Designing sustainable data centres

The pace of change and growth in the development of data centres is significant, but how much scope is there to improve their sustainability credentials? 

Operational efficiency and power usage can deliver big wins. But what about material choices? How do good intentions make it to reality? Is there an argument that design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) could be adopted more widely? 

Putting the sustainability arguments to the test are Angela Vico Correas, director at studioNWA, Roy Andrade, technical director at Sweet Projects, Timo Hendy, technical director at Stantec, and Stephen Meleady, MEP director and sector lead for data centres at Stantec. Hosted by Graham Munday at Stantec.

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:02

The pace of change and growth in the development of data centres is significant. But how much scope is there to improve the sustainability credentials of their design and operation? Power usage is where big wins can be achieved. Clean, energy efficient resources meet sustainability targets and reduce operational costs. But what about material choices in the design of these critical buildings? How did good intentions make it to reality? Is there an argument the design for manufacturing assembly FMA could be adopted more widely by the sector. Putting the sustainability arguments to the test. For this edition of The Scope. I'm joined by Angela Vico Correas, a director with studioNWA, an architectural practice specializing in the design of data centres. Timo Hendy, a technical director in Stantec civil and structural engineering team working on both new build and retrofit of data centres. Roy Andrade, a technical director for Sweet Projects, a turnkey construction company with an extensive track record in data centres. And Stephen Meleady, an MEP director with Stantec and our lead on mission critical facilities. I'm Graham Munday. Welcome to The Scope, a podcast from Stantec, a global leader in sustainable engineering, architecture and environmental consulting. Timo, sustainability is at the forefront for data centres, and we've seen a lot of new ideas coming from the industry, but there's a long way to go. Where should we be focusing in terms of data center design? What's your 1 to 3, if you like? Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess there are three main areas, you know, within data centres where you can find, efficient. Efficient. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you can make them more, ecologically, sound. One is, you know, through the, efficient, building systems and the efficient technologies within the building that call the IT equipment and, you know, main, you know, keep your equipment running. And one is the power that then feeds those systems. And, you know, within these two areas, there are clearly the biggest wins is, you know, they, impact the operational carbon consumption of these buildings, which is where their biggest impact is, is felt. And then the source of power then is in the decarbonization of the grid, which is, you know, to a degree, not part of the remit of the data center provider themselves. And more about the, you know, the wider grid. And, Stephen, we're seeing examples of that, aren't we? Yeah. I think I think you're right. The MEP efficiency side has been widely interrogated in the past. I think there's a bit of a shift from a renewables perspective. I think historically there's been a lot of power purchase agreements, where people are looking at green KPIs. But certainly we're seeing more of a shift to people looking for sites close to renewable energy source generation. And clients are prioritizing that in terms of their site selection. So, efficiency of the system's power, team over third one embodied carbon. Yes, yes. That's right. Yeah. And as a CSR designer on the, you know, design of the envelope of the building, obviously I would say this one is is key because this is the area where, you know, architects and structural engineers can have the biggest impact because there isn't the obvious financial incentive there to deliver a low carbon building fabric. You know, with efficient systems comes the saving on energy bills and a saving on consumed energy and operational cost to the building. Whereas often with building fabric carbon savings, there's actually a cost to implementing these technologies, you know, whether that's more innovative materials or or other such ways of changing. There is perhaps a lack of understanding in, in the, in the whole circle or the whole picture, in that ultimately, the, the it's either addressing it at the forefront of the design or is at the back end of the design. The, well, I don't want to say penalties, but it's, it's it's, carbon related charges. There is an opportunity for the industry to do more with regards to embodied carbon on early days, which can be, saved feature of the premise. A good sales point and one that would go really well with their own clients, or tenants or end users. It marries with all of the, the, statements and aspirations as well. And I guess I was gonna say, Roy, do you just come in here on this on this point? Because ultimately, as we go to 2050, if we get to 2050, listening to the government announcements yesterday, we have to find how we cover our scope three and that scope three is currently being covered by offsetting. And that offsetting can be much lower if we first consider what we construct our buildings from in the first place. So that is huge benefit for the future. If we start now, the time. I want to come on to some examples from yourself in a minute. But Andrea, can I just explore just a little further for our audience here as well? Embodied carbon concepts come forward, but they don't necessarily make it to to reality at the end. This is what we're saying. There there is, there is, the there is an interest from clients. There is an interest from the industry on this topic and so on on designs. The embodied carbon gets looked at, gets measured, gets reported. But the the there is at present, not many briefs will contain a section on embodied carbon as part of the design requirements. And so once the the notion gets recorded in the impact design stage two or stage 3 or 1 to planning with a certain metric in the design brief and the design scopes do not, preclude delivering that targets. Yeah. And so it at further stages 4 or 5 either because of three or because of just losing focus off of that, of that as an opportunity. The, the, the results get diluted. And before Timo, before we come to your examples and maybe you want to come in on this point, the question I'm going to ask is how do we overcome that? Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, it's incumbent on us, you know, as the designers and the area where we can really add value is by showing our clients that these technologies that we are putting in front of them can actually be that utopian unicorn thing that saves them money, saves them time, and saves material and carbon. And so the most effective ways that we found, in delivering low carbon, data centres is just by having very efficient design solutions because they save on material. So the, the contractor and the client are happy from a monetary perspective. But yeah, that, that also then delivers massive carbon savings. Have you got a couple of examples that you would like to share? Yeah, yeah for sure. Yeah. So we've you know, on a, on a previous project, we, we saved, 11,000m³ of concrete, from the design by making slabs thinner, reducing foundation sizes, which is, I think something like 2500, roundtrip flights to, New York from London. And, we've had to, two projects for the same client and where we saved 25% and 30% steel, respectively, on the two projects. One of those projects was a project that included four buildings, and we could have bought a fifth. So a fifth building with the amount of steel that we saved in the four that we built, which was, quite a fun challenge to deliver. But the, the CO2 saving with saving all that steel is, is enormous. And the cost saving and time saving on site was also big. So it is a it was a win win and and an easy sell for us to the client. Okay. I mean impressive results and impressive figures. And it's about educating and sharing that Roy it is and and the thing that will hit the mark quickest is where we as designers can show cost and time savings. That will definitely affect the client's mindset. And these are the sort of things building lean, building offsite and building efficiently is where we can save our carbon. A lot of that has to come from there, but it does take the designers to take that leap of faith to do that, because there's some of the regulations that we have to build with or construct with does not make that easy. You know, we have some very rigid legislation and regulations that makes that difficult for us at times. But, I mean, and in addition to the legislation, there are the end tenant requirements and, and their specifications, and they are sometimes unduly stringent and often don't get challenged by designers. So, you know, some of the, the, tenant loading requirements, for example, misunderstood miscommunicated over the top. And that can lead to huge inefficiency in structural design. You know, with much bigger member sizes than needed and some of the tolerances and deflection criteria as well, which if we find the opportunity to flex those with the tenants, then, but, you know, helping our clients to communicate that to the tenant, then we can find big savings that way. Do we talk about new materials? Because we've been talking about, you know, existing stuff. What are we seeing in terms of new materials coming through and, and how easy is it for the designers in the industry to navigate this, team? So maybe you can talk about timber CLT. Yeah. I mean, as ever, the US, leading the way here and, Microsoft have made a bit of a stir recently with the new, CLT data center, which is, you know, definitely a really positive step forward and a huge opportunity for all of us, to. Yeah, see that material, use more it it's great and and can be applied quite effectively. Yeah. To this, to this application. You know, some of the drawbacks with CLT is that it, when you use concrete and steel together, they work together to. So the presence of the concrete reduces the amount of steel that you need without getting too technical. Sorry. But with, CLT, you can't do that as effectively. So you end up with more steel by using CLT. So there is a bit of a payoff there. But the overall carbon equation still works well for CLP. But I think that in recognizing that, we can see that there's possibly an opportunity to use CLT with steel in a different way to the way that we use concrete, so that you can reduce both the steel and the CLT. And no one's really doing that at the moment. And I think that that would be an interesting thing to explore, you know, structural systems that are designed around the use of steel and timber together in your world. Angela, how does this play out? What are some of the challenges, I guess, for, for from our side? The, the challenges is that the industry tends to default to what they know. It's, it's what they have used before is what they, their insurers approve is what it's also typically their requirements are very prescriptive, but occasionally on a project, an alternative is permitted. And then we have this, this example where is a particular anti blast. Wall is, is forms part of the tenants requirements in the description. But they have consented and they have these, these present that they have consented something. Less onerous in another job. And so they would only, accept that, tentative and, and, and they will not want to move from, from there. So this very prescriptive. There is not a huge opportunity for new materials to break in. However, I think from an architectural point of view, the opportunity and construction point of view, the opportunity is on D4. For me, it's it's in the in the assembly of all of these existing all materials, but into an offsite, construction. But I think that our opportunities in things like aggregates to new aggregates that are being developed, see the new cements that are being used, which are green, credentials for those cements. I think that a bit more expensive at the