The long-held dream of bringing the large-scale "cloud" data storage industry to rural Scotland has come a step closer to becoming reality after Intelligent Land Investments lodged a planning application for a 10,000 square metre centre in East Ayrshire.
The proposed facility will be 40 per cent powered by six nearby wind turbines.
The developer of the proposed £5m four-unit "modular" processing centre, designed in conjunction with Edinburgh-based Green Cat Renewables, is hopeful of attracting large technology based companies using cloud-based sharing and storage users "such as Google, Apple and Amazon".
ILI director Mark Wilson, a property developer who switched the focus of his business from housing into renewables after the collapse of the property market in 2008, sees the burgeoning demand for cloud computing as "having enormous growth potential" in Scotland. He is actively engaged in talks with potential anchor tenant technology firm as the first occupant of the 2000-rack facility.
Wilson told the Sunday Herald: "We're expecting to have a planning decision late this summer and all being well, as we are confident that it will be, construction will start in 2016. We are pushing like made to get an end customer and working with commercial property firm CBRE and advisers KPMG. I firmly believe we can get a tenant or a memorandum of understanding, but we may build it speculatively anyway."
Earlier this month a planning application was lodged by ILI (Renewable Energy) and Green Cat Renewables for The Blair Farm Data Centre close to the village of Fenwick, five miles north west of Kilmarnock. The proposed development will see an investment of £3m - £5m and could create 15-20 new permanent jobs for the area, as well as 20-30 further jobs during construction.
The proposed facility is intended to use low-energy ambient cooling system, and have a normal use "power use effectiveness" (PUE) score of around 1.2 to 1.3, meaning that it will take only slightly more electricity to cool than it will take to power the computers themselves.
Wilson said, "Demand for cloud computing, coupled with Scotland's commitment to clean energy generation and Ayrshire's natural temperature make Fenwick a perfect location for a purpose built, partially self-powered data storage centre. We live in a time when the global economy is highly dependent on efficient digital information systems without robust data security."
"Scotland has been earmarked for some time as an excellent potential location for data centres as not only does it have a large highly qualified pool of IT professionals and a much lower security risk in terms of terrorist activity and potential environmental crises, on average it is two degrees cooler than other major European data centre locations. This significantly reduces the effects on the environment of such a development as less energy is actually required to keep conditions stable at the centre due to the cooler climate. Scotland is also very renewable energy friendly, and well on track to achieve the government target of 100 per cent of electricity supply from renewable sources by 2020.
In late 2012 a previous attempt to bring "big data" processing industry to Scotland was announce, when Scotia Global unveiled plans to build what was touted as a a new type of "build as you grow" modular data centre model near Ecclefechan in Dumfries and Galloway
Scotia Global signed an MoU with Schneider Electrical, one of the world's biggest IT infrastructure firms to build the world's first "industrial estate" for data on 40 hectares of Dumfriesshire farmland.
However the development, which promised to bring millions of pounds of benefits to an economically fragile area, was aborted following an unexpected decision by the council's planning committee which voted to refuse what was a routine planning permission extension request. The decision was later described as "unreasonable" by the official reporter, by which time the overseas investor had withdrawn. The perceived official resistance to the original proposal was also subject of accusations of improper collusion between Dumfries and Galloway Council officers and promoters of a copycat development by the now defunct firm Lockerbie Data Centres.
In October 2012 the consultants Hurley Palmer Flatt were commissioned by Scottish Enterprise to survey potential datacentre sites throughout Scotland and rank them in terms of suitability on criteria including electrical supply, fibre connectivity, physical security and accessibility, planning status, potential to attract financial support and financial benefits.
Their report did not include or rank the Fenwick site, though Glen Moon, project manager for Green Cat Renewables said that this was because it had not by then been proposed by a developer.
Moon said: "The sites had to be actively put forward to be considered in the study and this site wasn't available at the time. I also think those sites were looked at in terms of traditional data centres whereas ours, being partially powered by renewable energy, needs to be in an area that is suitable for a wind farm development and Fenwick is in an area of search for large scale wind which is key to the development."
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