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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly.As Europe’s largest data center project enters its detailed planning and costing stage of its planned 40 modules it said it has been working for over one year on alternative cooling methodologies which will help it achieve its planned efficiencies.
Speaking with DatacenterDynamics, David King, project director at Lockerbie data centers said that he had spent the last year working with design consultants sourced through the Carbon Trust. ‘The people they put us in touch with initially were generalist, not specific to the data center industry and this meant we explored cooling options from outside the sector. We spend a lot of time looking at how cooling is deployed in other industries in, for example the car industry.’
The work on the Lockerbie Data Center is one of a number of pilot projects being worked on by the Carbon Trust which officially launched its data center design service this week. The not for profit company said it could provide advice ‘enabling data centre developers to maximize the flow of natural air to keep components cool, use local renewable energy sources where viable and reuse the heat generated.’
King said: “With the cost of electricity rising and growing client concern over the size of their carbon footprints, increasing the energy efficiency of data centers was a fundamental design consideration. We have employed the Carbon Trust’s design advice to significantly reduce energy use, and to put wasted heat to good use - by providing low carbon heating to other commercial spaces being built on the site.”
Hugh Jones, Director, Solutions, the Carbon Trust, said: “Along with the ever increasing demand for data storage comes an ever increasing demand for energy to power and cool UK data centers. Low carbon design in new build and refurbishment projects has the potential to unlock hundreds of millions of pounds in energy bills each year. Now that the design service has been successfully road tested in what is expected to be one of the largest and greenest data centers in the world, we are very keen to offer our experience to other developers.”
Lockerbie Data Centres is developing a 272,000m2 data center to accommodate 50,000 racks with a peak power demand of 300MW. The facility is planned to comprise 40 6,800m2 data center buildings - completion date for the first is December 2011.