Podcast: Data Centre Realities with Alan Pritchard from FarrPoint

00:00:00 – 00:00:09 – Pete Aston

Hello and welcome to another podcast from Roadnight Taylor. I’m Pete Aston and I am joined today by Alan Pritchard from FarrPoint. Alan, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:09 – 00:00:10 – Alan Pritchard

Thank you.

00:00:10 – 00:00:28 – Pete Aston

So, it feels like a while since I’ve done a podcast. We’ve had a bit of a break over the summer, but it’s great to sort of kick off the autumn season with yourself, Alan, and we’ve just had a great lunch talking about everything that we’re going to talk about now, which is all things data centres.

00:00:28 – 00:00:29 –Alan Pritchard

Indeed yeah.

00:00:29 – 00:00:38 –Pete Aston

So, can you just give us a bit of a background to yourself and sort of the work that you’ve been involved with in the past and then into FarrPoint as well?

00:00:38 – 00:01:26 – Alan Pritchard

So yeah, I’m Alan Pritchard. I work for FarrPoint, as you said, Pete, so I’ve been in telecoms and networking and data centres for a long time, as my hair line would show. But yeah, data centres are not new, so they’ve been around as long as IT has been around.

So I’ve been involved in IT and telecoms, working for telcos in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, so I’ve kind of been around the block a bit and in terms of telecoms market and FarrPoint are a kind of specialist consultancy organization providing independent technology consulting advice, particularly in connectivity and digital infrastructure and of late, certainly within the last six to 12 months, data centres have been certainly one of our most popular lines of enquiry from the general marketplace.

00:01:26 – 00:01:47 – Pete Aston

This is more of an aside, I guess, to the main topic, which is going to be about data centres, but in terms of that connectivity piece, we work with a lot of clients who are connecting energy projects or, you know, connecting data centres and whatever. So, you advise on connectivity?

00:01:47-00:01:47 – Alan Pritchard

Absolutely yeah.

00:01:47 – 00:01:48 – Pete Aston

Bringing in fibre.

00:01:48 – 00:02:12 – Alan Pritchard

We don’t sell products or services, so we absolutely provide independent advice to those who have a connectivity challenge. They need fibre, they need mobile, they need microwave, they need something to connect a community, an asset, a town, whatever it may be. And we will go to market for those organisations on their behalf, if necessary, but certainly price up and do commercial analysis.

00:02:15 – 00:02:40 – Pete Aston

There we go. If any of our listeners want some advice on sort of connectivity data side of them, go to FarrPoint, have a chat with Alan and co.

So, let’s dig into our topic, which is data centres. Like you’ve, it’s a really popular thing to be looking at the moment for lots of developers looking in it. But let’s go back to basics, can you just explain, what is a data centre?

00:02:40 – 00:04:31 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, absolutely so, data centres are not new, even though they are very popular at the moment and are certainly appearing in popular news outlets, whereas typically you wouldn’t have heard of them before they’ve been in the background. Data centres have been around as long as we’ve had IT systems, so banks have had data centres for years. There’s just big grey boxes, anonymous on the edge of towns and cities and no one really knew what they did. Why are they popular now – is because of the growth, particularly in cloud services, and everyone deals with the cloud. Our smartphones are all connected to the cloud. Without data centres, none of the cloud works, because the cloud is effectively these data centres and, in terms of you know the sizes of them and they kind of same as, almost like t-shirts small, medium and large, and sometimes extra-large if you’re Google or meta or Facebook or someone.

But yeah, the hyperscale’s, they operate at the top end of the market. So those are the big data centres, typically hundreds of megawatts, if not beyond hundreds, you know, up to gigawatt in some, some cases, and those are the large, big tech companies that everyone’s heard of you know your Microsoft’s, your Google’s, your Facebook’s, etc. Etc.

Then we’ve kind of got the mid-tier market that deals in the tens of megawatts from 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 upwards, and those are kind of the majority of the traditional markets and data centres across the globe before the hyperscalers kind of came into being. And then we’ve got the small kind of edge data centres like of you know, ones and two megawatts. So those are the kind of tiering systems of you know. They’re basically big metal boxes full of IT, really really expensive really expensive IT hardware.