moment. But like everything else, the the prices come down with utilization. And if we can actually get those specifications into our systems, I think we have more efficiencies coming in. So we have to be brave as designers and engineers. We have to be brave and we have to put those things out there and see how we can further that effort by other industries. Yeah, for sure. I mean, GBS is, cement replacement is part of our standard specification now, and we roll it out as much as possible. And all data center sites that are within a, you know, a reasonable distance of a source of of GBS. And, you know, that is a really, great way of, of saving carbon in concrete. And but there are new innovations in that arena, such as concreting, which is, the impregnation of concrete with graphene, which then allows you to remove all the rebar from the concrete and reduces the cement content by even more than, than GBS does. So the these kind of technologies are a burgeoning. And there's a, there's a, a risk associated with these new technologies that, you know, needs iron to be able to, you know, actually deliver them on a project. But we have to, as designers put that model forward, we have to dictate to the clients of what is acceptable in the modern world. Okay. Yeah. Roy, I'm glad you cover that point, which was going to be my question. How do we make this happen? And it's by the sounds of things, as design engineers and architects is being braver to to make the point and explain why. Now, Angela, you brought us on to, DFM a moment ago, designed for, sorry, design for manufacturing, assembly. Let's just pick up on that point between you and I don't know who wants to lead off on that in terms of we see that in other parts in other parts of the built environment. Explained to me, with the complexities of data centres, how that could be used. It's it's definitely, A practice that can be implemented, more broadly. There is a lot more than can be done. I think that, that there is progress in this area. I think we are perhaps victims of, of of really rapid, programs, really strict, briefs. And perhaps not having enough opportunity to come. But all all of the, all of the changes that we're discussing require for, as Stephen said, for, for all the parties to sit around the table and come to, to, to with their ability to negotiate on, on those initial requirements. And in a lot of cases, that opportunity is not there during the design because the the scope is given this, there is no time. Simply there is no time. Swiftness of the build and the speed is causing the challenge. Talk to me about other aspects of the sites where that it could still be deployed. So I think we're seeing more of an uptake on it in other regions outside of the UK. I think we're seeing less in the UK, we're seeing other clients take it on, how they're taking advantage of that as a bit of foresight in terms of template designs and applying those template designs across sites. Yeah. So they got ahead of the curve in terms of that program and that construction. I think the most most common application in in the UK is in either services cassettes. So you see the services coming pre-assembled in a, in a box that can then just be hung from the ceiling, and then package plant rooms and drivetrain units. So the drivetrain can be fully packaged and that's then bolted on to the side of the building. But what we don't see is, DFM within the actual building fabric. So within the building structure and what makes the floor plate and what have you. And I think that that's a possible opportunity. I mean, the current limitation there or the perceived limitation I should say, is because the spans associated with data centres are quite long. You're talking clear spans of, you know, eight meters by 12m, which is too large to have a single component that can be constructed offsite to come in and, and serve that purpose. But if we were able to use DFM systems that could be, you know, bought onto site, assembled on and on the floor and then erected that would, you know, solve that issue. And I think one of the other key, opportunities would be to, to integrate the secondary systems, of the building with the primary systems. So at the moment we, we construct a floor plate, which is the primary system, and then we hang from a secondary frame from which all of the services are suspended. And those two things are independent from one another and don't help each other. And they both need their own independent strength in order to serve the building. Whereas in reality, if you were to bring them together into one DFM unit, you would have something that's only doing the job once. So only using the material once. A huge opportunity for efficiencies. There's a huge opportunity there, particularly with some of the site locations that we're looking at in the UK outside the, previous areas and industrial states in and around London. We're seeing more remote sites where there's, less local labor skill as accommodation and there's constraints on the site around not just getting our operatives to the site or from the area, but providing them with accommodation in the area or transport to the site. So by providing offsite fabrication and commissioning and assembly, we're reducing that constraint and pressure on the site and making it a bit easier for the inclined and the contractors to develop that plan for the site. Yeah, and that's what I that's where the benefits actually come in, because after you get to site, the amount of labor and the safety that you, met or the risks of safety issues, you are met by doing it in the factory is incredible. So you have to see that as a benefit or rand for the construction period. And then there's the quality control and the reduction in material wastage. So there, you know, with the primary focus being, you know, material saving, if you're not wasting anything, you know, that's that, that's yeah, definitely a major benefit. And it, it lends itself so well to these types of buildings because they are for the most part, you know, a ten meter cell that gets repeated 25 times. You know, that that's generally what, what what what the format is. So you know, and a lot of the vendors have