100MW bit barn farm in Ireland faces planning appeal from – yep – same guy who helped sink Apple's application A 100MW data centre campus in County Wicklow, Ireland, is in danger of being delayed or cancelled altogether after an appeal was lodged with the country's planning authority, An Bord Pleanála. In the appeal doc, data centre developer Brian McDonagh, CEO at Ecologic Data Centres Limited, claims the planning permission granted …
The appeal will be ruled on by 20 July
If the Apple case is anything to go by El Reg had a rare dose of foresight not to mention the year that the final appeal of the fourth appeal to Europe will be ruled upon...
My guess FWIW will be 2025 by which time the developer will have made the same decision as Apple and gone elsewhere.
" . . . . I am determined that this project gets off the ground. . . . . game changer . . . . . exciting plans for this iconic site. . . . . . I have been working on this project with Crag Digital, now Echelon, for the past 17 months. The initial investment is over €500m . . . . . major data centre with 100 megawatts of capacity in phase 1, which will in turn attract industries in the valuable technology and software sectors."
Tearing this shit apart is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Who'd have thought - here in the UK only the applicant can appeal a planning decision (source), whereas people who commented on an application can also appeal in RoI (source). Much more sensible over there (although perhaps it may add rather a lot to the administrative burden with all the NIMBY's in the UK).
Good on him, takes a lot of work to go up against expensive planning consultants
UK planning in small scale projects is also a farce: (from personal experience in my Parish)
Parish objects to house plan – District also object, on the same 9 points – Developer appeals to Government Inspector – Developer moves garage by 1m and reapplies – Parish object as same 9 points still apply – District says “we have no money to fight this” and approves plan – 2 days later Government Inspector reports that all 9 points of objection to original plan are valid and that type of house should never be built on the plot.
The only recompense for the Parish is a Judicial Review with costs starting at over 8 times the annual Parish precept! The whole system is one sided and corrupt!
It is actually even worse once it is appealed to the Planning Inspectorate.
They invariably take out a load of extra work in landscaping, planning gain (footpaths and so on) so it can actually be in the developers interests to get an application rejected so they can appeal it.
In a recent development near me, the local and parish council recommended it be turned down as there were too many houses on the plot.
It was appealed and the result of that was the same number of houses and best of all removing the requirement to put a footpath/cycle path along the side of the road where there is currently nothing. The best part is that a small development that comprised a shop and some flats at the end of the same piece of land did have to put in the path. We now have about 50m of path that just stops at a grassy bank and wall where it meets the appealed development.
All of which is easily disproved by Eirgrid's "All-Island Generation Capacity Statement 2016-2025", the 206 page Environmental Impact Statement which includes Flood Risk analysis (its proximity to the river makes that mandatory in Wicklow), and the 520MW expansion to the Arklow wind farm.
The main source of waste heat appears to be McDonagh himself.
The site happens to have 100MW capacity, the data center design peak load is 60MW according to the application. How exactly does one heat 312,000 homes (with <200W each) in a county with 50,000 homes?
NO large data-centre for data mostly used outside Ireland makes sense here due to the Electricity.
Wind & Solar are not the answer as there are long periods with no output. Especially Wind. UK has a bigger problem with failure of two nuke projects and much of their nuke due to close. Wind can be lacking over most of Europe for a couple of weeks at a time, so inter-connectors don't help.
I'd be wondering what the impact adding 100MW demand to Ireland's power grid would be, especially as Ireland took the Green piill. Datacenters want cheap, reliable power, renewables provide intermittent, expensive power. And given Ireland's location, it's at the end of the line for interconnectors to the EU's dreamed of magical supergrid.
Good on him for trying to make better use of low grade heat that would otherwise be wasted. Makes me fume when I see DCs and freezer farms just chucking hot air out whilst a hundred yards away they’re burning gas and oil to heat a building.
On the OTHER hand, who’s he to f*** up other players and block inward investment? There’s a need for DCs, and yay if they’re efficient and a smart design, but he’s not building his.
Either crap or get off the pot, man.
"Makes me fume when I see DCs and freezer farms just chucking hot air out whilst a hundred yards away they’re burning gas and oil to heat a building."
It makes you fume until you cost how MUCH it costs to catch that very low grade waste heat and reuse it for building heating. I looked into this for a project - it was going to more than doulble the capital costs and be more expensive to operate than burning gas and oil separately (I know, it doesn't make much sense to me either). Most of that has to do with the factor of needing to run chillers continuously to pump heat from the "cold" side to the "hot" side instead of simply using 'free-cooling' solutions.
About the only way you can make waste heat recapture viable is to make it part of the whole building design and plonk a residential bloc on top of the datacentre.
Most of that has to do with the factor of needing to run chillers continuously to pump heat from the "cold" side to the "hot" side instead of simply using 'free-cooling' solutions.
DC run continuously, so they produce heat continuously. Unless you suggest that one should simply open the window to provide cooling during winter, some form of air-conditioning will be running to remove that heat from the DC. Instead of throwing that heat in the air, it could be first go through a large tank of water and if there is any residual heat, it be dissipated in the atmosphere.
Warm water can be used for what you see fit.
My calculation is based on a design target average power per cabinet of ~6kW, includes ~26% unit power uncertainty and a managed power rate of 80%. The space calculation works out at 200 rooms with 10 pods per room and 10-12 cabinets per pod. 1 pod per room is reserved for staging, 5% of the racks are for ancillary systems and 30% of space is reserved for egress, circulation space, robotics, ramps, support columns etc. The cabinet numbers are given for the maximum capability of the facility - the expected occupancy would be 20,000 racks.
As I said, it's only a rough estimate based on the kind of mixed architecture typical to an enterprise DC. Cloud storage and HPC are much denser architectures. I might have lied when I said it was worked out on the back of an envelope... it was worked out on the back of some calculation sheets I picked up from the APC & Schneider stands at Data Centre World a couple of weeks ago.
Also needs a little expansion, ie 100MW total energy, ie thermal + electricity to the racks. Usual challenge is naturally as you increase power density per rack, you also increase the energy needed to cool it. Given it's a single tenant DC rather than general collo, at least they'll have more control over that.
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