Greener Colo: Service Providers Get Serious About Renewable Energy (datacenterfrontier.com)

1sockchuck writes: This week's Slashdot poll shows a strong preference for renewable energy to power data centers, with solar energy leading the pack. But until recently, only a few colocation providers have actually sourced renewable energy to support their facilities. A sign of progress is the commitment by Equinix, the world's largest colo provider, to shift to 100 percent renewable energy for the more than 100 data centers it operates across the world. The company is seeking to accomplish this through power purchase agreements and buying green power from utilities that offer it. Equinix is also testing both on-site solar arrays and fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which is slowly gaining traction in data centers. Although hyperscale cloud companies are sourcing more green energy, the Natural Resources Defense Council has targeted the multi-tenant data center sector as a source for huge potential gains in renewables.

Comments

Re:No, they aren't serious.

[AmiMoJo]

Any plan to reduce carbon output that does not include the use of nuclear power is not serious.

Anyone who claims that nuclear is the only option hasn't seriously looked at the alternatives.

Unreliable energy sources like wind and solar cannot power a first world economy.

No alone, no. That's just a straw man argument though, because no-one is suggesting that. The proposal is to have a mix of energy sources, including things like geothermal, hydro, wave, pumped storage, battery storage and the like.

See what I mean about not having looked seriously at the alternatives?

Any claims that the use of nuclear power is going to kill us all is laughable

Yes, they are. We are laughing at you and your second straw man. People are not opposed to nuclear power because they think there is a chance it will destroy the earth, they are opposed to it because it is extremely expensive and the people who run the plants tend to be cheap and somewhat incompetent, leading to accidents.