In a bid to cushion the impact of tech development on the environment and minimise its carbon footprints, Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) firm Zoho has set up a 5-megawatt on-grid solar energy farm near Trichy to power its offices and data centres.
Located at the village of Abinimangalam near Trichy, while the solar plant serves local power needs of the region in an agreement between Zoho and TN’s electricity authorities, the company is then offered credits to set off against their own energy consumption.
“This helps in saving approximately 7,200 tonnes per year of carbon dioxide emissions. That is the equivalent of having 14,400 trees,” a spokesperson at Zoho said. The company did not disclose the amount of investment made in this initiative.
“We have been thinking for a while now about leveraging solar to get into the sustainable mode of operations, and we have now been able to successfully deploy it,” Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist, Zoho, said.
“With our current power generation, we are able to meet energy needs of our Chennai data centre and a good chunk of our main campus in Chennai too,” he added.
Zoho zeroed in on the on-grid model of power generation, where they generate power and patch it on to power local needs near the plant, and set-off the credits to power their own operations. Zoho’s energy partner for the initiative is Rigel Energy Management.
“Sustainability cannot be a one-off initiative, and with this model working well, we are looking at more such locations and plan to continue to do this,” Vegesna says.
A recent report by French climate think-tank The Shift Project notes that total energy consumption by the global digital tech sector is growing by 9% every year, with India consuming twice the global average. The development and use of emerging tech such as AI, machine learning and blockchain necessitate the operation of large data centres, which are power guzzlers.
Zoho set up its Chennai data centre in 2018, and the company’s campus in Chennai houses over 6,000 employees. Zoho now has 10 data centers around the globe, to support its 45+ applications and over 50 million users. Zoho recently bought around 375 acres for their new headquarters in Austin in the US, and plans to use a portion of the area to set up solar panels to power a planned data center.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes
