Rackspace to launch wood chip powered datacentre

The company will source over 90 percent of its energy from the Slough Heat & Power renewable energy station

Managed hosting specialist Rackspace has today announced plans for a new environmentally friendly datacentre that will run on carbon neutral energy generated by a wood chip burning power plant.

The company has signed the lease on a site in Slough, close to the Slough Heat & Power renewable energy station, which generates hot water and electricity for local businesses by burning wood chips and fibre cubes made from used paper and cardboard. Any excess power the plant generates is then sold back to the national grid.

Such biomass-based power plants are regarded as "carbon neutral" because the CO2 released when the material is burnt would have been absorbed when the tree was growing.

As part of the lease agreement, Rackspace will source over 90 percent of its power from Slough Heat & Power. The company said it would only use energy from the grid or its own on-site generators as back up in the event of outages.

Jacques Greyling, managing director of Rackspace in Europe, Middle East and Africa, said that the 100,000 square feet site would also make it relatively easy for the company to deploy technologies and layouts that optimise the facility’s energy efficiency.

"Our existing UK datacentres are co-locations, so although we have moved to the most energy efficient servers available, there are limitations to what we can do in terms of lay out," Greyling said. "With this site, we'll be designing heat distribution and cooling systems to ensure they are at their most efficient."

Rackspace said that although the energy from Slough Heat & Power was comparable in price to that sourced from the grid, the company was paying a premium to locate its datacentre in the south east.

However, Greyling insisted that the extra investment would deliver a return by mitigating the effects of any future environmental legislation governing datacentres and appealing to customers increasingly keen on environmentally sustainable services.

"We have been running an offsetting tree planting scheme that has proved very popular with customers, and we see this new datacentre as taking our environmental strategy a step further," Greyling said. "Customers are interested in the idea of a green datacentre and could use it as part of their own CSR strategy."

The company said the datacentre is currently in the planning stages and will be up and running by spring 2008.