Social networking giant Facebook is developing a 200-megawatt wind-energy project to power its new data center in Fort Worth, Texas. Unveiled on Tuesday, plans for the wind-powered data center are part of the company’s long-term goal to eventually meet all of its data center energy needs with renewables.
Facebook already powers two of its existing four global data centers with renewable energy, and plans to achieve a 25-percent renewables goal by the end of this year, according to Vice President of Engineering Jay Parikh. By 2018, the company aims to meet half of its data center energy needs with clean power, he said.
Construction of the new data center has already started, and the facility is expected to come online in late 2016, a Facebook spokesperson told us. While the company isn’t disclosing full cost and capacity plans for the data center, the spokesperson said that “we have publicly committed to at least 40 full-time jobs and $ 500 million in investment.”
Efficiency Has Saved ‘$ 2B in Costs’
The company has worked with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corp. and Starwood Energy Group to develop a wind farm that will power the facility, West Region Director of Data Center Operations Ken Patchett said in a Facebook blog post. Currently under construction, the wind farm is located on a 17,000-acre site 90 miles from the data center’s location.
“We put a lot of effort into choosing where to locate a facility like this,” Patchett noted. “There are a lot of things we look for — everything from a shovel-ready site, to access to renewable energy, to great partnerships with the local community, to a strong pool of local talent for construction and long-term operations staff. We think we’ve found all that and more in Fort Worth, and we’re excited to be getting started.”
Data center design efforts focused efficiency, “have helped us save more than $ 2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years,” said Tom Furlong, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, in another blog post. Coupled with Facebook’s investments in renewables, “the carbon impact of one person’s use of Facebook for an entire year is the same as the carbon impact of a medium latte,” Furlong said.
Outdoor Air-Cooled, Even in Texas
The Forth Worth data center will be Facebook’s fifth. It also operates data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, Calif.; Altoona, Iowa; and Lulea, Sweden. Both the Altoona and Lulea facilities are also powered by renewable energy.
Through its participation in the Open Compute Project, which the company helped launch in 2011, Facebook openly shares its data center designs to “design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing.”
Patchett said the Fort Worth data center will “feature the latest in our Open Compute Project hardware designs” — including Yosemite for compute and fabric, Wedge and 6-pack at the network layer. Yosemite is a system-on-a-chip compute server aimed at improving speed and more efficiently serving Facebook traffic.
The new Fort Worth facility will also be cooled exclusively through the use of outdoor air instead of energy-intensive air conditioners, Patchett noted. “Yes, we can make that work even in the middle of the kinds of summers we have here in Texas,” he added.
