E X P E R T O P I N I O N esponsible data

Sustainability and carbon free energy are therefore as much on their minds as those of the legislators when considering expansion of data centres into new locations to further support our digital economy . Let ’ s start with the data centres themselves , and how they affect the local infrastructure .

Sustainable redevelopment

With rising costs of build and the increased focus of regulators on sustainable building developments , data centre operators expanding in both emerging markets and established locations need to take stock . The emissions of new build data centres are sometimes the only choice – but there are growing opportunities for repurposing existing data centres , which may no longer be anywhere near fully utilised . These provide a convenient local option for enterprises migrating from on-premise data centres to colocation and / or into the cloud – is a priority . nLighten terms this ‘ sector coupling ’, which is not a new term in the energy sector but one which has excluded data centres until recently .

This is the practice of energy recovery and reuse between producers and users of energy to affect lower aggregate emissions and a higher overall efficiency . It is no longer the data centre in isolation : the new definition of data centre operations takes the community infrastructure into account

addressing network connectivity and emerging energy efficiency legislation .

While new energy concepts and technical infrastructure are necessary , the opportunity is to reuse the embodied carbon expended during construction of vacated legacy premises . Levering existing operating permits and fibre connectivity , these sites provide a convenient and local solution for network deployments and local workloads .

This approach plays particularly well for well-funded Edge colocation providers , where network proximity to users is key to supporting low latency or high volume applications , for example , for enterprise businesses , industry , CDNs , entertainment and regional cloud providers . At the same time , it helps the data centre sector achieve timely and sustainable facilities to support accelerating capacity demands .

Sector coupling

Looking to the future , the implementation of innovative sustainable solutions in collaboration with the local community and redefines the data centre as a lever to environmental improvement .

After all , in our digital economy we are now as dependent on data as we are on established industrial utilities such as power , water , heating or cooling .

The energy transition and increasing trend toward weather dependent generation makes the energy sector dependent on energy storage and recovery . Yes , our utilities are all in a state of change to protect the environment and data centres are a part of this as a significant energy user .

Heat exchange and reuse

Heat recovery and reuse as a byproduct of data centre operations provides an emission free source of heat , which often offsets carbon rich energy sources for heating such as oil or natural gas . Northern Europe , for example , has significant potential for heat reuse with the growing demand for regional Edge data centres . Increasingly , these are being strategically located close to end-users and therefore ideally positioned to export excess heat .

www . intelligentdatacentres . com 43