M247's daily costs are probably mostly energy and wages but hopefully that are also keeping all the data secure and protected which adds a significant cost too.

And now they need to demonstrate compliance with standards everywhere since they are a UK company, not just a European company meeting EU standards - we have taken control of everything so now everyone needs to pay for all the work that needs to be done to demonstrate that products meet all the standards. But tell users that it's related to Brexit and the Brexiters will run around screaming, so it's commercially better to just say it's an energy cost increase.

That makes bugger all sense.

The UK standards are pretty much identical to EU ones. If you meet the tougher one, you meet both.

"The UK standards are pretty much identical to EU ones. If you meet the tougher one, you meet both."

Not necessarily, and you still need to prove to all the countries you export to that you meet the EU one.

Sure the standards are not changing much yet but every corporation now needs to create a complete new set of documentation and testing verification to comply with the standards requirements to make products available in both the EU and the UK. You can't just copy a file and rename it.

Your response indicates that you have no clue how regulations in each country require that "standards" are verified and documented.

M247 are renting rack space and internet connections, the end users are the ones that do all the compliance stuff.

As a separate note, they’re one of the least responsive companies I’ve ever dealt with, and the DC looked like many people were getting out (which we were trying to do). I suspect they’re using energy as an excuse to try and get more cash out of those left - we sudenly started getting ‘odd’ bills a few months ago for anything they could think of.

how many DC's have their own MicroGrids?

The head of National Grid was talking about this on Radio 5 - Wake up to Money this very morning.

Put solar on your DC roof and a shed (a large one) load of batteries. For Grid leccy, then buy it in the middle of the night and charge the batteries. The result is far less exposure to Peak Rate leccy costs.

Any competent DC should have stand-by gennies in case of power cuts but using large batteries is not new. Most major BT exchanges have lots of battery power on standby. You can't have the phone system going down in a power cut now can you? Although I have my doubts about all those FTTC/FTTH green boxes having their own UPS.

Yeah, great - but now you need twice as much battery, because you need all that you had in the event of an actual power outage.

@john Robson

Probably not because most grid failures happen during daytime when there is more stress on the grid and more switching as infill generators kick in and out. ie You are more likely to have a grid failure at the time you are running on battery anyway.

Also why don't they have a wind turbine or 2 of their own? As AC says it can't do any harm to have a bit of solar on the roof, although Manchester is getting a bit far north for effective payback on the cost of solar.

Wind turbines only work if they are massive things located on the top of a hill. A typical industrial estate roof is not a good place to locate a wind turbine. The small things you used to see in the early to mid 2000s were just toys that barely produced enough electricity to power their own electronics.

Small turbines are fairly useful - but not for a data centre.

Given a small baseload (e.g a home) you might only have a couple of hundred watts of base load - and a small turbine can really help there.

Nationally, we currently have [1]24.2 Gigwatts worth of installed wind turbines in the UK , which [2]are generating 4.74 gigawatts of power as of the time of writing; about a fifth of the rated capacity and about a tenth of the demand instead of over half of our electricity demand.

[3]Renewable subsidies spent on making wind power viable cost just shy of £9 billion last year , which was funded by pushing up customer power bills.

The new generation nuclear plants (Sizewell, Hinkley) will generate 3.2GW each 24/7 (excepting periodic refuelling) quite predictably for about 60 years at a cost of around £19 billion each, so about two years worth of the existing wind subsidies.

While the rhetoric that backs wind is powerful enough, the live generation figures appear to show that wind turbines are better suited at generating subsidies than electricity. Personally i'm not convinced that a DC is going to find it economically viable building their own wind farm without subsidies to bring their power bill down, it certainly hasn't worked nationally.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=total+installed+wind+capacity+uk

[2] http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-renewables-costs-idUKKBN12H2M3

At the time of replying, 1 hour later, they are generating 6.2GW or 16% of demand.

Which is nice to have, but obviously not something you can depend upon.

If you look at the chart containing "wind" then it's immediately obvious that no matter how much you add to the grid it's not going to work at eliminating carbon fuels because there are entire months with crap output. "Wind power" is a strategy to permanently be reliant upon burning coal, gas, oil and timber with intermittent periods of burning somewhat less.

