As I highlighted at the start of this story, conversations during the development of the SOTI about the challenges around power, people, perception, and the planet surfaced a new vision for the digital infrastructure industry: clean energy zones. We defined clean energy zones as master-planned towns or city-size areas developed around concentrated sources of clean energy to serve multiple industries, including multi-tenant data center complexes.
In the report, we speculated that the size of these zones and corresponding energy generation will vary by each market’s current capacity and growth trends. In some markets, such as Africa and Latin America, these zones could be less than 100MW while others, such as the US, could exceed 10GW. Complementary power-intensive industries such as battery and green hydrogen production could colocate in these zones. Housing, schools, restaurants and retail in these zones would attract people with an opportunity to gain the skills necessary to work in and support the digital infrastructure and adjacent industries.
The zones could also support next generation building materials like carbon storing concrete that need funding and local, concentrated demand to scale economically. Similar scaling would be possible for next generation clean energy technologies, including sustainable storage, renewable fuels like hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to replace diesel, small modular reactors, hydrogen fuel cells, enhanced geothermal, and fusion.
