Telecommunications company MTN SA is building a new data centre in Centurion, north of Johannesburg, that can operate entirely independently of SA’s electricity grid.

The site will be able to function indefinitely without drawing any power from Eskom by using natural gas piped in from Mozambique.

It will, however, have connections to Eskom and back-up diesel generators in case there is an interruption in the supply of gas.

MTN has commissioned Sasol, which drills the gas, to build a 3,5km extension to the energy giant’s pipeline into the Centurion site.

The facility, which will cost at least R100m, excluding the cost of land, will also function as a key switching and transmission centre for MTN’s network.

MTN Business, which provides converged communications solutions, will make extensive use of the 1 500sqm facility, which is under construction near the SA Mint. MTN’s internal IT department will use other parts of the centre.

It’s not the first time MTN has used natural gas as a power solution. It has a small “tri-generation” facility — able to draw on gas, diesel and electricity — at its Roodepoort head office, which it has used to test the viability of the solution.

The Midrand facility will be on a much larger scale, says MTN SA chief technology officer Lambo Kanagaratnam.

He says the data centre, which will go live by the fourth quarter of 2011, will help the company earn carbon credits.

The facility will even generate its own cooling and heating for the adjoining office block, without having to draw power from Eskom.

Willem Weber, MTN SA’s manager of core network implementation, says the operator realised couldn’t depend on a reliable power supply from Eskom over the next three years.

“We don’t have comfort the shortage [of electricity] is really being addressed,” he says. This, coupled with expectations that the cost of electricity will double in the next few years, led MTN to consider alternative forms of energy generation.

It considered wind and solar generation, among others, but concluded the only viable alternative to Eskom to power the new data centre was the natural gas Sasol pipes 820km from the Mozambique coast.

Weber says MTN is the first telecoms operator in Africa to register to receive carbon credits.

Meanwhile, the company is modernising its base station equipment, paying particular attention to energy efficiency. In some remote areas, MTN is deploying base stations using renewable energy sources. These towers are also completely off Eskom’s supply grid.

In addition, the operator will accelerate its roll-out of fibre to base stations. Kanagaratnam says MTN already has 100 base stations with fibre access and he hopes to increase this number about five-fold this year. — Duncan McLeod, with Candice Jones, TechCentral