'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

One of Europe's largest datacenter campuses is scheduled to be built in the UK close to the M25 motorway in Hertfordshire, permission pending, with a yet to be identified hyperscale customer set to take ownership. A company called DC01 UK Ltd says it has submitted plans for the new build facility, which it claims will have up …

[Steve Davies 3]

Putin says thank you

as he directs his missile command to add another target to the already extensive list of 'places to take out' in and around London.

As for the rest of us?

We have to tighten our belts and pay even higher prices for leccy as all these AI Bitbarns take it all and give nothing of use back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Putin says thank you

Indeed. UK energy generation is constrained by the abject failure to commit to an affordable and reliable energy policy adding huge additional power demand is utterly mindless. The only benefits are for ministers to claim willy-waving bragging rights about the UK being one of the biggest DC locations in Europe. There's few long term jobs, commercial benefits are to tax dodging scum from the US tech sector, the beneficial output of AI is negligible now, and likely to remain so in future, and power prices will climb further when they're already amongst the highest in the world.

I'm not sure why UK politicians are so stupid when it comes to the impact on growth and economic activity of the UK's energy prices, but sadly they all are. Busy chasing new zero, and wondering where all the jobs went, and why there's been no real economic growth for a decade or two.

[Anonymous Coward]

agree

That's half a major power station. At a time when the electrical power capacity required for decarbonisation simply doesn't exist.

[The man with a spanner]

Re: Putin says thank you

" give nothing of use back"

not entirly true - the energy gets used once in the data center and the degraded energy gets recycled as heat for houses. So two bangs for your buck.

It always used to amaze me how much energy power stations used to chuck into the air when you could have put a glass house or some other energy consuming bussiness next yo them and harvest essentialy free energy.

Still good to see we are starting to rediscover technology fom a century ago.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Putin says thank you

It always used to amaze me how much energy power stations used to chuck into the air when you could have put a glass house or some other energy consuming bossiness next yo them and harvest essentially free energy.

Cogeneration is a thing, indeed quite a big thing in many places, but it needs joined up thinking to actually invest in the pipes to route the low-grade heat to homes, etc. It also needs power stations to be close to said users, and with a strong NIMBY aspect to planning that is often ignored for power stations and so usually only done for a big company/industry with its own power plant and use-case for the otherwise wasted heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration

[PB90210]

Re: Putin says thank you

Battersea power station used to supply district heating to Pimlico, just across the river .. unfortunately it also contributed to the Great Smog of 1952 that killed thousands!

"Chiltern Green Energy Ltd" sounds like a good way of showing just how good this mega bit barn will be for the environment... 'greenwashing', surely not!

[xyz]

Re: Putin says thank you

Often thought about that.. Blow the road and rail bridges over the m25 and London is screwed.

If the big boy is MS maybe they need a DC near to lots of people in order to speed up windows update. Every millisecond counts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Putin says thank you

Not even that, just blow the Thames river bridges and you'd have chaos...it's already chaos because there aren't enough of them...going East to West in London is easy...going South to North...not so much. If a bridge is closed in the centre, you can feel the added chaos 20 miles away.

[streaky]

Re: Putin says thank you

K but

a) that's nuclear war and it's moot because Russia (and many other countries will cease to exist), and

b) missile defence. And yes, yes we do.

[rg287]

Cooling?

I wonder what cooling technology they intend to use for the site - aside from pumping it into a district heat circuit (very positive if that accounts for 100% of dispersal).

DC01 UK would no doubt like to handwave that away with "ah, well that's for the operator to decide based on their requirements". But if there's a sniff of evaporative cooling then the council need to be asking where they intend to dump thousands of litres of brine... or indeed get the water in England's increasingly arid South-East.

It is a mystery to me why London is a DC hotspot given the demands for power and cooling (no, there's no actual mystery - clustering of expertise, existing fibre, IXPs and it's "easy").

