The rise in carbon emissions threatened by the projected exponential growth of data centres could be halved in the UK, thanks to a new design service launched by the Carbon Trust today.
The new service has already been piloted in the design of multi-billion pound data storage and processing facility, The Lockerbie Data Centre, Scotland, where it is expected to help reduce operating costs by around 50%, compared with modern data centres of a similar size . The facility’s low carbon design is also expected to emit over 200,000 tonnes of CO2 less, per year, than a conventional data centre of the same size.
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 centres. 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 centres in the world, we are very keen to offer our experience to other developers.”
The Carbon Trust data centre design service provides specialist advice enabling data centre developers to maximise the flow of natural air to keep components cool, use local renewable energy sources where viable and reuse the heat generated.
David King, Project Director, Lockerbie Data Centre Limited, said:
“With the cost of electricity rising and growing client concern over the size of their carbon footprints, increasing the energy efficiency of data centres 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.”
Lockerbie Data Centres Limited, part of the R&D Group, has used the Carbon Trust’s advice on low-carbon energy planning for its new data centre. The 272,000m² data centre will be built to accommodate up to 50,000 server racks, with a peak power demand of 300 megawatts. The complete facility will comprise forty 6,800 square metre data centre building modules – the first of which will be completed in December 2011.
David King, added:
“When complete, each of the data centre’s forty modules will use around half as much energy as a conventional data centre of the same size – creating savings of around £2.1m per annum per module - or £85m per annum across the whole Lockerbie development.”
As well as cutting energy bills by a half, the low carbon design should also allow the data centre to cut its required purchase of carbon allowance units under the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). CRC allowances are allocated based on energy demand. The energy required for running 40 data centre modules of conventional design, but of similar sizes as the Lockerbie Data Centre’s, would require 2.8 million units to be purchased per annum. Thanks to the low carbon design, running all 40 modules of the Lockerbie Data Centre will require just 1.4 million CRC units per annum.
Spurred on by the global rise in cloud computing; server farms and data centres worldwide are expected to use almost 2,000 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, generating 533m tonnes of CO2 by 2020.
The Lockerbie facility is designed to use natural cooling from its Scottish location to help save energy, and to harvest waste heat for reuse in an adjacent eco business park, and new horticultural businesses on site. Much of the energy demand is likely to be provided by a nearby biomass fuelled power station and wind farms, so the data centre will rely on traditional forms of power only when the renewable electricity generation levels are reduced.
Emma Fryer, Head of Climate Change Programmes, at UK technology industry association, Intellect, said:
“It is essential that ICT systems, networks and devices are as efficient as possible, firstly because we increasingly rely on ICT in our everyday lives and secondly because ICT enabled technologies will help underpin our transition to a low carbon economy. In the complex data centre environment, energy saving technologies are evolving very quickly and we are delighted to see a range of them being deployed successfully in this solution.”
The Design Advice programme for Data Centres was developed from the Carbon Trust’s successful Buildings Design Advice service. The service is available to all data centre owners, designers and operators who are planning a new facility or looking to refurbish or carry out significant alterations to their data centre. By providing specialist advice around the design of the IT architecture as well as the associated building and engineering services the new service will help to reduce the energy spend of data centres, whilst reducing their carbon footprint.
Source: Carbon Trust
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