Cloud services provider iomart has announced the installation of rooftop solar panels to power its flagship data centre.
A total of 560 solar panels have been installed on iomart’s Maidenhead data centre, capable of generating around 250,000 kWh of energy each year. According to iomart, this will avoid 96,061 kg of CO2 emissions annually.
David Gammie, CTO at iomart, said: “We have a large portfolio of data centres across the UK and making sure they’re as sustainable as possible is one of our biggest focuses at iomart.
“We’ve already committed to powering all our data centres with 100% renewable energy. This installation at Maidenhead takes that commitment one step further – generating our own energy onsite, and in addition the potential to export energy back into the grid network in the future.
“Our Maidenhead data centre is the ideal location for a project like this. It has a vast roof space, making solar panels the ideal solution.”
Reducing the impact of data centres
Data centres are becoming an increasing focus of decarbonisation efforts due to the immense amount of energy these facilities consume. Globally, data centres are estimated to make up 3% of the world’s electricity usage annually, and forecasts from the National Grid predict that the rise of AI will cause data centre power usage to increase six-fold in the next decade.
As previously reported on Current±, Ireland has seen a boom in data centres in recent years. As a result, data centres make up a significant part of Ireland’s electricity usage; the Central Statistics Office for Ireland revealed that in 2023, Irish data centres consumed around 21% of the country’s metred electricity usage. This represents more than the total consumption of urban dwellings (18%) and rural dwellings (10%).
Data centres also generate significant amounts of waste heat; as such, a growing industry is exploring technology to capture and use this waste heat.
Late last year, the UK government granted £36 million from the Green Heat Network Fund to a project by the Old Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) seeking to capture waste data centre heat to be used in home heating systems. The heat network, which is currently in development, will heat over 10,000 homes as well as 250,000m2 of commercial space in the London Boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing, and Brent.
In January 2024, Octopus Energy announced that it had invested £200 million in tech startup Deep Green, which uses waste data centre heat to warm swimming pools. This tech is successfully in use at Exmouth Leisure Centre in Devon, which has seen a 60% cut in its heating bills thanks to this system.
A version of this article was originally published on our sister site Solar Power Portal.
