How many of you in the Information Technology industry are happy with the municipalities in which you live and work? The media seldom heralds their good news. Instead, the loudest voices bemoan the lack of communications, efficient record-keeping, and the crumbling infrastructure. Amid the cacophony of voices, there are few who suggest solutions to improve the outlook of municipal service delivery for the 10 to 20 years ahead of us.
However, if we hope to build a future where economic growth is dependent on well-trained AI models, housed in state of the art data centers, this is the direction where we need to focus our efforts. By ensuring that existing consumers enjoy excess supply, we can lay a solid foundation for the coming infrastructure expansion.
This excess supply need not necessarily come from expanding the infrastructure, but can be realized from the careful management of what we already own. By leveraging Public Private Private Partnerships (PPP), we can improve the maintenance of infrastructure in a way that reduces the costs of delivering services to end users (or shall we say, consumers).
To understand the potential for this approach, we can look towards organizations like South Africa’s Sasol for inspiration. During the period between 2010 and 2015, they participated in the Boloka Metsi initiative (https://mg.co.za/2013-07-05-fixing-leaks-beyond-the-factory-fence-line/). This initiative focused on providing community education to 49 000 households and fixing water leakages in the water delivery infrastructure of the Emfuleni area, south of Johannesburg. The result was a whopping 3.8 million cubic meters of water (3,800,000 m³) of water saved during the benchmark period.
On the power supply front, Africa 50 – A Pan-African investment organization has partnered with the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company Limited (KETRACO) to upgrade the electricity transmission network (https://energy-news-network.com/industry-news/ketraco-signs-landmark-public-private-partnership-with-africa50-and-powergrid-corporation-of-india-to-deliver-usd311-million-power-transmission-project/). This network will enable renewable energy providers to deliver their electricity supply into the existing energy grid.
You’re probably wondering what the electricity and water supply have to do with your organization’s current status on the monopoly board of your industry? The answer lies in data centers.
The electricity and water required to run and cool data centers (https://www.globalsociety.earth/post/ai-data-centres-are-testing-the-limits-of-power-and-water-systems) have the potential to reduce the quality of life of surrounding communities. We have seen this occur in places like Virginia, USA where the increased demand for resources has resulted in soaring water and electricity prices for both the local communities and the data centers.
With the knowledge that 2 billion gallons of water were consumed by Virginia’s data centers in 2023 (https://theconversation.com/5-ways-data-centers-endanger-their-local-communities-and-the-country-as-a-whole-282348), we can appreciate the 3.8 million cubits of water that Sasol helped the communities South of Johannesburg to reclaim. At the same time, the differences in these two amounts highlights the dependence that we have on water as a cooling resource for data centers. This should drive you towards an appreciation of partnering with your municipality today so that they can become efficient suppliers to your industry in the future.
As you prepare to manage municipalities as the suppliers of your future data centers, read Chapter 4 of “Managing IT Suppliers : A Practical Guide To Vendor Management (https://exclusivebooks.co.za/products/9781041104155)” to help guide you in the establishment of robust KPI’s.
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