For anything that isn't High-Frequency Financial Trading, building on the side of a loch in Scotland would be naturally cooler and have better access to power. The latency from Scotland to England is negligible (c.f. DCs building in Iceland as a mid-Atlantic site with easy cooling and reliable power).

I trust that the Business Rate band for "Datacenter" is punitive given that they don't actually employ many people per sq.ft and all the "known hyperscalers" are US-based who will dodge their Corporation Tax one way or another. Business Rates are one of the few business taxes that aren't easily avoided by multinationals - if you have a physical site, you owe the local council money.

[Like a badger]

Re: Cooling?

"I wonder what cooling technology they intend to use for the site - aside from pumping it into a district heat circuit (very positive if that accounts for 100% of dispersal)."

The net efficiency of the multi-stage heat pumps needed to convert low grade waste heat into 90-110C heat network needs is poor, so the heat network would only get about 25-35% of the heat the DC outputs, with the rest released to atmosphere. The load on heat networks is also hugely skewed by the high winter heat loads, so the net contribution of a constant output industrial heat source is near impossible to utilise in the relatively mild UK.

In practice I'd guess the cooling will be a token connection to a heat network for a nearby commercial development, but most heat being dumped through non-evaporative fan assisted chillers, as used by most building air conditioning systems. It's uncommon in the UK to use true evaporative cooling aside from old style power stations and some industrial processes, and it's use in the US probably reflects less regard for the environmental impact.

[The man with a spanner]

Re: Cooling?

" The net efficiency of the multi-stage heat pumps needed to convert low grade waste heat into 90-110C heat network needs is poor, so the heat network would only get about 25-35% of the heat the DC outputs, with the rest released to atmosphere. "

Forgive my ignorance but why are you proposing to raise the tempetature to 110 degC? I only need 65 deg or so, particularly as it is likely to be an enetgy efficient new build.

Failing that build a leisure center with a big swimming pool. These are being shut down due to energy costs.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Cooling?

Normally increase the temperature to reduce the amount of fluid(ie water) you're moving.

You could take the 40C air from the racks and send it directly to homes and end up with 25C at the end - but you are going to have to shift a lot of air and people object to having pipes the size of the channel tunnel across their garden.

The obvious solution, given the housing situation inside the M25, is to move the people to the heat. A series of recyclable wood-fibre based pre-fab 'housing' could be built directly on the roof of the data center and be heated with no further infrastructure. As an extra bonus these can be recycled from the 'housing units' the servers are delivered in.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: move the people to the heat

Just get them to live in 19" racks -"affordable" housing is heading that way already.

[Paul Herber]

Re: move the people to the heat

Most people under the age of 40 are now metric only, they won't fit in 19" racks without percussive persuasion, and that's your actual physical abuse, that is.

[rg287]

Re: Cooling?

District heat doesn't need to be 90-110. Obviously the hotter you get, the more energy you can shift per litre, but others run cooler. Southampton is ~75 (designed around the temperature of their geothermal supply). Kingston Heights is a scheme pulling water from the Thames to effectively use as a water-source heat pump, the same as has been done in Copenhagen. What are the odds that a hyperscaler might be running water-cooled GPU-dense racks anyway, giving you a direct supply of warm water?

Stepping up to 65-80deg isn't that hard to do. It's certainly more efficient than every house having an individual air-source heat pump!

Naturally you have fluctuating demand through the summer, but this can be dumped into thermal storage boreholes for extraction in winter. People have in fact considered these issues and solutions are in operation around the world. "Near impossible" is nonsense from an engineering perspective. Commercial viability may vary in individual cases, but usually works out as a win for TCO and energy price stability (compared with russian gas...) provided you can find an investor with a sensible ROI time horizon (not 3 quarters away) for the up-front install.

[Richard 12]

Re: Cooling?

Exactly. It's utterly ridiculous.

Scotland already has more wind power than there's capacity to export to England & Wales, so consume it up there and export the bits.

