Data centre heat reuse has a “squeezed middle” problem
Heat reuse from data centres works well at the edge and at scale. It’s everyone in the middle who’s stuck with the expectations but not the infrastructure. Economists talk about the ‘squeezed middle’ – households that earn too much to qualify for income support but not enough to feel totally secure. They sit in the […]
Staying the path to net zero data centres
At the time of its announcement Liz Truss’s intervention to freeze energy prices for households for two years was expected to cost the government as much as £140bn. In the worst-case scenario, with the separate six-month initiative to cap costs for companies, charities, and public sector organisations, it could potentially cost a further £48bn. Whilst […]
Pushing the Boundaries of Data Centre Sustainability
Much has been said about the energy crisis unfolding in the UK in the last six months, especially given the unfolding events in Ukraine. To complicate matters further, the climate crisis is accelerating at the same time. As a large scale energy user, both of these serious issues directly impact the data centre industry. The […]
Commissioning – the first step in ensuring a sustainable data centre footprint
When we talk about data centre sustainability, much of the conversation is focused on operational elements – power utilisation, water consumption, green power sources, etc. While each of these are critical to an operational data centre strategy, one area missing from most sustainability conversations is the commissioning and construction of the data centre itself. According […]
Powering the next generation of Net Zero data centres with HVO
Today the five-nines principle, or 99.999% uptime, is something that practically all data centre providers will promise customers. And to achieve this, many operators across the globe will rely on fossil-fuelled backup generators as a means of mitigating power or grid failures. The overwhelming majority of these gen-sets are powered by traditional, mineral diesel, which […]
Is Net Zero a realistic goal?
This year, the sustainability targets have changed. Last year, data centre operators would aim to score a good value on an industry metric like PUE (power utilisation effectiveness), or promise to use more renewable energy. This year, they have a bold new target: Net Zero. There’s a reason for that. The climate crisis is now […]
PUE – The data centre measure of efficiency that is still going strong…
I’ve spent almost three decades working within the data centre industry and around this time of year it’s usual to see blogs, articles and commentary on “industry predictions” outlining new ways of operating, cooling and monitoring data centre capacity. Despite all this annual change, one measure of efficiency that has always steadfastly remained is the […]