Deep Green

Keysource and Deep Green are proud to announce that we have won the Edge Project of the Year award at the DCS Awards! This recognises our innovative approach to data centre design and construction, which uses sustainable technologies to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact.

Project Overview

An innovative start up Deep Green has seen the heat generated by a data centre used to heat a Devon public swimming pool. The computers inside the white box are surrounded by oil to capture the heat – enough to heat the pool to about 30C 60% of the time, saving Exmouth Leisure Centre thousands of pounds. The data centre is provided to the council-run centre free of charge and the leisure centre’s electricity costs for running the “digital boiler” will also be refunded.

Sean Day, who runs the leisure centre, said he had been expecting its energy bills to rise by £100,000 this year. “The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months – our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof.”

The future of the data centre has to be at the heart of communities, contributing too, rather than detracting from local communities. We can do this as part of an integrated planning process, leveraging the heat for district heating, support local community services like swimming pools or even as part of new residential and commercial developments.

Rishi Sunak recently highlighted the £800m investment in supercomputing, and what better way to achieve this in a sustainable manner, to support NetZero 2030 than an integrated Metropolitan Edge data centre within every community. Keysource and Deep Green are working together to scale this approach across the UK.

Challenges Addressed

Energy costs are at an all-time high and swimming pools are struggling to stay open. (Last summer, BBC News revealed 65 swimming pools had closed since 2019, with rising energy costs cited as a significant reason.) This also bucks the trend of data centre projects by repurposing the heat generated to serve the local community.

The project was able to find the ‘load’ that marries up with the Direct Liquid Cooling compute approach in a footprint that can be sustainable and secure whilst ensuring the IT hardware has valid ‘warranty’ in DLC / Immersed environment.

Moving forward this approach also addresses the Grid limitations and energy requirements that are significantly limiting opportunities to develop new data-centre capacity and creating significant negative publicity for the data centre industry which is manifesting itself in moratoriums on new project development.  In essence, rapidly growing industry energy requirements and carbon footprint represent an existential threat to existing DC business models.

Innovation

This approach utilises small pockets of ‘spare’ and already allocated grid capacity to deliver edge and HPC capabilities within the fabric of society. The energy recapture model saves pools at least 63% on their energy requirements to heat the pool.  In exchange, the pools provide space, power and connectivity to support the deployment.

It utilises the energy efficiency benefits of immersion and direct liquid cooling in combination with heat re-use to deliver a PUE of 1.005 or lower and runs on 100% renewable energy.

Project Challenges

As with many projects in the sector we faced supply chain delays and had to also manage the programme with the swimming pool. The availability of skilled people was an issue as we were looking for specialist partners to work with, with strong supply chain and coverage to support the installation.

Warranty restrictions of existing components is not favourable to immersion projects so we had to work with OEM manufacturers to validate the use of their technology within immersed environments.

Benefits

A cut in gas consumption for pool heating by 91%; a current PUE of 1.005 with a projected PUE of 1.003; projected cost savings of £2500 per month: and projected reduction of carbon footprint of 3 tonnes per month.