New Telehouse Data Centre To Heat Homes In London
The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community.
Telehouse Europe’s expansion of its Docklands facility is the first major data centre to gain planning permission in London since the city passed stringent sustainability requirements. Telehouse said the project’s approval was enabled by green innovations developed with WSP Group, a London-based international sustainability and engineering consultancy. This will be the first time a data center heat export strategy has been introduced in the UK.
The Telehouse project is the most ambitious effort yet to reuse the excess heat from data centers. IBM has designed a data center in Switzerland that that uses waste heat to warm a nearby community swimming pool. Researchers from Notre Dame University placed a rack of high-performance computing nodes at a local municipal greenhouse, the South Bend Greenhouse and Botanical Garden, to help heat the flowers and plants in the facility
Telehouse has two existing data centers in the Docklands, with 300,000 square feet of data centre space housing more than 700 telecoms and colocation service providers. Telehouse West is part of a global expansion of Telehouse facilities to meet surging demand for data center space from its clients in the financial and telecom industries.
Telehouse West is scheduled to be completed in 2010.
Tags: datacentre, green, technology, telehouse