Meanwhile, France is sitting there habitually exporting what amounts to about 30% of our total energy needs to their neighbours because thanks they have both a perpetual surplus of electricity due to their nuclear program, and cheaper electricity bills.

But you have a level of battery storage that you need to cover for grid outages

You presumably need that level of energy storage to allow for a reasonable time to pass and to kick in the generators for longer term power delivery.

If you start using those batteries as time shift - you need to leave the capacity that was chosen for the above task available, so you need more batteries to deal with the time shifting.

Most datacentres won't have hours of battery standby, they'll have a few minutes, just enough to get the generators started (with the assumption that the power outage won't have been caused by a tsunami that floods the generators as well).

5-10kW/rack isn't unusual - so a one hour backup would need 5-10kwH of battery *per* rack - that's easily 15% of your rack (6u out of 42 is 14%) taken up for just one hour of storage:

https://www.greensunpv.com/48v-50ah-lifepo4-battery-2400wh-storage-lithium-battery-pack-51-2v-lithium-ion-battery_p144.html

Data centres are power hungry - and I've completely ignored the AC requirements (although these are now a much smaller portion of the overall DC power budget than they used to be).

But you have a level of battery storage that you need to cover for grid outages

You presumably need that level of energy storage to allow for a reasonable time to pass and to kick in the generators for longer term power delivery.

Often the batteries are sized pretty much to allow UPS until the generators fire up and take over. Challenge for datacentres is over the last couple of decades, power requirements per rack have increased, putting more strain on HVAC. Which then means more costs to upgrade those, or less revenue by blocking out rack-equivalents. So say the design was based on 8kW/rack, one rack drawing 16kW means 1 less rack to rent out to other customers.

But it's also possible to play the subsidy game. The 'renewables' lobby pushes for grid-scale batteries. They're expensive, and often only capable of providing <1hr of potential grid demand. But they can also be extremely lucrative, eg the one in Australia makes millions providing grid synchronisation to cope with the instability caused by intermittent 'renewables'. And then of course there's arbitrage opportunities, ie charge when spot price is low, sell when it's gone through the roof because the wind's stopped blowing.

There's also potential revenue from stuff like the UK's STOR, or Short Term Operating Demand where when 'renewables' can't deliver, STOR assets kick in. Not looked at the current terms on that, but from memory, there's a 'stand-by' revenue stream, plus whatever you make from the sale of electricity. Challenge I guess is you'll also need someone who can play the markets a little, or contract with someone who does. There's a few large datacentres that do this, because why not make money from large gensets that would otherwise be sitting idle.

The fundamental problem though is the UK's abject failure wrt energy policy. As seen this week on local and national scales. The COProphiliacs could be shuttled from some hotels to the conference centre by Teslas.. But hotels didn't have power to charge them, so had to rent gensets. So the Teslas were indirectly diesel powered. And on the national scale, winds have been light, temperatures cold. So the usual situation where 'renewables' can't deliver.

So lots of hot air in Glasgow, demands for even more money to be wasted on 'renewables', but the grid would have collapsed if it wasn't for Drax using it's coal fired generators.. Sadly though, both the Tories and Labour are hooked on the Green kool-aid, and think that wasting money on more windmills will make the wind blow. Instead, they should be asking why, if we've 'invested' so much on 'renewables', electricity prices are rising, not falling. Especially as the subsidy-sucking parasitical 'renewables' lobby keep telling us that their product is the cheapest form of generation, and their costs have been falling.

Nah, most DC's have Diesel backup and only fall on to batteries in extreme circumstances.

Pretty sure the batteries are there to cover the time required to start the deisel genny

If you don’t own it you can’t budget it. A lesson every new lot of bean-counters needs to experience - You can’t tell them, and they will have used "how they saved money" to get promoted before the odure impacts the air movement device.

Increase the cost of energy by pushing unreliables and not building actual power generators leaves us very exposed and reliant on gas. Banning fracking which is our only reliable secure source of gas puts us at the mercy of the global supply issues controlled by... the producers of gas.

Seriously this needs to be heavily reported otherwise people will still somehow believe monuments to a sky god is the way to our salvation.

Codejunky>>> Banning fracking

Starbuck & Apollo cannot freely express themselves ?! #CylonPlot

@AC

"Starbuck & Apollo cannot freely express themselves ?!"

Might have to watch the original again. I couldnt get into the remake though :(