00:04:31 – 00:04:35 – Pete Aston

So, from an external perspective they’ll look like a sort of distribution warehouse.

00:04:35 – 00:04:52 – Alan Pritchard

They’ll look like an Amazon warehouse without the Amazon logo on the side. They’re typically de-branded because people do not want to advertise their existence, because they are seen as a critical asset. There’s a lot of you know, expensive, very sensitive equipment and information in them.

00:04:52 – 00:04:59 – Pete Aston

Am I right in thinking the government fairly recently branded them as a critical national infrastructure? Asset like electricity substation.

00:04:59 – 00:05:16 – Alan Pritchard

Indeed, they did. Yes. And they’ve arguably always been a critical national you know, infrastructure asset, a bank who had a data centre that you did your banking with. That’s pretty important to you and all that’s banking customers, it’s just they weren’t kind of unofficial, critical national infrastructure asset.

00:05:16 – 00:05:22 – Pete Aston

So, we’ve got the big metal box.

What’s inside the big metal box that makes the data centres?

00:05:22 – 00:05:45 – Alan Pritchard

Lots and lots of servers and storage equipment. So, whatever you have in your laptop or your desktop, if you’re still running a desktop for those that like desktops, some of us still do, but you know, anything that looks like a laptop, basically stuffed to the rafters full of very expensive IT hardware and servers, which are basically very, very big versions of laptops.

00:05:45 – 00:05:47 – Pete Aston

So, there’s, and these are sort of in racks?

00:05:47 – 00:06:05 – Alan Pritchard

Racks, rows and rows, and rows, and rows and rows.

So, it’ll be thousands of servers in one of these data centres. All computing, gathering data, churning through data, storing data, retrieving data, sending it to your phone, my phone, everyone’s phones.

00:06:05 – 00:06:09 – Pete Aston

And cooling, I assume because they produce a lot of heat, I guess there’s a lot of cooling systems?

00:06:11 – 00:07:09 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, the majority of the energy involved in running a server or, you know, a, you know laptop gets warm when you use it gets generated as heat. So, all the energy that it takes to supply one of these things actually gets dumped as heat. So, they get very hot very quickly. It’s analogous to you sitting on your, your laptop, on your lap and on sofa at night. If something’s really busy, your lap gets warm. In terms of what the laptop’s doing, it’s exactly the same with a server. You know server some, some servers are now you know more energy than you know? One bar electric fire was the old way of using an analogy. A one-kilowatt fire like a one bar electric fire. Some servers are like five, 10, 15, 20 times that size of energy consumption. So that’s a lot of energy, that’s a lot of heat that’s got to be got rid of and if it doesn’t be got rid of, basically it melts.

00:07:09 – 00:07:25 – Pete Aston

Yeah, yeah, and we’re going to come on and talk about a bit later about the sort of considerations of data centre location. But I guess some of the other components into a data centre are the connectivity.

00:07:25 – 00:07:26 – Alan Pritchard

Energy.

00:07:26 – 00:07:42 – Pete Aston

Yeah, but yeah, maybe we’ll touch on that a bit later because obviously that’s really crucial to thinking about the rollout of data centres. But can you just talk us through some of the historic rollout of data centres across the country?

00:07:43 – 00:08:28 – Alan Pritchard

So, I think it’s probably useful to give a perspective in terms of the UK’s data centre market and where it sits in Europe and where it sits globally and where data centres in the UK are found or majority are found, even though they’re quite anonymous boxes, big metal boxes. So, there are about you know, 500 approximate data centre sites in the UK, vast majority around London, vast majority of 80% plus the data centres in the UK of these 500 approximately are in the London area, particularly in west London, which is why there’s a quite a, you know, high demand for energy in west London. But so that sounds like a big number 500. The USA has got 4,000.

00:08:28 – 00:08:31 – Pete Aston

Wow and yeah.

