NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Filecoin Green, a Protocol Labs initiative to decarbonize the Filecoin Network, announced today a milestone in their renewable energy partnership with DCENT Storage to enable granular reporting and verification of clean energy consumption of DCENT’s hardware. DCENT, the largest European storage entity on the Filecoin network, will install an array of solar panels at its data center located in Heerhugowaard, Netherlands to expand its clean energy capacity. The partnership will utilize Filecoin Green’s monitoring and reporting tools to verify solar production and hardware electricity consumption.
Installation of the rooftop solar array began in March 2022 and has already seen the installation of 238 panels, each with a capacity to generate 385 watts. This project creates a direct supply of clean energy that will power data storage capabilities and allows the provider to establish a verifiable link between RECs and its on-site energy sources. Unlike offsets, direct energy production increases the proximity of clean energy production and consumption, improving electricity matching capabilities.
This proximity improves transparency around DCENT’s sustainability claims and sets a precedent for verifiable sustainability reporting and clean energy consumption among storage providers. Using Filecoin Green’s suite of reporting and monitoring tools integrated with DCENT’s energy consumption and solar generation, Filecoin storage users can see geographically where their data is stored and view energy consumption metrics.
“Blockchain’s open source nature enables us to provide tools for verifiable, transparent energy reporting and encourage the development of more clean energy capacity as we work to support the energy transition,” says Alan Ransil, Filecoin Green Project Lead. ”Filecoin Green is dedicated to improving the way we report and track sustainability metrics, and helping foster the creation of clean energy sources to power our activities.” In 2021, Filecoin Green mobilized $38M of capital to build new solar generation in the US, which will generate more clean electricity each year than the Filecoin network uses in the US.
Filecoin Green is financing this project through its recently announced Regenerative Finance (ReFi) Green Grants Program, which empowers a series of experimental projects for proof of concept of clean energy capacity and software development. For DCENT, access to clean energy not only reduces reliability on the grid, but allows the data center to continue running consistently during the current energy crisis in Europe. As the data center continues to improve access to granular, real time energy consumption and generation data, they work to gain a thorough understanding of the impact of their clean energy.
“As a previous Ethereum miner, I want to enable use of utility blockchains for sustainable impact, directing their energy usage for good,” says DCENT Computer Hardware Specialist, Hidde Hoogland. “As a 100% renewable energy powered data center, we aspire to empower other storage providers to meet a new standard for localized, clean energy usage and reporting, using Web3. We have developed a guidebook to help other storage providers improve their sustainability”.
ABOUT FILECOIN GREEN
Filecoin Green is a Protocol Labs initiative to decarbonize the Filecoin Network. The initiative is spearheading a future of verifiably clean energy powered by crypto. By marrying blockchain’s granular tracking functionality with the information-sharing infrastructure of Web3, Filecoin Green will incentivize its network to reduce emissions. Starting with decarbonizing the Filecoin Network, the initiative then aims to build open-source tools that quantifiably measure and mitigate emissions generated from crypto-related activity. Filecoin Green aspires to prove that clean blockchain is not an aspiration, but reality. To learn more about Filecoin Green’s mission, visit filecoin.io.
ABOUT DCENT
DCENT Hosting BC is one of the largest European storage entities on the Filecoin Network, located near Amsterdam. They operate with a private IP backbone, 100Gbit/s of throughput, and 100% renewable energy. DCENT places privacy at the core of their vision and aspires to provide 100PiB of mirrored storage by the end of 2022. To learn more about DCENT storage, visit https://dcent.nl/about/.