Wyoming, and we're really excited to be a part of that reality," Mills said in a statement announcing the facility’s opening. “This building represents a $200 million investment in Cheyenne.”

A home of rare data centers

Cheyenne has become home to a number of unique data center endeavors besides the latest green data center project. Microsoft has deployed a proof-of-concept set-up at a Cheyenne municipal waste treatment plant, which uses fuel cells to convert methane generated as a byproduct of waste treatment into electricity for one of its data center modules called ITPACs.

In addition to the “Data Plant” research project, Microsoft has a massive production data center in town, which is about to get even bigger. In April, Microsoft announced a $274 million investment in expansion of the data center site.

Two years ago, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research had one of the world’s most energy efficient data centers built in Cheyenne to house Yellowstone, the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to studying climate change.