Increasingly, microgrids are being deployed to provide carbon-free energy and resilience for data centers – notorious power hogs.

For example, Microsoft last year announced a partnership with microgrid provider Enchanted Rock and energy project developer U.S. Energy to power Microsoft’s new data center in San Jose, California, during grid outages.

Providing solar energy to data centers

Powering data centers with clean energy is the focus of Donato Solar, a startup that aims to build solar energy installations to power new data centers in Illinois. The company gained $14.5 million in funding to move the projects closer to completion.

These efforts are underway for good reason. Domestically, data center power consumption is expected to triple between now and 2030, from 20 to 60 GW, said Sayles Braga, senior partner at Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), an infrastructure developer that has a novel idea for addressing the challenge. SIP is a spinoff of Google owner Alphabet.