Facebook starts construction on wind power based data centre in Texas

Social media giant Facebook has broken ground on its $500m data centre in Fort Worth, Texas, which will be powered by 100% renewable energy.

The data centre will be powered by 200MW of wind project being developed in Clay County.

Facebook has commenced grading work on the 110-acre property, on which the three 250,000ft² buildings will be built.

The company has already signed deals with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power and Starwood Energy Group to supply wind power to the data centre through Texas grid.

Construction on the wind farm has already started on a 17,000-acre site in Clay County, which is located 90 miles from the data centre.

The wind farm is schedule to start supplying renewable power to the grid by 2016.

Facebook Engineering vice president Jay Parikh said: "In 2012 we set a goal for ourselves to reach 25% renewables in our data centre mix by the end of this year.

"Over the long-term, we plan to get to 100%. We’ve set our next short-term goal to be 50% by the end of 2018."

Facebook said in a statement: "Our continuing work on data centre design is an important part of our overall infrastructure efficiency efforts, which have helped us save more than $2bn in infrastructure costs over the last three years."

The company presently has four data centres in the US which includes Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina.

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Image: Facebook’s Fort Worth data center rendering. Photo: courtesy of Facebook.