The Southern African division of Distributed Power Africa has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Africa Data Centres (ADC), the largest network of the carrier- and cloud-neural data centre facilities in Africa. Under the agreement, DPA Southern Africa (DPA SA) will provide solar energy solutions for ADC’s data centres in South Africa.
DPA SA is a 50:50 joint venture between Distributed Power Africa and the French utility company EDF which provides innovative solar energy solutions for a range of industries in the region. The renewable energy provider is developing a solar power plant near Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State province, to supply 12 MW of solar power for data centres in South Africa.
ADC operates a large network of data centres in several African cities including 1,800 sq. meters of storage space with 5.5 MW capacity in Cape Town. The communications solutions provider plans to expand the capacity of its Cape Town data centre to 25 MW.
Tesh Durvasula, Chief Executive Officer of ADC, said the data centre facilities are the foundation of the digital transformation in the continent. These centres need to be reliable, cost-effective and should utilize clean energy for their operation. Their partnership with DPA SA will enable them to reduce the dependency on the South African power grid and allow them to help alleviate the energy challenges in the country.
The recent agreement is in line with ADC’s strategy to transform its data centres in Africa into carbon neutral. This will enable over 30% of data centres in South Africa to be powered by solar energy. The decarbonization of the growing data centre industry is highly important as they are responsible for nearly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
For the last few years, DPA is working with sister company Cassava Technologies and its subsidiaries for deploying solar energy solutions for several data centres in Africa. It has installed rooftop solar power plants at ADC’s East Africa data centre in Nairobi in 2021 (1 MW) and ADC’s data centre in Midrand, South Africa in 2019 (1.2 MW). DPA has also deployed 104 kW of solar at Cassava parent company Econet’s Leo data centre in Bujumbura, Burundi.
