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Sylvia Ma

China’s first large-scale project to supply renewable energy directly to data centres started operating on Saturday.
The opening of the plant in the northwestern region of Ningxia, a major centre for wind and solar power, comes as Beijing tries to balance increased demand for electricity and computing power with its decarbonisation goals.
The project has a solar capacity of 500 megawatts – with a further 1.5 gigawatts of wind power planned by the end of the year – and is integrated to a cloud base in the city of Zhongwei, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
It is designed to coordinate energy supply and computing capacity so that the data centre can shift tasks to where renewable power supplies are plentiful or when electricity is cheapest to reduce strains on the grid and cut costs and emissions.
After the wind power element of the project is finished, it will generate 4.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, equivalent to cutting carbon emissions by 3.65 million tonnes.
China is witnessing an explosion in demand for computing capacity that is largely driven by AI – which in turn has pushed up electricity use – and it is trying to manage this in light of its green energy transition, where the goal is to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030.
There is also a push to shift energy-intensive data processing to resource-rich western regions, where renewable energy is more abundant and costs are lower, under the “east data, west computing” strategy.
At present, six of China’s top 10 computing power companies have set up operations in the Zhongwei cloud base, according to CCTV, where green electricity now accounts for more than 90 per cent of total power consumption.


Jiang Debin, deputy director of the statistics and digital intelligence department at the China Electricity Council, told CCTV that electricity consumption by the country’s internet data service industry had been accelerating over the past five years, with an average annual growth rate of 36 per cent over that period.
In the first quarter of this year, electricity consumption by the sector reached 22.9 billion kWh, up 44 per cent year on year. The sector now accounted for nearly 1 per cent of the country’s total electricity consumption, Jiang added.
March’s government work report included a pledge to “launch new infrastructure projects for hyperscale intelligent computing cluster” and coordinate “the development of computing capacity and electricity supply” – the first time such concepts were explicitly incorporated into the new infrastructure agenda.


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Economy

China Economy

The development in Ningxia is intended to balance AI-driven demand for computing capacity with the drive to cut carbon emissions


The development in Ningxia is intended to balance AI-driven demand for computing capacity with the drive to cut carbon emissions.


China powers up first green energy project with direct link to data centre

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The development in Ningxia is intended to balance AI-driven demand for computing capacity with the drive to cut carbon emissions

The development in Ningxia is intended to balance AI-driven demand for computing capacity with the drive to cut carbon emissions