Green IT Is Having a Watershed Moment

Australia’s Byron Bay is now the setting for a Netflix reality series glorifying its beachside lifestyle. But something less known is that it’s also becoming a center for the crypto-mining industry in the country.

In October 2021, Byron became the location for Australia’s largest bitcoin mine operated by the Mawson Infrastructure Group. The other notable feature about the development is that the mine is powered entirely by renewable energy.

Although the mine will add around 0.4 exahash — as the computing horsepower measurement is called — to global crypto mining operations, 100% of the power will come from renewable energy generated at a facility operated by Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners.

The Mawson mine is co-located inside a Quinbrook facility. The sourcing of renewable energy is designed to allay much of the criticism of crypto mining and its energy use.

According to the University of Cambridge’s bitcoin electricity consumption index, bitcoin miners consume around 0.6% of global energy, putting it up there with the carbon dioxide emissions of developing nations such as Jordan and Sri Lanka.

The point of the Byron Bay anecdote is not to highlight the energy consumption of bitcoin mining but to call attention to the activities of Quinbrook, a specialist investment manager focused on renewables, storage, and grid support with operations in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.

It is an interesting company because it is a fund manager and investor, a developer of renewable energy generation and a solutions vendor with intelligent grid software, and a provider of green data centers.

The company has invested around AUD8 billion into projects across its three markets. It is a fascinating model in that it straddles the traditional generation and the emerging new world of green data and smart solutions in an integrated model, showing the kind of innovation the move to green IT can inspire. 

“Green Cloud”

According to Beroe research, the global market for green data center construction projects is expected to grow at a healthy 10% CAGR between 2019 and 2022. In Europe, the IT sector has recently launched the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, which has been signed by the major European data operators and is targeting 100% renewable energy for the sector by 2030 across Europe,

Green data centers are only part of the story. The broader story is the holistic integration of green management layers in all parts of the IT ecosystem, from bricks and mortar to a “green cloud” managing everything from IoT applications to database access and distribution.

“We are not financial engineers; we are actual engineers, and that is a bit unusual. But it’s what the industry needs,” Quinbrook founder David Scaysbrook told me last year.

“We need more managers who know how to build things, and I think we’re going to see more manager platforms which are run by industrialists rather than bankers.”

The company’s most recent announcement was the hiring of an ex-Amazon Web Services executive, John Lucas, as senior director of data strategies to lead the firm’s green data solutions operations.

One of the critical components of this in the U.S. is Project Rowan, which is a joint venture between Quinbrook and Birch Infrastructure, designed to deliver low-cost net-zero solutions to green data centers located on Rowan sites. 

The joint venture has identified multiple strategically-located sites across the US to host next-generation, mission-critical, hyperscale data centers powered by renewables.

“We are not financial engineers; we are actual engineers, and that is a bit unusual. But it’s what the industry needs”

Rowan has made rapid progress, with construction expected to be completed later this year on the initial 240MW stage of the Temple data center campus in Texas, ultimately expected to be one of the largest of its kind in the U.S., delivering capacity to customers spanning high-performance computing and hyperscale data storage.

In Australia, two facilities on the east coast deliver renewable power supply and backup resiliency solutions and assist hyperscale data center operators in meeting their accelerating carbon reduction and net-zero targets.

Beyond these assets, the manager’s portfolio also includes U.K. companies Habitat Energy and Energy Trade in Australia. Its capabilities span AI-enabled battery optimization, smart grid, and automated energy trading.

Net-zero infrastructure

A business model that vertically integrates green technologies with AI and IoT in combination with bespoke generation has potential application in creating smarter cities and shows that Green IT can be so much more than hooking up a data center to renewable energy in a five star green rated building. The idea of net-zero infrastructure can embrace the traditional and the digital.

Just as Quinbrook’s expertise is both financial and engineering, Green IT can harness the power of renewables in combination with connectivity, data, and analytics and points the way forward for another wave of transformation that is digital and sustainable.

The idea has come a long way fast. Not too long ago, people questioned how IT could have a sustainable dimension, which led to a focus on green data centers.

Now, it is clear that new horizons are opening up, making possible a rare win both for business and for the planet.

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/Chairat Netsawai