New Data Centre To Help With Future Ecosystem

The site also has a chilled water system that circulates water under the slab level, and it will also house the new Internet exchange point France-IX, offering Condorcet customers both national and international peering options.

However there is another very green, attention-grabbing aspect to Condorcet, as the waste energy from the facility will be used to heat a ‘Climate Change Arboretum’ built on-site.

This ‘arboretum’ will recreate the climatic conditions expected to prevail in France in 2050. TelecityGroup has an agreement with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), which will use the arboretum to grow and research plants from around the world with the aim of selecting those species most adaptable to changes in the prevailing climatic conditions.

“The original idea came as data centres consume a lot of energy, as you have to produce cold air or water to cool servers,” Duproz said. “If you put cool air into a room, you then waste hot air, and this heat is energy.”

“So we immediately wondered if we were able to give that heat to somebody. We asked our neighbours if they wanted the free heat in order to save their energy bills, but we did not find many opportunities because the neighbourhood was undergoing a renovation,” he said. “So we were left with no use for the excessive heat, but we really want to do something useful for the environment with it. So we came up with the crazy idea of integrating a greenhouse into the data centre.”

“Our Arboretum program will look to constitute our future urban landscaping,” Duproz said. “We will recreated in our Arboretum, the Mediterranean climate conditions expect for the Paris region in 50 years time. We will nurse and grow plants and trees, and see how they behave in those conditions, and then select the best performing fauna for urban landscaping.”

“The main idea was what we could do with our waste heat, and we have ended up with something really speculator, which is creating an enormous buzz in Paris at the moment” Duproz said.