Feature
What Commercial Building FM’s can learn about Sustainability from Data Centres By Ed Ansett, Founder and Chairman, i3 Solutions Group
For data centres the journey to carbon net zero operations began over ten years ago. With the pace now accelerating, Ed Ansett explains how the sector has built upon the imperative for energy efficiency and is today deploying strategies which put data centres at the heart of sustainable energy supply and distribution.
In built environment terms, data centres are relatively new kids on the block. Dedicated data centre buildings became part of the commercial construction industry around 25 years ago with the advent of pervasive internet use and the birth of a plethora of internet based private and public services.
Today large data centre buildings come in three main types: Hyperscale, Commercial Colocation and Enterprise. Typically, each data centre is measured in megawatts of IT load. Globally there are over 600 hyperscale data centres in operation today, with hundreds more planned in the tens to hundreds of megawatts range. In the colocation market, an entire global commercial data centre industry has emerged. Finally, there are enterprise data centres which are owned and operated by large companies such as banks.
The Data Centre Boom
The first data centre building boom was largely the result of the internet wave in the late 90s and early 2000s, when the success of mobile internet and the iPhone made consumers the main drivers of data generation.
A new industry was born as architects, mechanical and electrical engineers were contracted to design and construct large, low and wide technical buildings where few humans would work, but which housed tens of thousands of pieces of IT equipment
24 fmuk
together with power systems to provide many megawatts of stable,
continuous power and large-scale air-conditioning infrastructure to control the operating thermal envelope.
Initially the primary goal was uptime - keeping the computers running at (almost) any cost. Buildings were designed with spare space, power and cooling capacity to facilitate growth. However, many would never use more than 30% of the available power and even today data centres rarely reach more than 75% of their power capacity.
Measurement And Management
With 60-70% of the cost of building and operating a data centre coming from mechanical and electrical infrastructure, developers are under pressure to reduce energy waste and consumption and reduce carbon emissions. But this challenge is nothing new.
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