Eclipse MD joins Data Center Dynamics Connect London panel
At last month’s Data Center Dynamics Connect London event, Eclipse Power Solutions MD, Charles Deacon, joined the panel discussing ‘Powering HPC workloads – overcoming power constraints in the region.’ Here Charles shares his views on some of the topics covered over the course of a single hour.
When you bring together people from the data centre and energy sectors, UK power distribution, infrastructure project management, and the legal profession, you’re bound to get a wide-ranging discussion. Data Center Dynamics’ Head of Broadcasts, Alex Dickins, chaired the panel and drove a conversation that took in some interesting subjects.
Pretty early on in the discussion, we agreed to replace ‘HPC’ with AI to better reflect current data centre workloads, and we went on to discuss how the significant challenges that the data centre infrastructure faces due to constraints on energy availability, grid capacity, and sustainability. We looked in depth at the limits on grid capacity, fluctuating energy availability, and environmental regulations, and how renewable energy sources, energy storage systems and other initiatives could provide some solutions. These were my highlights:
The need to increase grid efficiency to power data centres
Energy efficiency differs from grid efficiency. There was a time when people thought that energy efficiency would reduce demand, and demand constraints weren’t an issue that long ago. The National Grid didn’t believe that demand connections would need grid reinforcement, but with the take up of AI, we’re seeing the opposite is true. Different types of data centre have different power requirements. For example, language planning models and AI have considerably higher power requirements – sometimes 100MW+ – than traditional data centres.
As a panel, we agreed that it’s important to accurately assess how much power a data centre will actually need and have conversations about ramping or phasing development in order to secure connections faster.
Connections by need rather than place in the queue
As we were on the topic of need, prioritising connections that are ‘first ready and first needed’ indicates the importance for a national strategy on demand connections, especially as the Government has added data centres to the Critical National Infrastructure classification.
Utilising existing infrastructure
Surprisingly a lot of the existing infrastructure is underutilized – possibly as much as 70% – as housing developments and EV chargers use less power than they think they’ll need. Unlocking unused capacity by contractually giving it to a data centre, through flexible contractual arrangements and better collaboration will help energise data centre developments.
Location, location, location
It might sound obvious, but there are connection advantages of locating data centres where they can help the grid. This means building data centres where there is an abundance of renewable power. This could see more data centres being constructed in Scotland where there is 20GW of renewables output in the connection queue. Export capacity to England from Scotland is currently limited to just 6GW export capacity. So, it makes sense – and is more efficient – to ramp up demand to meet supply than pay to curtail output.
Collaboration and integration
Our discussion finished on a call to encourage the data centre industry to give back to the grid rather than just taking from it. Rightly or wrongly, data centres are often seen as massive consumers of energy to the detriment of local communities. Co-locating demand and generation within a private network and sharing connection points with the local community would boost data centres’ reputation as good grid citizens. This could involve finding synergy between data centres – where a lot of the power requirement is for cooling – and facilities that need heat, like local authority swimming pools.
A critical imperative
What’s clear is that data centres are critical to economic development, part of the UK’s critical infrastructure in fact. It’s imperative that data centre development projects are able to connect to the grid in a sustainable, timely way. At Eclipse Power Solutions, we are determined to find workable solutions to make this happen.
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