A Critical Zero-Carbon Challenge

The world’s largest hyperscalers have the unique challenge — and opportunity — of setting the tone for sustainability within one of the most power-intensive industries on the planet. Over the past few years, we’ve seen their ambition to lead this charge in the world’s transition to a zero-carbon grid.

They’re incentivizing the development of new renewable energy projects in the regions where they operate. They’ve made incredible investments in virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs) bringing tens of gigawatts of new clean energy capacity onto electric grids annually.

But the same ambitious hyperscale operators know more needs to be done. While signing VPPAs can help offset a hyperscaler’s annual energy consumption, the goal has evolved to operating all of their data centers using carbon-free energy – “net zero” carbon usage, for short.

Reimagining Renewable Energy Supply

It’s an understatement to say that we need to rethink data center planning. In fact, we need a new approach that takes scale to new heights in keeping with the phenomenal expansion of computing needs over the last few years. It wasn’t too long ago that facilities of 20 MW were considered massive. Today, larger data centers need to accommodate hundreds of megawatts to meet the escalating demands of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other new technologies. The next generation of data center campuses must evolve to meet modern compute-heavy needs while achieving harder-to-reach sustainability goals.

Collectively, the industry is building the plane as we fly it toward net zero — which requires quick thinking, deep partnerships, and a lot of creativity among the regulators, utilities, municipalities, and multiple other stakeholders. Merging the benefits of renewable energy generation with the consumption profiles – and ambitious self-imposed sustainability goals – of data centers in the regions where they operate requires new and sophisticated contractual power structures. That’s where CleanArc’s True Additionality comes in.

A Creative Energy Solution Whose Time Has Come

True Additionality goes beyond carbon offsetting and even net-zero emissions aimed at offsetting consumption broadly; it means actually adding clean energy onto electric grids in the area where the energy is being consumed. By offsetting energy use where it’s used, hyperscalers can be good neighbors, reducing potential strain on the local energy grid.

How? By creating an innovative model for hyperscale data center development that combines campus-scale sites, offsite-manufacturing and robust power structuring with sustainability baked in from the beginning.

To accomplish this, we spent more than a year researching the availability, energy value and development of new green energy sources in the regions where our data centers are located. This meant launching an RFP and sorting through a plethora of proposals (~3 GW) to curate a portfolio of strong renewable projects that will provide wind, solar, and other renewable sources to offset utility power consumption on our campuses. When coupled with our specialized expertise in power structuring, CleanArc can deliver an advanced renewable energy structure to provide customers with hourly, load-following carbon-free energy.

We like to think of it as the data center of the future — we’re delivering the scale, cost-effective construction, and green energy supply needed by hyperscalers in one comprehensive solution.

Why CleanArc?

CleanArc has:

The expertise. Our executive team has designed, managed or built 2 gigawatts of state-of-the-art data center facilities along with adding $5 billion in renewable energy projects to the grid.
The resources. We’re backed by Snowhawk, a private equity firm that invests in businesses that power the economy’s digital transition.
The sophisticated power structuring experience. Our team includes energy experts with high-level expertise in power contracting — the brains behind True Additionality.
The passion. We are deeply committed to the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and have been for years.