Somewhere like Inverness is perfect. The oil refineries are closing, so that's a huge expanse of flat land that nobody wants to live on due to contamination, and they can take a leaf out of Newcastle's book and install a corrupt mayor to extract all the taxpayer's money while getting the land for free.

[munnoch]

Re: Cooling?

Its Grangemouth where the refinery is closing. Don't think its the entire site as there are other petrochemical processing plants there and they plan to build an import terminal for refined products. Inverness is another hundred or so miles north and not particularly well endowed with large expanses of flat land.

Nevertheless siting DC's in the Scottish central belt is not a bad idea to explore. I rather suspect the utterly non-commercial minded SNP leadership would never get it and SE focused Westminster would never support it so its unlikely to get very far.

[Richard 12]

Re: Cooling?

Thanks for the correction, knew I'd made a mistake somewhere.

[Vikingforties]

Re: Cooling?

Slight correction, did you mean Teeside?

Your idea is worth extending - instead of bothering to have a free port so we can house dodgy goods, we can have a free harbour for dodgy data!

[Paul 14]

Re: Cooling?

Not really a mystery, it's all about connectivity and geography, and less to do with latency and more to do with bandwidth, cost and agglomeration.

The London area starts with about 10% of the UK population, all now keen on bandwidth-hungry gaming and video streaming, but previously all keen on the as-was bandwidth-hungry applications of the younger internet. Fibre installation ultimately costs per-mile, so putting the compute closer to the population reduces bandwidth costs. Then this compounds because putting compute close to other compute (some of which it will inevitably need to connect to) also reduces bandwidth costs. Then you add in that this attracts more fibre investment and bandwidth to the same locations, including international connections, and things compound further. Skills availability is another feeder for agglomeration, as is London's position as a popular connection node between America, Europe and Asia.

Functionally the internet appears to be geographically agnostic, but we know that in reality getting bandwidth longer distances to the back of beyond costs substantially more than around major cities. Not only is fibre installation cost per-mile but more energy is required on an ongoing basis to send more data over longer distances. So whilst data centres anywhere there's power available are in theory possible, in practice the bandwidth cost is more of an issue than you might think.

As time moves forward the Moore's law acceleration of compute vs the rather more linear acceleration of connectivity suggests we might see more "edge" compute distributed closer to smaller population centres, but that remains to be seen, and it's hard to see how the agglomeration effect of global hubs like London (+ Singapore, North Virginia, Amsterdam etc) can be avoided.

[PerlyKing]

Another one?

Google have already started on one near Waltham Cross, and want to build another at North Weald. Are they trying to surround London?

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Another one?

Yep. More traffic for the M25 car park.

Build the thing in Scotland where there is more leccy than demand plus lots of water for cooling.

[Jim Willsher]

Re: Another one?

Agreed. I live in Scotland and it pisses down. A lot. Plenty of water here. Oh, and it’s windy.

[Like a badger]

Re: Another one?

Unlikely to be G because they're committed. More likely it's Microsoft, Meta, or Amazon, all of whom have issued press releases about expanding their UK presence with multi-billion investments (think Meta's may have just been "globally"). But bear in mind whoever this is, they're using third parties to try and get the relevant approvals, and that's a chicken feed cost to them - there's no real commitment until they own the land and start construction, and that's at least three years away. A lot could happen between now and then to ensure that the commercial case doesn't stack up. Maybe paying somebody to get UK approvals enables them to play hard ball with planning authorities in other countries, may of whom want to be the El Dorado of data centres.

It's worth a look at international energy prices (tax adjusted) for large business consumers (source DESNZ, latest July-Dec 23 data), and the UK averages a horrifying 27.07p/kWh, compared to 15.34p in Germany, 17.94 in Eire, 6.23 in Sweden, 10.13 in Spain. The UK as a DC location makes little sense other than for latency sensitive loads.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Another one?

"The UK as a DC location makes little sense other than for latency sensitive loads."

Data sensitivity is also a factor. We'll need to see if Labour heads in a direction that will lose equivalence with the EU.

