The UK is set to get its first solar-powered data center, with Iomart announcing the installation of solar panels on the firm’s flagship site in the southeast of England.
A provider of cloud hosting and managed services, iomart said it has installed a total of 560 solar panels on a data center located in Maidenhead, one of 13 other data centers that form iomart’s UK portfolio.
Comprising nearly 3,000 square meters, the Maidenhead location is the firm’s largest site and its “main self-managed infrastructure facility” responsible for powering more than 12,000 servers.
Now, solar panels will help to power those thousands of those servers. The panels will reportedly generate 250,000 kWh of energy for the data center, helping circumvent the production of 96,061kg of CO2 emissions each year.
“Our Maidenhead data center is the ideal location for a project like this. It has a vast roof space, making solar panels the ideal solution,” iomart CTO David Gammie said.
Delivered by solar energy company 3ti, the installation of the solar panels was completed earlier this year.
This is an initial step in the firm’s wider commitment to sustainability, according to iomart. The firm stated the investment forms part of its “long-term sustainability strategy”, which ultimately hopes to power its entire data center estate with 100% renewable energy.
The firm plans to use solar power among other things to achieve this aim, such as wind power and hydro power.
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iomart already partnered with Katrick Technologies in 2021 to pilot a heat cooling system designed to turn the waste heat at iomart’s Glasgow site into power to drive server cooling systems.
“We have a large portfolio of data centers across the UK and making sure they’re as sustainable as possible is one of our biggest focuses at iomart,” Gammie said.
“We’ve already committed to powering all our data centers with 100% renewable energy. This installation at Maidenhead takes that commitment one step further – generating our own energy onsite, and in addition the potential to export energy back into the grid network in the future,” he added.
