Dive Brief:

• Facebook said it intends to source 50% of its generation needs from renewable sources by the end of 2018, towards a longer-term goal of reaching 100% clean energy.
• The company announced the goal alongside plans for its next data center, to be located in Fort Worth, Texas, and fueled by 200 MW of wind energy.
• The announcement is indicative of a shift in the fuel mix powering technology companies, which require large amounts of power for servers and cooling; Google and Apple have also both indicated the intend to use all renewable power in the future.​

Dive Insight:

Tech behemoths looking to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts are increasingly looking to their data centers – large complexes of servers and equipment powering their platforms – as places to reduce consumption and clean up the mix.

Following in the footsteps of Apple and Google, Facebook has set a goal of reaching 100% renewable power at its centers, though the company has a more specific interim target of 50% in the next three and a half years.

In 2012 Facebook set a goal to reach 25% renewables in our data center 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,” Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of engineering, said in a post.

The announcement came alongside new plans for the company's fifth data center, this one to be located in Fort Worth and fueled entirely by wind power. “We worked with Citi Energy, Alterra Power Corporation, and Starwood Energy Group to bring 200 MW of new wind energy to the Texas grid as part of this deal,” Parikh wrote. “The wind development will be 17,000 acres, located less than 100 miles away.”

According to the company, continuing work on data center design is “an important part of our overall infrastructure efficiency efforts, which have helped us save more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years.”