[UnknownUnknown]

Re: Another one?

Needs to be heading towards the EU equivalence, not away.

If not that can always cool it in Thames Water’s sewage overflows. Many overflows.

[rgb1]

Re: Another one?

" OUR VERDICT

The prices in this list are out-of-date, and don’t reflect the average cost of electricity for consumers."

source https://fullfact.org/online/energy-price-comparison-list/

[Carl W]

Re: Another one?

Apparently the North Weald site has been leased back to the council. And the council are taking bookings to use the site for the next 2 years.

[PerlyKing]

Re: Another one?

That sounds like a sensible move. It'll be at least two years before they'll be able to break ground on their new project, so why not get a bit of income if they can?

[UnknownUnknown]

Re: Another one?

No real need for it to be in Londonshire.

After build with the limited number of bit swappers and rebooters it could be Glasgow, Middlesborough, Grimsby/Scunny, Port Talbot, Carlisle, Warrington….

Levelling Up.

[Anonymous Coward]

out of support

unfortunately DC01 is now out of support

https://www.dyson.co.uk/support/vacuum-cleaners/uprights/dc01

[Korev]

Re: out of support

That sucks...

[PiltdownMan]

Re: out of support

Just replaced the filters in my Dyson DC01 - still going strong:-)

Mind you, I rarely vacuum these days :-/

[Doctor Syntax]

Just who that customer might be is "commercially sensitive"

"But can a 74 million pound building project on a nine acre site in the middle of a city be swept under the carpet?"

"We'll use the Official Secrets Act."

"But how can it possibly be a secret, it's so huge?"

"It's a big secret."

[katrinab]

The Post Office Tower, now the BT Tower in London used to be an official secret. Nobody could mention its existence despite it being visible from miles around.

[werdsmith]

The inevitable urban myth re-emerges.

[I am the liquor]

That it didn't appear on OS maps is certainly a myth - here's an OS map from 1973 that clearly shows the Post Office Tower. But the Reg itself has claimed that it was designated an official secret.

[Steve Davies 3]

The P.O tower

It would be even harder to keep it a secret as almost every TV prog went up the tower when it first opened. Then there was the revolving restaurant at the top. Do you honestly think that all those diners signed the Official Secrets Act just to go to dinner?

Think again sunshine. Perhaps you should stop drinking the kool-aid?

[Nifty]

A new data centre in West London has already been deemed impossible due to grid constraints. I wonder why the idea is being resurrected now?

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/report-home-building-to-halt-in-west-london-due-to-data-center-power-demands/

[plunet]

The embargo in West London is broadly due to constraints on the lower voltage distribution network which in West London is broadly operated by SSE. New bit barns are now being sited where they can pick up power from the national grid substations eliminating the need to bother the distribution network.

Previous policy rumours for siting of bit barns suggested harnessing former heavy industrial sites with existing high capacity grid feeds, usually in areas where the economic situation is depressed due to the loss of those former industries, and people who need jobs and retraining. Whatever happened to this relatively sensible idea....? Teesport might not meet latency requirements for some workloads but would be a site ripe for redevelopment and retraining, and has good connections to the national grid

[collinsl]

> Whatever happened to this relatively sensible idea....?

Lack of fibre connectivity, lack of trained staff to staff the DCs once built, lack of local generation capacity (a lot of the coal fired plants which used to feed old industry have gone), and lack of nearby DCs showing that the area is a good investment for new DCs.

Basically people want other people to have taken the risks for them before they start, so they go with a known quantity around London because it's always worked before.

[bernmeister]

Lets think about this.

The output of a small modular nuclear power station is 300MW. Since almost all of the energy used by a data centre is eventualy lost as heat it would make sense to build somewhere closer to a power station and where the heat dissipated by the data centre could be reused. South Mimms does not seem to fit the bill. Just another nail in the coffin.

[streaky]

Re: Lets think about this.

