Data centers stock up for winter

Anticipation. This is the keyword for all companies before winter, especially for data centers that consume a lot of energy. Companies in the sector take the lead in the face of the risk of power outages in the coming months. Received today in Bercy, on the occasion of a meeting with the Delegate Minister in charge of the Digital Transition and Telecommunications, Jean-Noël Barrot, the sector will make proposals to participate in the effort to reduce energy consumption.

Fill the tanks at all costs

The priority of the data centers is to fill the fuel tanks to the maximum to supply the generators that start up in the event of a power outage, since the sites must operate 24 hours a day. Thanks to this, the leader French DATA4, which operates 17 data centers in France, “will, for example, last a week, compared to 72 hours in normal times. We are going to fill the tanks of four data centers still under construction to make additional stocks” , explains Olivier Micheli , CEO of DATA4 and president of France Datacenter. The operator Orange, which has ten data centers in France, will also fill its tanks to the maximum and periodically carry out maintenance and tests on the generators.

Participate in the war effort

But the idea is also to participate in the “war effort.” Although data centers consume around 2% of electricity in France, the sector proposes to voluntarily switch to generators in case of voltage in the electrical network, for example, at the beginning of the night. “In exchange for this effort, we would like to be recognized as critical infrastructures, in particular, to be supplied with fuel oil as a priority”, suggests Olivier Micheli.

Proposals in Bercy

The sector is also asking the government for a further increase in the proportion of cheap nuclear electricity sold by EDF (Arenh), to cushion the impact of skyrocketing power prices. Electricity accounts for 30-40% of data center companies’ operating costs, which obviously weighs on their margins and has led them to raise their prices since the beginning of the year.

Géraldine Camara, General Delegate of France Datacenter, also proposes to “push companies and administrations to server pooling”, which consists in abandoning their on-site data centers, often inefficient from an energy point of view, to transfer their data in modern facilities, managed by specialized companies.

The sector, for which energy has become a major economic problem, has been working for some time on solutions to reduce its electricity consumption: cooling by capturing fresh air from outside, circulating cold water as close as possible to the servers or use of artificial intelligence sources to better control consumption.

international anticipation

This problem does not affect only French data centers. The world number 1, the American Equinix, will fill its tanks to 90% for its sites in Europe. Just like its rival Digital Reality Trust. The two companies are also buying additional diesel reserves to provide emergency power, notes the Financial Times.

Around the world, data centers consume between 200 and 250 terawatt hours of electricity per year, according to the International Energy Agency, which is equivalent to 1% of total demand.