Had a great, highly informative meeting with a data center developer yesterday in Santa Clara, and because I arrived fifteen minutes early, I took a stroll around the neighborhood.
Now business parks don't normally make interesting walking routes, but this one was fascinating for me as it was as close to a data center "park" as I have ever seen.
Let's start with the central feature, pictured here, of Silicon Valley Power's Scott Receiving Station, a spacious switching center and substation on Space Park Drive. The station is one of three transmission receiving centers for SVP.
(I appreciated the artwork commissioned for the elegant street-facing portion of the switchyard, featuring well-tended landscaping - not typical of utilities!)
I could see this facility coming into view by watching the confluence of overhead transmission lines on monopoles (beautiful, compared to typical tower construction).
I also knew from frequent trips down the 101 to San Jose that SVP's Donald Von Raesfeld Power Plant was just a few hundred yards away, with it's own attendant switching center. The plant features combined cycle gas turbines good for just under 150 MW of power production.
With all of that high-power infrastructure nearby, what would you expect to find in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why, data centers, of course.
If any stones happened to be at hand, I could have thrown them at a half-dozen major facilities from where I was standing, including centers owned or managed by Digital Realty Trust, Level 3, and Telehouse. There is one more facility under construction, and another about to start.
Besides abundant power delivery capacity, the neighborhood sits atop a recycled water line from the City of Santa Clara, so evaporative cooling systems at the data centers are as environmentally sensitive as you can get.
And of course, there are oodles of fiber under the streets (the vault for communications infrastructure for the Digital Realty Trust center was big enough to house power gear).
Here's a good game to play: check out this map courtesy of Google, and zoom in on the buildings on Space Park Drive and Raymond Street and see if you can count the number of back-up generators. Assume each one is a 2 MW unit, providing backup to IT equipment only, apply a PUE (note that two of the centers are LEED certified), and derive a total data center load for the neighborhood.
The answer is: lots.
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