their template cookie cutter design that they want to see implemented as much as possible, so that designs are already ready before the project is in inception. So if we were to take these ideas and apply them to the cookie cutter before the project exists, then you know, we were ahead of the curve. The design is done. Yeah, let's let's move on with the conversation in terms of what's on the horizon, what what should people be thinking about? Roy, we've had a conversation previously about scope three emissions, for example. Well, the yeah, big the big, challenge about sustainability and the net zero agenda now is, everybody can say the scope 1 or 2 is reasonably easy to achieve, and we should be achieving that quite comfortably. However, scope freeze is the biggest issue. As a contractor, we've done a measurement of our own scope three elements, and all of our works accounted for 99.4%. Was scope three. Now that's our upstream. Scope three will be the clients downstream scope three, and therefore that all of that carbon has to be offset at some points. So just imagine how many tonnes of carbon if we move from the front end can be saved at the back. It is huge. And we do need to consider scope three, which is not being widely addressed at the moment. And, and some of the stuff we talked about was buildings being too heavy, maybe because of codes and things like that, that and this goes back to our point, you know, as designers, we're very traditional. We we base it on our regulations, our legislation, which is traditionally based on a solution that's already been predetermined. We've now got computer modeling softwares now that can actually bust that apart now, but yet we still go back to our our traditional ways of construction. We should be using our modern ways of, calculations and design to say, yes, that was traditional. But now we can prove that that doesn't need to. But making the buildings lighter and therefore making it a lean construction build, construction build is, is definitely a huge potential for saving carbon. Okay. Yeah, definitely. And using less materials, I think it's for example, when, when when going through the planning process, perhaps this this could be integrated even further. It gets reported. But when we look at design options, it could be merit in analyzing how they see it in the environment, how they contribute to to the, to the, the building, the building masses around them, etc.. But also what, what additional, carbon footprint will that building now contribute to in, in if they live in that specific form. So let's cover two other brief points then before we wrap up here, Stephen. I and liquid cooling was something we've talked about as well. Yeah, I think we touched on earlier had there's been a lot more exploration around efficiencies from an MEP perspective, but I think there's still opportunity there with some of the changing technology. So obviously high density rocks, are creating much more of a demand for, liquid cooling within the space. And that creates some opportunities to move from a historically, air cooled system to a 75% liquid cooled system in the current arrangement. So there's opportunity to eliminate some of the efficiencies associated with, fan systems and, the medium of cooling via air. So there's definitely opportunity moving forward to, to reduce the energy usage in a can I just add on that because we go on to liquid cooling and the chips are able to accommodate higher temperatures, we got higher off temperatures from those chips. And therefore those higher off temperatures will assist us in, district heating plans, because at the moment the temperatures what we get is pretty mundane. But if we can get another five, ten degrees out of those chips, it makes a huge effort to. Yeah. To, yeah, we've seen a historical shift from like, six, 12 degrees all the way to what we're seeing now, which is 2530, which opens up the door for more opportunity. And that's going to get higher, I think. Yeah, yeah. And Angela was a brief moment here just to ask about, district heating as well. And the opportunity for that. Yes, I will, I think as us were saying, there's huge potential to, to that idea. I think we all know this is, this is still in the realm or lives in the realm of ideas here in the, in the UK was it has it is realized in other areas of Europe, especially northern Europe. They seem to get it have gotten a good grip to, to to the system. But over here at the moment is is still in the realm of ideas. Either either it would entail district heating systems, which is obviously a much more complicated notion or this would require perhaps a big of a bigger nudge from from the planning authorities towards, private agreements between perhaps the residential and the industrial sector. So I'm quite interested to see what the government's new eye growth sounds and the plans they have to co-locate these centres in, in one area. What's going to happen from a heat export perspective and what ideas they have around that, and what other, building uses that they can put in those spaces to, to ensure that we're going to take advantage of that. And as a country, we do lack the infrastructure to get that distributed. And that has to come from central in a lot of cases or you have to be incredibly lucky and find the heat continually on the doorstep. Yes, it's a huge timing problem. So that's a big opportunity is new, which requires more focus, more probing and sponsorship from central government. But what I've heard from this conversation today is there's a lot of other things that with confidence from from the engineers in terms of designers and the architects pushing, solutions to, to clients and to operators and to developers can also help to ensure that this sector is as vibrant a disease in the UK, but also very sustainable as well. Okay. Thank you. Really good debate. Thank you. Thank you particularly to our guests, Angela from studioNWA and and Roy from sweets. Thank you as well to Timo and Steven for joining us to thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to The Scope on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And you can find all of our episodes on the Stantec website.