According to Carbon Trust, the Design Advice program for data centers was developed from the Carbon Trust’s successful Buildings Design Advice service.
The company said that the service is available to all data center owners, designers and operators who are planning a new facility or looking to refurbish or carry out significant alterations to their data centers.
In addition to reducing their carbon footprint, the new service will help to reduce the energy spend of data centers by providing specialist advice around the design of the IT architecture as well as the associated building and engineering services.
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 centers of a similar size.
Carbon Trust claims that the facility’s low carbon design is also expected to emit over 200,000 tonnes of CO2 less, per year, than a conventional data center of the same size.
Hugh Jones, director of Solutions at Carbon Trust, said: “Low carbon design in new build and refurbishment projects have 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 centers in the world, we are very keen to offer our experience to other developers.”
The Carbon Trust data center design service provides specialist advice enabling data center developers to maximize 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 of Lockerbie Data Centre, said: “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 Centre, part of the R&D Group, has used the Carbon Trust’s advice on low-carbon energy planning for its new data center. The 272,000m² data center will be built to accommodate up to 50,000 server racks, with a peak power demand of 300MW.
The complete facility will comprise forty 6,800sqmt data center building modules – the first of which will be completed in December 2011.
Mr King added: “When complete, each of the data center’s forty modules will use around half as much energy as a conventional data center 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 center to cut its required purchase of carbon allowance units under the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).
