Malaysia’s solar energy industry needs to catch up fast in order to meet demand from data centres
10 Oct 2023
Malaysia needs to develop its solar energy capabilities to accommodate growing demand for green energy from the data centre industry in the country.
“Malaysia needs to catch up, that is a fact,” NTT Global Data Center Malaysia managing director Ho Yee Chung said during a press conference in conjunction with the launch of its sixth data centre on its campus in Cyberjaya.
According to Ho, the local renewable energy has yet to gain its size to achieve economies of scale enabling cost efficiency.
“But NTT is committed to start, we are happy to adopt it (using renewable energy) and have started. This journey has to move forward.
“Solar is not a new thing to us, because we already started installing solar on our roofs ten years ago. We also just completed our solar roof parking lot,” he added, noting that its campus’ emission savings is equivalent to 165 tonnes of CO2 per annum.
Ho was speaking to the media at the launch of NTT’s Cyberjaya 6 (CBJ6) Sakura data centre — its sixth data centre on its NTT campus — with an investment of RM234 million with a critical IT load of 7MW, 4,890 metres square of space, and two 33 kilovolt substations.
The occupancy of its data centres on campus stands at 70%.
Ho sees green energy demand to pick up over the next 24 months, with more solar farms to be built in line with the government’s target for 25% of the electricity supply to comprise renewable energy.
He noted that NTT Global has inked a Corporate Green Power Programme (CGPP) with a corporate partner as its eyes emission savings of 3,000 tonnes per annum.
“We are one of the pioneers that joined CGPP and gave our opinion on how the future of data centre technology will be coupled with solar farms, transitioning from using brown to green energy,” he added.
Meanwhile, Ho said he is cognisant that another major issue the renewable energy industry is facing is the need to use battery energy storage systems is crucial to tackle the green energy’s intermittent nature — fluctuating output.
He noted that with most of the company’s customers being from the financial services industry (FSI), a core requirement is its data centres avoiding outages.
“We do that for them, the efficiency of a data centre concerns its stability, which requires us to work a lot with the local government and Tenaga Nasional Bhd,” he said.
Source: The Edge Malaysia
