Europe’s greenest data centre planned for Cambridgeshire

A former airfield in rural Cambridgeshire is set to be transformed into a state-of-the-art data centre facility and 'Eco Village'.

The Elean Data Campus will consist of a data centre spread across six buildings and a 400-home Eco Village which would be heated by the waste energy from the Campus. It will be built at a 65,000 square metre site at Mepal Airfield in Sutton, 12 miles north of Cambridge.

Developer Lasercharm claims the site could be the greenest data centre in Europe. The data centre will be powered by multiple redundant sources, most notably using biomass with a straw-burning combined heat and power plant. Lasercharm also said the plant will only use 100 per cent carbon-neutral waste and be 40 per cent less energy than comparable sites as a result of using absorption cooling.

"The reduction in the energy burden will translate directly to reduced operational costs for the data centre occupiers, in addition to reducing the impact on the environment by the data centre campus," said Lasercharm spokesman Alex Arthur.