Traditionally, data centers are powered by relatively inefficient energy sources, relying on traditional fossil fuels that generate significant emissions. According to the NRDC, in 2013 data centers used 91 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electrical energy and it’s estimated they will be using 120 billion kWh by 2020, a 53% increase. This growth in energy usage, and subsequent increase in CO2 and other hazardous pollutant emissions, has provided the data center industry the opportunity to look into ways to reduce a data center’s energy footprint while increasing the efficiency of these mammoth energy consumers.
Increasing efficiency often leads to looking toward utilizing often unproven generation resources. Renewable resources, though an efficiency and clean source of power, are just beginning to enter the data center power generation equation and, along with their benefits, offer challenges in reliability due to the intermittency in which they are created. Wind and solar are beginning to be utilized in some sites across the U.S., but biogas was yet to be tested in a real-world scenario. Biogas, a renewable resource created as a byproduct of waste water reclamation facility operations, had yet to be proven in a fully-functioning data center environment but offers enormous benefits.