00:08:31 – 00:09:22 – Alan Pritchard

So actually, the UK is number two in the world. So, we’ve got 500. The USA is number one, it’s got 4,000. So, there’s a big gap between number one and number two. And then the kind of the rest of the world market is about 10,000 data centres. So you can see that the US is pretty much the majority of the data centre you know market globally and the UK is kind of number two and of that capacity in the UK, London is the majority of that of that capacity it’s about 1.1, 1.2 gigawatts of energy at the moment operationally, and the reason why it’s in London, it’s just the fact of that’s where the historically the demand was. Financial services were there historically and still are, and so data centres kind of grew from that that base and they tend to congregate together, like many markets do.

00:09:22 – 00:09:24 – Pete Aston

And safety in numbers safety.

00:09:24 – 00:09:27 – Alan Pritchard

Safety in numbers. Sheep, you know, the herd instinct kicks in.

00:09:21 – 00:09:40 – Pete Aston

Can you tell us a little bit about latency, sort of comms network latency and the impact that sort of historically had on location and maybe the impact that currently has?

00:09:40 – 00:10:40 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, so traditional IT applications running in data centres, like banking, is a good one, because you know, we’ve had banking, electronic banking, for a long time. Financial transactions are very time sensitive, and if you’re trading especially, but even if you’re not trading, so that the time taken to send data, have it processed and send it back is really, really critical. Now it takes time to send data around down a cable; it travels at approximately the speed of light, so that’s quite fast. But the volume of the transaction and the importance of it, the value of the transaction, means that sometimes these very, very small delays, you know, when they’re magnified up through thousands or hundreds of thousands of transactions, you know, are significantly they mean money, and so that has meant that data centres were located relatively close to where the big peak demand was. So, there was very, very little …

00:13:53 – 00:14:02 – Pete Aston

And I guess the financial market’s been located in the middle of London, hence data so data centres being very close to London.

00:10:40 – 00:10:55 – Alan Pritchard

West London particularly, but docklands as well. So that’s why that historic market grew there and it has expanded from that point.

00:10:55 – 00:11:07 – Pete Aston

And am I right in thinking that the transatlantic fibre cable comes in from the West and in through West London? What sort of impact has that had on location historically?

00:11:07 – 00:12:06 – Alan Pritchard

So that cable or those subsea cables are really important to data centres. So terrestrial cable is very important to where your demand is. But data centres have to connect to other data centres and traditionally there’s a global market for data centres. So, if you were a data centre in London or South Wales, you’ll want to be, you’ll be talking to data centres in Virginia and in the US, or in Amsterdam or in Paris or in Frankfurt. So those subsea cables and because latency can be quite sense, it can be very important for certain types of transactions the straight-line distance on a subsea cable. If you’re at the end of that straight line cable, that means you’ve got a bit of an edge in terms of latency, so you wouldn’t put a data centre for example, I don’t know in the south of Spain, if you were trying to transact with someone in London, you’d want that cable to be as close as possible to London.

00:12:06 – 00:12:30 – Pete Aston

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So, can you tell us a little bit also about the experience in Ireland, which obviously is not GB but obviously very, very close market to GB? They, from what I understand, had a very strong incentives for building data centres that drove certain behaviours in.

00:12:30 – 00:13:45 – Alan Pritchard

So, the Irish government had a policy. I think they still have the policy. It was a kind of a low tax regime. So, they attracted a lot of US tech companies and also pharmaceuticals as well, but particularly tech. So, in Dublin Bay a lot of tech companies arrived, and they brought their data centres with them.

So, there’s a large part of you know the data centre capacity in Western Europe is located in Dublin Bay. At one point if you were consuming Netflix in the UK, it was probably coming from Dublin. But it’s since changed so that kind of that tax regime generated, you know, interest in building the data centres in Dublin Bay and it’s become a very popular data centre market to the extent that something like 60% of the energy consumed in Dublin is actually is consumed by data centres, which I mean Ireland’s a relatively small country, so it can show you that kind of tax benefit or tax rate regime can sometimes, you know, arguably go, you know, to the extremes, and I think there’s now a moratorium on new data centre capacity in Dublin just because of the energy problems that that’s caused.

