Social Media giant Facebook has announced that it will run its new data center in Iowa on 100 percent wind power.
The nearby wind farm needed to power the center will be built, owned, and run by local power utility MidAmerican Energy. Facebook chose Iowa as the location for the data center because of its potential to generate a lot of renewable energy nearby. In addition to being run on wind power, Facebook says the center, its fourth, will use a similar energy efficient design to its others.
Facebook now has a stated goal of having a quarter of the power it uses come from renewable sources by 2015. This will be Facebook’s second data center to run on renewable energy; the other one is in Lulea, Sweden.
An additional benefit of Facebook running the new data center on wind power is that it says the project will amount to 138 megawatts of capacity, which should be more than the data center “is likely to require for the foreseeable future”. The remaining renewable energy capacity can be fed into the power grid for use by others.
It’s an encouraging trend that big tech companies are starting to develop and use a lot more renewable energy. As we previously reported, companies such as Google, Apple, and others are also jumping on the renewable energy bandwagon. It certainly makes a lot of sense for these thoroughly 21st century companies to be at the forefront of clean energy development and use. In some cases, however, it wasn’t without a good deal of prodding to get started.
Via Wired, Facebook
Image: Facebook. An artist’s impression of the new data center in Iowa.
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