Darren Hawkins (SpaceDC)
A new green data centre campus will be rolled out in Jakarta during the first quarter of 2020, billed as a first of its kind in Indonesia.
Spearheaded by SpaceDC, the initiative will use natural gas to produce electricity to power the facility, while also recycling waste heat from the gas generators to provide cooling through absorption chillers.
The 1.8-hectare campus in Jakarta Barat will house two data centres, the first being JAK2, a 2.6MW Tier III facility.
“Lowering the environmental impact of data centres is at the heart of SpaceDC’s company philosophy,” said Darren Hawkins, CEO of SpaceDC. “When selecting a site, we always look for innovative ways to use local natural resources to create green energy and reduce our carbon footprint.
“Our 26.6MW Indonesian campus will be powered by natural gas which will both reduce the environmental impact and increase the overall fault tolerance of the site.”
According to Hawkins, Jakarta typically experiences “unreliable electricity supply” due to "insufficient" electrical generation capacity at a country-wide level.
To address this, the SpaceDC team, leveraging more than 60 years of combined industry experience, 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,” Hawkins added. “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, Hawkins said full back-up 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,” he explained.
Headquartered in Singapore, SpaceDC specialises in creating a network of data centre campuses in Southeast Asia’s key regional cities.