00:13:45 – 00:14:08 – Pete Aston

Yeah, that’s very interesting, yeah, and I guess it’s worth bearing that in mind as we, as we move on now to sort of think around the current interest in data centres. So, we’ve sort of mentioned it already, but there’s a lot of interest from lots of parties at the moment in data centres. So, can you sort of talk us through what’s driving a lot of that interest?

00:14:08 – 00:15:33 – Alan Pritchard

There’s like there’s, I think there’s kind of two ways of looking at it. There’s a kind of organic growth. The cloud’s getting bigger, we’re consuming more services from the cloud, either in the workplace or at home. So, the cloud is kind of organic growth. The cloud requires connectivity, and it requires data centres, so that generates the requirement for more capacity.

But what’s kind of given up a bit of a step change is artificial intelligence. So, the AI word. or two words rather that’s generated the majority of the kind of new popular demand for data centres, and that’s because AI, as different to traditional cloud data centres, requires a lot more energy and a lot more IT hardware to do its thing it’s very, very intensive in terms of IT hardware, particularly the computational chips from NVIDIA and others that actually do the AI computations, either training or inference.

So that energy requirement, that hardware requirement, has spurned and generated the demand for more real estate hardware and more energy, because IT needs energy, lots of IT needs lots of energy. AI needs all of that and so it’s kind of self-perpetuating.

00:15:33 – 00:15:52 – Pete Aston

And so, obviously, AI is a global thing, so you know you’d expect somewhere like the UK to be getting into that. In terms of the sort of UK government, though, what are they doing to promote data centres?

00:15:52 – 00:16:51 – Alan Pritchard

UK governments are trying to embark upon a kind of stimulus maybe stimulus is the wrong word, but they’re trying to encourage AI. They want to be sovereign in AI. I mean sovereign is an interesting concept because many other countries don’t want to be reliant on some of the big tech companies who have all the dollars in AI. So many countries around the world are looking to be sovereign in their own capability and the UK is certainly no different to that. So, UK government have announced some packages of stimulus, particularly growth zones. Growth zone number one is in Cullum, not far from where this has been recorded. That was announced in January and there’s another two, I think, to be announced relatively soon somewhere else in the UK and those will be to try and foster and generate demand and interest and capability and sovereign capacity for AI factories effectively.

00:16:51 – 00:16:58 – Pete Aston

So, does that mean that if you are trying to build a data centre, you can only build it within an AI growth zone?

00:16:58 – 00:16:59 – Alan Pritchard

No.

00:16:59 – 00:16:59 – Pete Aston

Or it’s just like a focal point?

00:17:01 – 00:17:25 – Alan Pritchard

I think a focal point is a good way of describing it. It’s hoped that they will effectively, if you build it, they will come, others will come around and an ecosystem of like-minded industries, digital industries, AI industries, will be fostered, and you know they will collaborate around each other. So that’s certainly the goal. I believe that those goals will soon achieve.

00:17:25 – 00:17:38 – Pete Aston

And in terms of your own experience and what you’re seeing in terms of activity of your clients, are you seeing a marked increase in conversations?

00:17:38 – 00:18:42 –  Alan Pritchard

Certainly, lots of conversations and lots of conversations from folks we probably wouldn’t have spoken to before about you know, what’s the likelihood of us being able to have a data centre in this location. Do we have connectivity? Do we have power? Do we have land? Asking those questions and folks asking the question well, I’ve got fibre in my house, BT have just dug fibre in, or whoever it is, Virgin Media have got fibre in my house. Does that mean I can have a data centre in my back garden? That’s maybe an extreme example but, it’s kind of some of the thought processes that go, that go with data centres and the reality is probably not. I’m not sure I would want a data centre in my back garden anyway. But yeah, that’s in lots of conversations about people, from people trying to get it understand. You know what it takes to have a data centre, where’s it best to have one? Can we even have one? Do we have x, do we have y, do we have z and what? What are those x, y’s and z’s?

