There’s nothing like a bit of competition get folks behind a good cause. The PUE standard had given data center designers and managers a defined figure to aim for and companies are now proud to publish  their PUE for the world (or not)  to see just how much energy/money/time they are saving.

As Andy Dominey says in yesterday’s post – the new ebay facility in Utah raises the bar in terms of energy efficiency, achieving an estimated PUE of just 1.4. So every Watt of energy used by servers or storage, only requires a total data center input of 1.4 watts. Very efficient. However,there's always someone who is aiming that little bit higher..

Cambridge Elean Data Campus - A Vision of the Future?

A UK company, BNB Developments, is planning to build a data center that they claim will have a PUE of less than 1. Huh? As they say on their website, there's no such thing as a Green data center, just greener..

The key to the efficiency of the solution is that the site just happens to have it’s own CHP Power Station. CHP? Well that’s Combined Heat and Power – a type of power station that’s been around for quite some time.

CHP 101

Energy isn't just wasted in the places that we finally use it; most of the waste in our electricity system happens before it even reaches our homes and businesses. Conventional power stations throw away enough heat as is needed to provide hot water and heating for every building here in the UK. How does this happen? Well, generating electricity by burning stuff like gas or coal for example produces huge amounts of 'waste' heat, which is simply thrown away by our power stations - for example, as steam up the cooling towers. Outrageous!

On average, our large, centralized power stations throw away two thirds of the energy they generate.

If power stations can be sited close to where heat is needed - say, near towns and villages or on industrial sites like Elean at Cambridge - then this heat can be captured and supplied to homes and businesses or used in industrial processes such as data center cooling. The heat capture technology exists and is actually well established in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands.

Here's how these guys aim to run the data center using CHP:

As you can see from this neat flow diagram, at the 700,000 sq ft Elean site near Cambridge, they are planning to use power from the existing CHP site, along with other energy saving technologies. This, they claim will result in a negative PUE. It uses some other cool technologies such as Absorption Cooling but that’s not unusual, it’s the onsite power source that’s key. All that heat that is usually wasted by power generators is re-harnessed and used to power the cooling facility. Crucially it should also exempt them from a chunk of tax in the form of the UK CRC Levvy so the financials stack up nicely too. Put it this way, if I had a truck load of servers with no home I would be heading their way. So maybe there's no such thing as a green datacenter, but if all of the servers in this facility were running NightWatchman Server Edition, it's hard to see just how you could make it any greener!

Check out the full story at http://www.eleandata.com