Renewables and nuclear energy will dominate the growth of global electricity supply over the next three years, together meeting on average more than 90% of the additional demand

With Amazon the sole customer of the substation it will (via Oppidan) pay for the 26 month-long design and construction process, with the exception of the City-owned control building. It is expected to cost $5,388,260 across three payment milestones, one of which has already been paid.After it is built, property rights will transfer over to SVP, which will operate and maintain the substation.

This verticalization will have the great flaw of making the real consumption of these infrastructures invisible. Today we can still retrieve some data from water and energy providers but when Amazon builds its own substations, like in Santa Clara, or Google its own pumping stations then the black box will continue to grow.

At the environmental level, the territorial approach makes it possible to get out of the mystique of relative efficiency values to align consumption in absolute value with a local stock and a precise environment.

However, the possible unsustainability of the new data center project was outweighed by an $800 million project with various financial benefits to the community, so the construction project was voted 6-1 in the city council.

It also raises the point that data centers could crowd out renewable energy capacity on the grid, slowing down the country's energy transition.

Energy used in a mine, in freight, in the supply and production chain is much less likely to be renewable.

The US giant advertises that its data center in Eemshaven in the Netherlands would be 100% powered by RE since its opening in 2016. However, on Google's electricity supply matrices we can clearly see that 69% of the electricity supply was provided by RE. The remaining 31% is offset by RECs or virtual PPAs. Google's statement in the preamble is therefore not factually correct.

In this scientific literature, it is estimated that the manufacturing phase (construction of the building + manufacturing of the IT equipment) represents on average 15% of the energy and GHG footprint of a data center in a country with "medium" carbon electricity (approx. 150-200gCO2/kWh).. To get to this figure, it is assumed that the building is new and will last 20 years and that the IT equipment is replaced every 4 to 5 years. Based on GAFAM's Scopes 3, a recent publication by researchers from Facebook, Harvard and Arizona University estimated that the carbon impact of data centers related to IT equipment, construction and infrastructure was higher than imagined. There is therefore a growing interest in better understanding these "omissions".

The Commission found that the arrangement, as currently written, could result in annual revenue shortfalls ranging in the millions of dollars, which other customers would have to cover due to the credits that could completely zero-out Facebook’s bill.“The Commission noted this is not logical— that a customer could reduce its bill by using more resources,” it said.

After techUk’s Emma Fryer released the results of the second period of the UK data center sectors climate change agreement (CCA) 2nd Period findings in 2017, I conducted some desk-based research which looked at the issue from a UK PLC perspective and included all those enterprise data centers, server cupboards and machine rooms that are largely hidden.