Developing a net zero emission data center is an important action to mitigate the growing carbon footprint in Indonesia. However, with this opportunity comes great responsibility.
Data centers provide cloud services that connect everyone around the world allowing them to communicate and share information, such as Facebook and Google with daily active users of 934 million and 361 million respectively.
To host these online services, data centers require high-performance computing system facilities. These data centers consume a lot of energy through IT equipment and operations.
Why We Must Develop Net Zero Emission Data Center in Indonesia?
According to a report by Internet World Stats in the year 2021, Indonesia has about 180 million internet users, which makes it the most populous country in Southeast Asia.
Data centers serve as the backbone for many internet services and applications, including social media, e-commerce, cloud computing, and big data analytics.
With the rapid growth of digital transformation in Indonesia, the amount of data centers has also been rapidly increasing.
However, there’s one important thing that keeps in mind: all those data centers are increasing their CO2 footprints. That is why we must develop a net zero emission data center in Indonesia.
In the latest report on Climate Change, the world is facing the increasing temperature that causes climate change. To combat this problem, Indonesia has been taking some initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. One of them is building an eco-friendly data center.
The net-zero emission data center is an initiative to create new technology, provide a more sustainable lifestyle, and develop new business models.
The coming of this initiative will improve the carbon emission throughout all processes operating in a data center, including the acquisition of natural resources, manufacturing of components that become part of the data center facilities, and operation of the data center itself.
Business users in Indonesia are asking for an eco-friendly data center. The Green data center concept is challenging for data center providers to build eco-friendly data centers.
The Green data center concept is one of the best ideas business users can apply in achieving KPIs and ensuring sustainable development.
However, some challenges remain to be addressed before building a net zero emission data center in Indonesia.
The Challenge in Building Eco-Friendly Data Center in Indonesia
The Challenge in Building Eco-Friendly Data centers in Indonesia, especially in developed countries are considering improving the facilities. The negative impact of global warming triggered this discussion.
Data center location
You should look for areas where there are no restrictions on land use, which can be problematic if you have limited resources or capital at your disposal.
A low-latency data center is a facility designed to minimize the distance between the servers and the client.
The main objective of a low-latency data center facility is to reduce the travel time between server and client by minimizing latency. If a business operates in multiple countries, it may have to move its data centers to different locations to ensure that clients get their services faster.
In Indonesia, many cities offer good connectivity at an affordable price: Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, Semarang, and Bali. These cities have hubs for telecommunication companies such as Telkom Indonesia, Indosat Ooredoo, and XL Axiata.
Local demand for power
The average power consumption per server is around 10 KW/year and the average power consumption per rack (10U) is around 150W. This means that if we have 100 racks, we will consume 15 MW of power a year and if you have 1000 racks, it would be 15 MW.
This number is already big and can create a huge impact on the environment if it is not managed properly.
Data centers can save up to 25% on their energy bill if they use gas as their main source of power instead of diesel or other fuels. Gas is considered to be the cleanest source of power because it uses less carbon and produces less pollution than other fuel sources such as coal or oil.
The government in Indonesia has been trying to promote clean energy and reduce pollution by offering incentives for businesses that use clean energy sources in their factories or offices. This is also true for data centers, which means if you build your own data center in Jakarta, then you will receive tax breaks from the government for using gas as your main source of power instead of diesel or other fuels
Local regulation
In Indonesia, there are no specific policies or requirements related to green data centers yet and we need to develop them together with local stakeholders such as government agencies, vendors, operators, and end users. We need to find solutions that are good enough for both parties so that everyone can benefit from them at the same time.
The Indonesian Government is also focused on increasing the IT infrastructure, which means it is trying to increase the IT products and services in Indonesia.
The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia has put a challenge to building the green data center in Indonesia. The criteria are divided into three categories, technical, economic, and environmental. You can choose any type of technology or implementation method and it should fulfill the criteria set forth by the ministry.
President Joko Widodo signed a presidential decree on information technology (IT) policy called “E-Government Policy” which aims to accelerate the development of e-government services in Indonesia by 2020 and improve service quality through digitalization.
The implementation of the “E-Government Policy” will create more demand for IT infrastructure such as data centers. Of course this will require data centers to upgrade their technology to suit this purpose.
Conclusion
The data center facility is the heart of technology and social living in today’s interconnected world. Traditional data centers are considered not environmentally friendly because they emit large amounts of heat and pollutants into the environment.
Therefore, there have been efforts in the industry to define environmental performance standards for new data centers or to improve existing ones.
Indonesian experts predict that 85% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. This will lead to a higher demand for digital infrastructure and computing services, especially at a regional level.
Indonesian experts predict that 85% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. They also use waterless cooling systems to reduce their carbon footprint.
In addition, the development of the digital economy via cloud computing will increase demand for data center services and infrastructure. We are challenged by these factors in combination with the limited physical land size available in a densely populated country like Indonesia to build a net zero emission data center.
Continue to follow articles from PusatData.Cloud (Cloud Data Center) to get the latest developments regarding data centers in Indonesia.