Portugal's environment minister told a parliamentary hearing on 3 November that the government is finalising a decree for data centres, Reuters reported. New projects will need either a cooling technology that does not use fresh water, or a water solution that does not compete with supply to the population and to other economic activities. They will also have to run on renewable electricity, which operators can buy from utilities, and go through what the minister called a very rigorous environmental review.
The timing is not accidental. According to Reuters, more than 2.6 GW of data centre capacity is under development in the country, led by the 1.2 GW Start Campus in Sines. One of its six planned buildings already runs, on renewable power and with a seawater cooling system. DatacenterDynamics counts 36 operating data centres in Portugal and ten more under construction or planned, with Lisbon the largest market: 25 MW in operation and almost 1.4 GW planned.
No date for the final text was given. Spain is working on similar rules; in August it proposed that data centres source at least 80% of their electricity from new renewable generation on an hourly basis, and in October it raised the size at which the rule applies from 1 MW to 10 MW, DCD wrote.
What "no fresh water" does to the cooling plant
Most of the water a large data centre consumes goes up its evaporative cooling towers. Take that option away and the designer is left with dry coolers, closed-loop systems with adiabatic assistance used sparingly, or an open source such as seawater, treated effluent or a river under permit.
Where seawater is the answer, it is normally kept out of the IT cooling loop altogether: it passes on one side of a plate heat exchanger made of titanium or another resistant material, and the clean closed loop runs on the other side. The same arrangement applies to treated wastewater, where the worry is fouling rather than chlorides.
Anyone writing a specification for such a site in Portugal should expect the permit to ask how the open-water side is filtered, how often the exchangers are cleaned, and what happens to the cleaning chemicals. Those answers are easier to give when the exchanger can be opened on site and a spare set of plates is on the shelf.
Sources: Reuters (via Yahoo News), DatacenterDynamics
