A group of investors, including investment bank Morgan Stanley, are set to fund a £250m off-grid tidal-powered datacentre in the north of Scotland, it was confirmed yesterday.
The banking giant said it is to work with tidal power company Atlantic Resources Corporation – in which it holds a stake – to build the site by 2011.
The datacentre would require about 150Mw hours of power and the alliance wants this energy to be sourced entirely from tidal arrays.
The zero-carbon datacentre will seek to tap into increasing demand for greener IT systems and be opened up to third-party companies to hire space. " They will be looking for tenants for the datacentre," said a spokesman for the partnership.
The scheme must still secure planning permission to go ahead, and although the Scottish government has recently signalled its support for marine energy projects, only one commercial-scale tidal energy project has so far gone into operation in the UK – and that took 13 years to come to fruition.
However, the Morgan Stanley project is expected to avoid one of the main technical challenges faced by tidal energy projects, by connecting direct to the datacentre facility and not linking to the national grid.
The project is the latest in a series of innovative proposals designed to tackle datacentres' increasing energy use and associated carbon emissions.
Globally, datacentres are responsible for the same amount of emissions as an average European country, according to research by Gartner – accounting for about a quarter of the 580 million tonnes used by IT equipment worldwide.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change estimates server farms are responsible for three per cent of electricity use in the UK, a figure expected to double by 2020.
Consequently, growing numbers of firms are investigating ways to power da tacentres using renewable energy. Earlier this year, submarine cable operator Farice signed a £12m deal with networking company Thus for a high-bandwidth internet connection between UK businesses and datacentres in Iceland that could be powered using emission-free geothermal energy.
Meanwhile, Google last month filed a patent for an offshore floating datacentre that would use wave and tidal energy for power.
London firms targeted with promise of high-speed connections and cheap geothermal energy 28 Jul 2008
Tidal turbine firm to invite rival developer to help provide power for expanded Scottish datacentre 13 Nov 2008
"Sheik" Salmond to offer £10m to first team to deliver commercially viable marine energy 03 Dec 2008Clean tech firm behind plans for tidal-powered Scottish server farm inks deal with green datacentre specialist 27 Jan 2009
Statkraft invests £4.6m in innovative Scottish energy project 30 Mar 2009
Ecotricity confirms it is taking legal action against the firm for using its image of a green Union flag 10 Jul 2009
Logistics giant claims more efficient planes and use of biofuels will cut emissions by a further 20 per cent cut by 2020 09 Jul 2009
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