Sustainability a Top Priority for Data Center REITs

Sustainability has become a top priority for data center REITs, who are under the gun to reduce the carbon footprint and water usage of data centers.

Equinix, one of the two largest pure-play data center REITs, is spearheading an effort to develop low-carbon fuel cells to power data centers. A consortium of seven companies—including Equinix, InfraPrime, RISE, Snam, SOLIDpower, TEC4FUELS and Vertiv—have been chosen by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership to create a new power source for data centers using low-carbon, solid-oxide fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries.

The consortium’s pilot project will pave the way for the use of hydrogen fuel cells for primary and backup power at data centers, the Clean Hydrogen Partnership said at the project announcement in December.

Equinix, which says it has a “future-first” sustainability strategy, has pledged to become climate neutral by 2030 and achieve 100 percent renewable energy across its global footprint.

The board of directors of Switch, which operates a 1.3-million SF data center at its Citadel campus in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center—the nation’s largest industrial park, adjacent to Tesla’s EV battery gigafactory—voted unanimously in November to convert to a REIT by the end of this year.

Switch is planning to market itself as one of the most sustainable data center players in the West. Several upgrades are being planned at the Citadel campus this year, including a 7.2-million SF expansion of IT capacity and a new 16-mile pipeline that will deliver 4,000 acre-feet of treated effluent water from the Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility in Sparks, NV.

Extreme heat and drought in the Western US are making water conservation an urgent priority for data centers, which are huge consumers of water as well as electricity. A large data center can consume up to five million gallons of water per day to keep its server farm cool, the same amount that could serve the daily water needs of a city of 50,000.

“This innovative solution [lets us] operate mission-critical technology infrastructure in the most sustainable way using 100 percent recycled water to protect the area’s precious natural resources,” said Switch President Thomas Morton, at the pipeline announcement.

JLL’s 2021 Data Center Outlook, which measured the largest domestic markets by total net absorption in megawatts, said Northern Virginia remains the largest data center hub by far in North America, with four times the net absorption of the Pacific Northwest, Greater Phoenix, Chicago and Salt Lake City, rounding out the top five, respectively.