Why Indonesia should push for Green Data Centres

With over 170 million internet users, Indonesia digital sector is a market that cannot be ignored. The government plans for the country to be the next Data Centre hub in the region:

• From 2020 onwards, the digital economy is being developed as an important sector for Indonesia’s economic growth 
• An important regulation GR 80, 2019 on e-commerce was introduced in November 2019. Foreign e-commerce businesses with a ‘significant’ economic presence in the country must have a permanent establishment in the country and must store their data (subscribers, payments, complaints, contracts, shipments etc.) in local data centres
• Softbank will invest some US$2 billion in ride-sharing app Grab to upgrade digital infrastructure in Indonesia and Google plans to open its first data centre in the country (ASEAN Briefing, 2020)
• By 2025, Indonesia’s digital economy is predicted to have a gross market value from US$133 billion (ASEAN Briefing, 2020) to US$150 billion (Report Linker, 2020) 

At the same time, we need to mitigate the impact of energy and water demand.

The above table is a 20-year projection of data centre global electricity demand (Anders S.G., 2015) in Terra Watt Hours (TWh). If we operate “business as usual", there will be a potential significant rise in electricity demand bringing it to a total of 8000 TWh by 2030. However, Green Data Centres concept can keep the demand lower at 3000 TWh and this can be further reduced to 1137 TWh.

With regards to water demand, it takes in an average 0.87 l/kWh as the most water-efficient DC with PUE 1.06 (Thomas et al, 2017) to 1.8 l (Arman Shehabi et al, 2016).

There are several potential solutions that can be adopted to mitigate the impact, which are environmentally and geographically specific (continued).