One of the things that prompted me to write about CHP and Biomass was an email I received from a colleague, Howard Pheby of 5 nines. Howard, and his partner Paul Foskett, are announcing their plans to build a new data center complex co-located with a Biomass Plant just up the road from my home in East Anglia. Exclusive to The Hot Aisle and as well the standard Press Release (designed for the non technical folks), Howard sent on an interesting presentation that outlines the plans for providing sufficient power for a very large site.
The 5 nines approach is very interesting and innovative because it leverages a number of techniques to get the power delivered, drive energy efficiency and also to provide resilience in case of failure of the main building feeds.
The proposed data center is located on the same site as the Elean Biomass CCHP Power Station and is connected into the National Grid with two independent 30 MWe feeds. The available power from these feeds is insufficient to drive all of the planned equipment and cooling load required. The plan is to build two gas turbine CHP plants on site to provide a further 14 MWe.
Now here is the smarts. Because both the Biomass CCHP and Gas Turbine CCHP plants are on site, the hot water they produce will be used to drive absorption chillers in the data centers. Howard claims that this will reduce the electrical load by up to 24 MWe.
Now for the nice country bit, Howard tells me that….
“Energy Power Resources (owners of the Elean Power Plant) will facilities manage the power infrastructure of the campus as well as giving us the hot water from the power station to drive the Absorption Chillers. The Gas will be incremental. The main electrical feed is direct from the grid at this stage although we are working on taking directly from the power station – but there are legal issues with this I believe.
What is also interesting and not in the Press Pack, not in detail is the housing development going up from the same developer for a village development with Cotswold type architecture with village green, pub, cricket pitch, windy lanes etc……and subsidized hot water and power from the egress heat from the data centers….very green indeed”
I like the idea of an old fashioned warm pub to go with my warm English beer… Very nice indeed.
Pingback by Using Absorption Chillers in a real world Data Center Design | The Hot Aisle on 18 September 2008:
[...] Reviews • Feature Tags: Cooling • Data Center • Green Ideas I wrote about Elean Park Data Center some time ago on The Hot Aisle where we looked at the use of absorption chillers that use the waste [...]
Pingback by UK Data Center wins US Award for Energy Efficiency | The Hot Aisle on 27 April 2009:
[...] You may remember that The Hot Aisle covered the Elean Data Center in earlier articles about A green Data Center design and Absorption Chillers. [...]