00:18:42 – 00:19:19 –  Pete Aston

Yeah, and that’s interesting. Yeah, we in our work as Roadnight Taylor are seeing a huge amount of interest in data centres as well from the power side, and we’ve already talked how power is vitally important, but in terms of the capacities we’re dealing with many gigawatts’ worth of interest in data centres. So, I know you’ve told me earlier, but can you tell everyone who’s listening what the current installed capacity of data centres is in this country?

00:19:19 – 00:19:29 – Alan Pritchard

So, I think I mentioned earlier that London’s about 80% to 90% of the UK data centre market. It’s 1.1, 1.2 operational gigawatts.

00:19:29 – 00:19:30 – Pete Aston

In London?

00:19:30 – 00:21:14 – Alan Pritchard

In London but that’s to be honest, that’s the majority of the UK market, so everything else added up it’ll be one and a half, or something.  Yeah, so one and a half gigawatts let’s call it one and a half for our numbers. It’s the UK’s operational capacity. So, if you want to build a one-gigawatt campus at the bottom of your backyard, that’s the size of the whole UK data centre market. You know 70 to 80% of the current UK capacity. So that shows you the scale of some of these projects and the cost of them.

100-megawatt data centre is about a billion pounds. Now, that gets you. What does that get you? It gets you the land, it gets you the power, which is good for you, it gets you some fibre, which is good for ourselves. It gets you a building and it gets you that building powered with generators, with cooling equipment, effectively enough to move into if you’re. It’s not going to be furniture in it. You couldn’t live in it, and not that I’d want to live in a data centre anyway. But it gets you a shell that’s kind of capable of doing something. It gets you no servers. It gets you no storage. It gets you no IT equipment and that can be like three times the value or again yeah because some of those, some of this IT hardware, particularly the AI chips, are really really, really expensive, really expensive. So, yeah, that kind of puts it in perspective. So that’s 100 megawatts is a billion pounds. A gigawatt is a wee bit more.

00:21:14 – 00:21:40 – Pete Aston

So, I mean that’s phenomenal, I was really surprised when you told me there’s only 1.2, 1.5 gigawatts of operational capacity. Bearing in mind all the volume of capacity that we are looking at, we’ll only be looking at a fraction of everything that’s going on. So, it does feel like there’s something of a bubble.

00:21:40 – 00:21:41 – Alan Pritchard

Oh, I can’t use the bubble word.

00:21:41 – 00:21:42 – Pete Aston

We can’t use the bubble word.

00:21:42 – 00:22:07 – Alan Pritchard

No, we’re not allowed to use bubble words, but there is a bit of a, I think you’re right, though there will be a kind of levelling off. There has to be, and I think it’s like any kind of funnel pipeline project. You start off with this, it goes to that, it goes to this and then it kind of ends up as that.

00:22:07 – 00:22:21- Pete Aston

You know there’ll be a huge amount of attrition. You know some sites won’t get planning permission. Some will just not look attractive for other reasons. Some can’t get power, or the power’s too expensive or fibres too expensive.

00:22:21 – 00:22:36 – Alan Pritchard

I think power’s the kind of number one criteria, because everyone’s got land. If you’ve not got land, then you’re not really having a conversation anyway. But power is the number one problem, the number one challenge constrain, whatever you want to call it for a data centre just because of, because the energy consumption.

00:22:36 – 00:22:37 – Pete Aston

You talk to me about a three-legged stool.

00:22:37 – 00:22:38 – Alan Pritchard

Yes, I did.

00:22:38 – 00:22:40 – Pete Aston

In terms of data centres, we’re on four legs at the moment.

00:22:41 – 00:24:00 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, yeah, three-legged stool as useful analogy, because the data centre needs three critical things. There are lots of other critical things, but there are three super critical things.

I mentioned land, so land’s taken as a given. You need to have a plot of land that’s big enough and capable enough and folks want a data centre on it, which is not necessarily the case, for you know some locals.

