UtteraWhere the power comes from
Uttera doesn't rent space in someone else's data center. The machines sit in our own facilities in Andalusia, southern Spain, and the electricity that moves them is generated in the same place where it is consumed: a self-consumption photovoltaic plant and a battery bank sized to cover the site's demand through the dark hours and through periods of low irradiance.
The order of priority is that one and no other: sun first, then battery, and the grid only when neither of the two gets there.
This is not an offset bought afterwards. It is where the current moving the graphics card that is transcribing your audio right now comes from.
What that avoids
A conventional data center has two effects on its surroundings that almost never show up on the customer's invoice:
| The usual | Here |
|---|---|
| New load on an electricity grid that has to be reinforced, in areas where the substation is already stretched. | Consumption is covered by our own generation at the point of use. No new grid capacity is requested. |
| Evaporative cooling, which spends drinking water — sometimes hundreds of thousands of liters a day — in regions under water stress. | Air cooling. Zero water consumption for cooling. |
| Backup diesel generators that are load-tested periodically and burn fuel doing it. | Ordinary backup is the battery. There is a last-resort diesel generator and it has never been started — see below. |
What happens if the grid goes down
On 28 April 2025 the Iberian peninsula lost power for hours. It's the scenario that makes clearest what all of this is for, so it's worth explaining the whole plan, ugly part included.
- During the day, nothing happens. The site doesn't depend on the grid to run: it's generating.
- At night, nothing either. That's what the battery bank is for, and it covers the hours without sun whether there's a grid or not.
- If the outage lasts longer than the battery holds, there is a diesel generator as a last resort.
The commitment to report it
This is where it pays to be exact, because it's a field where a lot gets exaggerated.
The figure, as of today: the sites' electricity bill has been zero for three years. What they consume, the plant generates. It isn't a projection or a 2030 target: it's what has been happening.
And this is what we commit to:
- If that figure stops being zero, it gets said here. A bad year, growth that outruns the installation, a long fault: if at some point we have to buy energy from the grid, it appears in writing on this same page. The commitment isn't that it will never happen; it's that if it happens, you hear it from us.
- Today this is reported by hand, and we say that too. The figure comes from the site's inverters, but it isn't published automatically yet. Automating it is on the list. In the meantime we prefer a true number updated by hand to a pretty dashboard nobody looks at.
- We don't buy guarantees of origin. A renewable origin certificate is a perfectly legal market instrument, but it doesn't change where the electron that the machine consumed came from. If we ever buy a kilowatt-hour from the grid, it will be reported as a grid kilowatt-hour, not as a green one.