by Shane Henson — March 4, 2013—Cofely, GDF SUEZ Group, a France-based developer of a complete range of energy solutions, has announced that it has begun work on a “green” data center using cutting-edge technologies that will guarantee the most demanding international standards in terms of energy efficiency. The project will serve as a model of its kind at the European level for these essential but normally very energy-consuming facilities.
The Crealys Park Data Center in Wallonia, Belgium, is projected to have a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.3 and provide annual savings of 10,000 tons of CO2 per year compared to a conventional data center. Cofely says that a typical Belgian data center has a PUE of between 1.8 and 2.2, and being able to reduce the PUE by only a tenth enables annual savings of $200,000 euros in the data center’s energy bill, which indicates just how well this data center will perform.
According to Cofely, the development of the data center will provide a complete end-to-end solution using the combined expertise of Cofely companies for installation of electrical equipment, data cabling, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, refrigeration and development of a wide area network.
Also, used for the first time on this data center, Cofely says it has developed and patented, based on free-cooling technology, a new ventilation installation that uses outside air to cool the information technology (IT) rooms equipped with racks, giving 15% to 20% energy savings.
When complete, the new site will have seven 514 m IT rooms. Phase I, due for completion in October 2013, will comprise three rooms, two of which will house GDF SUEZ’s own IT servers.
