eBay has announced that its new data centre will be powered by 100% renewable energy.

The online auction site, eBay, will partner with Bloom Energy to build the largest non-utility fuel cell installation. The company will use 30 Bloom Energy servers that use biogas as their source of power.

The President and CEO of eBay Inc, John Donahoe, said “We believe the future of commerce can be greener”. He said they wanted to change the way shopping is powered, adding “We are embracing disruptive energy technology and designing it into our core data centre energy architecture. Running our data centres primarily on reliable, renewable energy, we intend to shape a future for commerce that is more environmentally sustainable at its core”.

The new data centre is being built in Utah and should be completed by the middle of next year. Each of the servers will generate 1.75 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year. Electricity from the grid will only be used as a back-up. Meanwhile the fuel cells will be powered by biogas which will come from organic waste material.

This will be the fifth renewable installation for eBay, and that largest. It already has a solar array and a fuel cell installation at its headquarters in San Jose and another solar array in Denver. In April the company installed a solar array at its Utah data centre.

As business electricity prices rise and businesses look to reduce their carbon footprint it may become more common for businesses to generate their own renewable energy. This may come in the form of solar panels, wind turbines or biogas boilers.

The news that eBay is generating its own renewable energy comes after a recent report from the National  Renewable Energy Laboratory said that renewable energy could provide 80% of the electricity in the US by 2050.