UK’s biggest data centre to use renewable energy

Being green will be a big deal for some web hosting users and they will be pleased to hear that the UK’s largest data centre is set to get some of its power from renewable energy. Dumfries & Galloway Council planning officials have now given the go-ahead for the site.

Lockerbie Data Centres will be responsible for construction, in a project that will cost around £950 million and create in the region of 3,000 jobs over a five to ten-year period. The facility will cover a 250,000 sq metres storage facility.

James Cole, director of data centre designers Keysource Ltd, said: "Reliability is the difficulty really, because the traditional sorts of renewable, like solar or winds, if companies are going to explore data centres efficiently, the data centres should be their first port of call to utilise this."

He asserted that combined heat and power, localised gas generation and other kinds of technologies can be brought in to use as renewable sources.

"I think careful thought needs to be put on any use of renewable power, because if it’s going into the data centre and it’s unreliable, then maybe that power should be used elsewhere," Mr Cole commented.

There are two key issues that data centre designers face, he added, and these are what they can do with the heat that is created by the facilities and seeing if they can use more renewable sources of power.

Other plans are in place for green data centres to go up across the world. IBM recently announced that it had been chosen by Slovak Telekom to construct a new data centre in Bratislava.

The complex will use a cooling system which will bring in outside air during cold periods of the year, thereby reducing the need to use air conditioning. It will also make use of a high-density layout to make sure IT equipment is sectioned according to heat emissions so that cooling capacity and efficiency are optimised.

Written by Jessica Lighthouse.