Equinix expanded its data center sustainability initiatives to include 151 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy in Australia, where the data center provider continues to address customer demand for sustainable connectivity. This power purchase agreement (PPA), combined with Equinix’s existing renewable energy deals, will help the vendor claim responsibility for more than 1 gigawatt (GW) of clean power to global energy grids by 2029.

Equinix signed a PPA with Australian renewable energy provider TagEnergy in an effort to match the energy consumption of its 17 Australian data centers with clean energy by the decade’s end. In other words, the vendor invested in TagEnergy’s Golden Plains Wind Farm project and plans to neutralize its carbon emissions associated with fossil fuel energy use.

Australia represents the last mile for Equinix in terms of reaching its goal of 100% renewable energy use in its operations by 2025. While the continent has traditionally been a “bit trickier of a market” for clean energy, its clean energy market is changing. “Things are really starting to open up now in Australia,” Equinix VP of Sustainability Christopher Wellise told SDxCentral.

Making an impact on emissions Power purchase agreements like Equinix’s most recent deal are “super high impact,” Wellise said. “If you look at emissions factors associated with global grids and so on, it really represents an important area of opportunity.”

As more renewable energy is funded, plugged into the grid and utilized, demand for fossil energy should lessen. PPAs effectively displace brown, or fossil-based, electrons in the grid. As opposed to a large solar panel installation on the roof of a data center, for example, it isn’t physically possible to trace a green electron produced by a wind farm to determine what and where exactly it ends up, Wellise said.

PPAs are “more about driving additional green power onto the grid, which benefits not just us, because our data centers are connected, but also the others that have access to and utilize that particular grid,” he said.

To that point, Equinix claims its Australian PPA is the largest utility-scale deal of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region to date. Equinix funded 20% of the first development phase for the more than 41,000-acre wind farm, which will be able to produce 1,300 MW of clean energy by 2029. The vendor’s purchased capacity will be available starting in 2029.

PPAs meet growing demand for sustainability Equinix’s PPA represents one way the vendor is addressing growing customer demand for energy efficient compute infrastructure. “We’ve really seen the sustainability-related level of interest with our customer massively grow over the course of the last handful of years,” Wellise said.

In an assessment of Equinix’s requests for proposals (RFPs) in 2023, 100% included sustainability-related questions. “I’ve been in this field for a number of years, and that was something that was definitely not true 10 to 15 years ago,” he said. “Now all of them are asking questions about sustainability.”

There are significant inefficiencies associated with operating on-premises data centers, for example, rendering Equinix’s efforts with renewable energy a significant value proposition. “They care about security; they care about availability and uptime; location and the digital services and interconnection we provide, but sustainability is increasingly being one of those accelerators,” he said.