Hidden sites that power our lives

Matt Precey
BBC Look East

Data centres use 3% of the UK's electricity

They are the places where the internet lives.

They use about 3% of the UK's electricity and their collective carbon footprint is set to overtake that of aviation.

They are also discreet, occupying anonymous buildings on industrial estates and commercial parks.

Data centres are the purpose-built locations which house IT equipment for corporations, government departments and technology companies which need to process large amounts of data or have that information backed up in a secure environment.

They also use mind-boggling amounts of electricity.

Telstra International operates one such facility on the outskirts of Cambridge.

From the outside the building looks like any other in the business park, but deep within it are row upon row of servers, each with endless cable runs and arrays of blinking lights. The place literally hums.

Some data centres in the eastern region use more electricity than the town of Ipswich

A huge backup generator occupies an entire room along with dozens of what look like car batteries - the power supply of last resort.

Keeping the servers running in all circumstances is a vital part of the facility's job.

It could also be one way of watching television in the future.

According to chief executive officer Simon Vye: "Eurostar hosts its reservation system here and we also host the BBC iPlayer service so when customers want to see their favourite programme, they come in here."

Telstra said it gets its electricity from sustainable sources, but powering and cooling their servers is a hot topic for an industry which has seen its energy use double since the start of the decade.

The BBC asked the specialist consultancy CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) to try to calculate the approximate amount of electricity consumed by data centres across the East of England.

'Critical' to economy

They found 19 facilities, three of which are in the planning stage, with the capacity to draw 162 megawatts of power.

CBRE's Andrew Jay said: "A Hertfordshire data centre (based in Welwyn Garden City) that was recently built uses about 25 megawatts of power and that's equivalent to all the residential properties of Ipswich."

CBRE said the number of data centres is growing at an exponential rate and they are critical to the British economy.

There are plans for a new generation of "efficient" data centres which use less power.

All of this information was lost, and trillions of dollars of trade volume with it CBRE

At the site of a disused airfield near Sutton in Cambridgeshire, planning permission has been granted for a large complex which would use energy produced by the steam from a nearby power station to cool its servers.

The company behind the proposal, BNB Developments, also wants to pipe any excess heat from the data centre to provide hot water to a nearby housing estate.

Data centres also provide an important business continuity service. The BBC has seen plans to convert a former nuclear bomber base in East Anglia into a data centre, using the hardened aircraft shelters to house servers.

The 11 September attacks in New York prompted the building of many such facilities to provide secure storage for information in the event of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

According to CBRE, the dust caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers clogged the generators at the data centres which served Manhattan's banks.

"The impact of this was savage, given the amount of trading activity ongoing at the time. All of this information was lost, and trillions of dollars of trade volume with it."