But far more important than that is power. Can you get access to the grid, and can you get the power at the right price and is it and is it renewable sources? I mean that’s one of the UK government’s key asks, of AI growth zones is that there has to be using renewable and green, given the kind of carbon neutrality and these the targets that we have that, yeah, building data centres that just take gas, gas generated energy or whatever they are. You know, carbon generated energy is not seen as kind of desirable, so it has to be renewable sources of energy, ideally.

And then the third leg of the stool, which is probably kind of smaller leg of the stool. It’s not very good stool.

00:24:00 – 00:24:01 – Pete Aston

It’s like a lopsided.

00:24:01 – 00:24:31 – Alan Pritchard

Slightly lopsided stool is the connectivity. data centres need fibre from two, three, three, four, five, six providers. The more providers the better, because they run 24-7, 365 days of the year. They’re connecting and moving information around constantly to other data centres, to other data centres on the other side of the world, and they cannot stop; They do not stop, so resilience is critical for them.

00:24:31 – 00:24:45 – Pete Aston

And in terms of we talked about, location in the country has been sort of focused around London, from a sort of you know, connectivity point of view, could you have a scheme located in Northern England or Scotland or Wales?

00:24:46 – 00:25:23 – Alan Pritchard

You could, yeah. There’s probably no read, particularly for some use cases, particularly AI training, which doesn’t need huge amounts of connectivity all the time because it’s doing a lot of processing itself. It’s kind of glowing red-hot computing, all the things that need to be computed to train AI models. They typically go where the power is cheap, so there’s you know examples of AI training data centres in Iceland and Northern Sweden because the power is quite cheap.

00:25:23 – 00:25:24 – Pete Aston

Cooling is a bit easier.

00:25:26 – 00:25:34 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, you just kind of open the door almost. It’s an extreme example. But yeah, free air cooling is certainly a lot cheaper when in a cooler climate.

00:25:34 – 00:25:48 – Pete Aston

And I think you just raised a really interesting point around cost of power. So obviously the three-legged stool is maybe around how you actually plug into the grid but once you’re plugged in, the UK has pretty high energy costs.

00:25:48 – 00:26:17 – Alan Pritchard

It does it does, we all know that. As domestic consumers, we have high energy costs. Data centres’ biggest operational cost is energy. Once it’s built, it just consumes energy. It consumes energy to run servers. It consumes energy to cool the servers. It consumes energy just doing what it does. So, power costs in the UK don’t favour data centres. If it was, my money.

00:26:17 – 00:26:18– Pete Aston

And yet there’s a lot of interest.

00:26:18 – 00:26:23 – Alan Pritchard

Exactly, but I think it’s this kind of sovereignty thing, so sovereignty comes at a premium.

00:26:26 – 00:26:33 – Pete Aston

Okay.

00:26:25 – 00:26:39 – Alan Pritchard

If you want to be sovereign in something, inevitably you, you know I’m not saying the cost is irrelevant, because it’s always relevant, but if you want to build a sovereign capability in anything, sometimes it does come at a premium because you have to, you have to overcome those barriers.

00:26:39 – 00:27:01 – Pete Aston

Yeah, time scale wise, lots of sort of clients I talk to and saying, you know, if they haven’t built these AI data centres, you know, by 2030 or the early 2030s, that’s it. You know that you sort of missed the boat, sort of thing but is that true, or is there a bit of a longer tail?

00:27:01 – 00:27:14 – Alan Pritchard

I mean, I don’t think they’ve necessarily missed the boat, but there is a bit of a bit of I’m not going to use the bubble word – we agreed we’re not going to use the bubble word.

00:27:14 – 00:27:15 – Pete Aston

We’re not going to mention the B word.

00:27:15 – 00:27:48 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, don’t mention the B word.

There will be a flattening of, but demand will keep going. It’s just, I guess, the gradient of the curve. How many gigawatt campuses do you need in the UK? How many do you need in Europe? How many do you need in the globe? But you know, the tech will move on, they will enhance, they will develop. So, I don’t think it will be build at once and that’s it. It will never happen again. It will continue to be build out. I think it’s just the argument over how much.

