An interesting take on the issue of how to manage energy-hungry data centres comes from Burkina Faso, where plans have been proposed to launch a data centre powered in an unusual way.
Consulting and management firm Essor Services will partner with Costa Rican clean energy company Kaia Energy to build a data centre in Burkina Faso powered by a waste-to-energy plant.
The project will entail the installation of a power plant that will convert household waste into electricity for the new data centre facility,
As Austin VanCampen, founder and president at Kaia Energy, explains: “We will be building [the] needed power and data infrastructure to support this transition – all powered by carbon-negative waste-to-energy.”
News reports suggest the plant will produce around 12MW of electricity. According to the Director of Essor Services, Fidèle Rinsinda Komboigo, the implementation of the project should begin in October 2024 and be completed in November 2025.
However, Essor and its partner Kaia Energy say they have decided to work to reduce the deadlines to allow the project to see the light of day before November 2025. Other specifications of the project have not yet been shared.
While there is little detailed information about Essor Services, Kaia Energy says it specialises in creating turnkey solutions for turning waste into energy for factories, data rendering, asset mining, or selling back to the grid.
It works with Hoskinson Group of the US, which manufactures the first and most advanced waste-to-energy systems in the world and started selling plants to convert waste to usable energy over 50 years ago.
