SpaceDC readies Jakarta’s first green data centre

SpaceDC expects to bring online in the first quarter of 2020 Jakarta’s first green data centre campus, which will use natural gas to produce electricity.

The data centre will also recycle waste heat from the gas generators to provide cooling through absorption chillers, a unique energy saving feature for such a facility in Southeast Asia.

The 1.8-hectare campus in Jakarta Barat will house two data centres, the first being JAK2, a 2.6-megawatt Tier III facility.

“When selecting a site, we always look for innovative ways to use local natural resources to create green energy and reduce our carbon footprint,” said SpaceDC CEO Darren Hawkins.

Hawkins said the use of natural gas will reduce the environmental impact as well as increase the overall fault tolerance of the site.

Jakarta typically experiences unreliable electricity supply as country wide there is insufficient electrical generation capacity. To address this, the SpaceDC team designed the site to run on natural gas.

“Creating a stable power supply to ensure service continuity was a major consideration for SpaceDC when building a data facility in Indonesia,” said Hawkins. “There are two natural gas pipelines running alongside the site, which means that if there’s a fault in the supply from one, we can divert to the other.”

In the event of a problem with the natural gas supply or gas generators, full backup of the power and cooling is provided by diesel generators and electric chillers. This makes the site more resilient than a typical data centre that is powered from the electrical grid.