00:27:49 – 00:27:53 – Pete Aston

And at some point we’ll get quantum computing not understand what quantum computing is.

00:27:53 – 00:27:55 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, I’m not sure. Don’t ask me what that is!

00:27:55 – 00:28:04 – Pete Aston

And so, what do you see the key challenges then over the next sort of one to two years for developers who are sort of trying to develop data projects?

00:28:04 – 00:28:30 – Alan Pritchard

Power, the P words power. It’s all about power, getting access to power, gaining access to power, getting access to grids, getting access to renewable sources of power, navigating all those constraints. That’s by far the biggest challenge, and I think that’s a global challenge. It’s not particularly a UK challenge. Global markets and data centres are pretty much seeing the same challenge. It’s all about power.

00:28:30 – 00:28:47 – Pete Aston

What do you think about public opinion as well? You said right at the beginning, data centres have sort of been hidden, but now perhaps, if we’re moving to you know gigawatt scale campuses, maybe you can’t really hide them.

00:28:47 – 00:28:49 – Alan Pritchard

You can’t really hide them?

00:28:49 – 00:28:51 – Pete Aston

So, have you got any sort of feeling about that sort of public opinion side of things?

00:28:51 – 00:29:32 – Alan Pritchard

I think the jury’s probably out on whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, you know, and it’s probably both in terms of your perspective. You know whether you’re not in my backyard or, yes, come to my backyard. You know, there’s a bit of both. What I would say is, having spoken to some developers, is that the cost of building a big data centre project, a local community could really benefit substantially. And we’re not talking about roads, we’re talking about building campuses where broadband 4G, 5G, lots of stimulus could be added into an area because the cost of the project is so big.

00:29:33 – 00:29:35 – Pete Aston

So, infrastructure improvements to a community,

00:29:35 – 00:29:44 – Alan Pritchard

Yeah, absolutely. So, someone told me they would build a university campus. Because of the size and scale of these things, we couldn’t afford to build a university campus.

00:29:44 – 00:29:53 – Pete Aston

Wow. And what about the heat? So, I’ve heard of some data centres trying to do something with the heat that they produce?

00:29:53 – 00:30:49 – Alan Pritchard

Yes. That is more common in mainland Europe than it is in the UK. But there are some projects being established where district heating so the excess heat from a data centre can be piped into houses, swimming pools, hospitals, public buildings. It’s quite hard to do because the heat doesn’t travel well so it’s got to be relatively close. And there’s other projects where you can heat greenhouses and things like that so you can build greenhouses on the side of data centres. These are all possible, not as common in the UK because the UK doesn’t have a history of district heating networks. We all tend to be heated on our own, but not impossible, and certainly some of the sustainability metrics that are used to measure projects. If you can offer heat to people, that certainly would reduce a barrier to take up.

00:34:00 – 00:34:04 – Pete Aston

Brilliant. Well, we’ve been waved at by the person who’s recording.

00:30:55 – 00:30:55 – Alan Pritchard

In a good way or a bad way?

00:30:55 – 00:31:08 – Pete Aston

Abi’s waving at me to say we’ve probably been talking long enough, Alan. I think, it’s fair. This has been brilliant. Any last things to say, things that we’ve missed, that we should have said, that we haven’t.

00:31:08 – 00:31:45 – Alan Pritchard

I think we’ve covered a lot of ground, actually. I think the key takeaway for me is that data centres have been hidden for a long time. They’re no longer being hidden. They’re kind of in the press. They’re not going away and, whilst people may not want them, there’s some kind of argument that says well, we all have smartphones, we all watch our TVs, our TV content comes from data centres now rather than TV studios like this. So unfortunately, they’re a kind of fact of life and it’s made the best, trying to make the best of it, you know.

00:31:46 – 00:31:57 – Pete Aston

Alan, it’s been absolutely fantastic, thank you so much. It’s been really interesting for me and hope for listeners as well, and thank you everyone for listening or for watching, and I hope you join us on our next podcast. But thank you and goodbye.

00:31:57 – 00:31:58 – Alan Pritchard

Thank you, bye.