RR are basically 500MW.. But, *per reactor*. SMR sites are unlikely to be single reactor sites because of licensing, security etc (and yes - grid infrastructure); they're going to be made up to 2.5GW, 3GW+ with multiple units.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if

the commitment to this (which politicians will consider a plus) is linked to the Facebook scraping decision.

[Aldnus]

Sounds like someone decided to buy some land and dont know what to do with it.

Major constraints will be the fight for power, bearing in mind there's a lot of warehousing in and around that area and companies moving to Electrified trucks whose range is between 5 and 120 miles per charge and those babies swallow good old electricity like a a rain drop in a well. and will require super fast charging to make it worthwhile and these are required to meet 2030 carbon emissions. whereas a lovely useless AI datacenter which tells you your fridge is empty or there's someone at your front door isn't exactly urgently required.

Delivering goods will outstrip AI in importance than another datacenter so i wont be at all surprised if this use of land doesn't change again.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Sounds like someone decided to buy some land and dont know what to do with it.

Sounds like someone decided to buy some land and dont know what to do with it.

Yep. Sounds to me like they're doing the usual land/property developer thing and trying to flip it. It seems more hype than hyperscale and the numbers don't seem to add up. So an estimated construction cost of approximately £3.75 billion translates to around £1,875 per square foot. I'm also a bit dubious about the power claims, ie using MVA instead of Watts, But being Monday, and assuming a power factor of 0.8 then that's 320MW and 160W per square foot.

So seems like an extremely high cost for an empty bit barn that can't support any power hungry & dense hypescale computing. And I'm a bit dubious about the company. DC01 was previously Hillfield Energy, which hasn't made any money. But at least they have a nanny as a director. From a quick roam around Companies House and the web of SPVs, I get the feeling that the plan is to get planning permission and then try and shop that around. But financing a £3.75bn investment would seem to be an interesting conversation and I've always been a bit dubious about websites that contain many forward looking details, but don't have any 'About Us' sections.

[Killing Time]

Re: Sounds like someone decided to buy some land and dont know what to do with it.

MVA and KVA are the standard nomenclature used in heavy power distribution rather than expression in Watts so my guess is that the developer is directly quoting an NG document to sound cool.

Also, I am extremely skeptical that they have secured that capacity from an as yet to be built substation due to the facts that a. Their project might never happen and NG will be completely aware of this and b. That kind of capacity would commit the majority, if not all of a significant substation build.

Typical developer over embellishments.

[Killing Time]

Re: Sounds like someone decided to buy some land and dont know what to do with it.

Further digging suggests Hillfield were behind a stalled Battery installation adjacent to the same substation.

Just chancers.

[Anonymous Coward]

As it is a single site - does that limit the list of potential buyers?

This news talks about a single location. Assuming that the need to be inside the M25 is driven by the proximity to the client base and that distance is one factor - where are there other facilities to provide resilience and/or load balancing?

[Roj Blake]

South Mimms

At least the waste heat could be used to finally make the pies in the nearby motorway service area an acceptable temperature.

[Lee D]

As someone who worked at a place that was near and fed power from Elstree power station / distribution / whatever it is there - that's gonna make entire towns unreliable.

We had a dedicated 100KW line put in and Elstree are possibly the worst I've seen for turning power off both scheduled and unscheduled, having overnight brown- and black-outs, and it played merry hell with our IT and often cost us equipment when it went. Over ten years, I reckon we had a powercut or brownout every few months, which prompted the install of the dedicated 100KW line, and that made... absolutely no difference at all!

A friend still works there, and nothing has changed since. In fact they're discussing buying generators permanently because the hire cost is getting prohibitive and they had a power-station-side blackout for 2 days a few weekends ago, meaning they had to bring in generators. Made a royal mess of the IT, even with UPS, multiple feeds between buildings, etc.

Sorry, but how they can say they've got 400MVA available, I would absolutely dig into. It's GOT to come at the expense of all the nearby and intervening towns because the power supply around there is possibly the worst I've ever worked under.