'Cáceres Green': 400 million and two photovoltaic plants to bring green data centers to Extremadura

• David Vigario

  Caceres

Updated Tuesday, March 8, 2022-01:32

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Data

are the new manna for investors.

The massive domestic use of the internet as a consequence of the pandemic and the potential achieved by the development of electronic commerce and of public administrations themselves has triggered dependence on data centers, an increasingly coveted industry.

In fact, demand for the digital economy far outstrips supply around the world.

Also in Spain, where its impact is increasing and unstoppable.

If in 2019 its weight in GDP was 18.7%, the following year it already reached 22% and

.

Suffice it to point out that less than a decade ago the contribution was only 4.5%, according to data from the National Telecommunications Observatory.

Technological advances and the digitization of work have further accelerated this trend.

Banking, insurance,

, security and commerce lead this momentum.

"There is a lot of talent and the engineers in our country are very versatile in adapting to new work models," highlights

, founding partner (2009) and executive director of Ingenostrum, the company that promotes a Data Center, a large information center data processing, in Cáceres.

"This is a non-intervened sector, not like gas or electricity," warns this director from Extremadura, who confirms the interest in providing adequate infrastructure for this tremendous potential of this explosion of the digital ecosystem.

The large multinationals that have data as the basis of their business do not stop investing.

Facebook (now Meta) currently has

.

None are in Spain.

The multinational groups them in 18 campuses around the world, with an investment this year between 29,000 and 34,000 million dollars.

In the center that has cost him the least, he has invested 300 million;

the largest passed 1,500.

Another example: Microsoft plans to build between 50 and 100 data centers in 2022.

Thus, the forecast is that 30% of newly created jobs in 2035 will be in the ICT sector.

In addition, the NextGeneration funds for the period 2021-2027, endowed with 21,000 million, include innovation and digitalization (a program specifically endowed with 7,000 million) as one of the seven pillars to recover and strengthen the European economy in the coming years.

DECENTRALIZATION

Europe follows the same trend.

The largest concentration is in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, where the centers of greatest power are located.

They are the so-called FLAPs that, together with Dublin, concentrate the largest load capacity measured in megawatts IT (MW IT).

In Spain,

), important although with less volume than the previous ones.

However, the sector is already beginning to talk about the decentralization of this type of infrastructure, housed until now in the big capitals.

This decentralized business model already started in the US several years ago.

There was little land supply in the first locations, especially in Santa Clara in California (Silicon Valley) and in Ashburn (Virginia) so in recent times they have begun to locate in places as distant from the previous ones as Huntsville (Alabama) .

The same is happening in Spain, such as the cases of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

, where land is more affordable, there is more capacity for electrical connection and renewable energy projects are added to optimize them.

In this sense, a significant percentage of managers and technicians of the world's leading companies in the sector are Spanish.

"The energy market is looking for new electrification niches, likewise the new digital economy needs a large fiber optic capacity," emphasizes this civil engineer, with experience in sustainable renewable energy installation projects in different countries such as Chile, Brazil, Italy, Spain or Colombia.

"We are talking about data centers being the buildings that consume the most energy in the world per square meter, they are very intensive since the servers process at full speed and need to dissipate a lot of heat," he asserts.

Hence, this is the great challenge of this type of industry: its

because there is a risk that this excessive consumption could unbalance the electrical network of a region or an entire country, as is the case of Ireland", he warns. For this reason, "a powerful electrical infrastructure" is needed and also "neutral in carbon" following the parameters of the EU that encrypts in 2030 the date in reduction of greenhouse gases in at least 55 % compared to 1990.

'FREE COOLING'

But what conditions are needed to build a large data center?

The

"need very powerful, robust and secure infrastructures to withstand the ever-increasing increase in data traffic and provide security to the clients who host their servers there", explains the businessman, whose project called 'Cáceres Green' is It will carry out over 200 hectares of land and the installation of

.

In addition, it intends to connect to the 'Los Arenales' electrical substation, now under construction, to where a 220 KV line will reach from the Alcántara reservoir hydroelectric plant, to which will be joined another one that arrives from Trujillo and another one that closes the ring with the current Cáceres I substation. The investment for the construction of the first phase of the six buildings that make up the project will amount to

;

A similar amount will be allocated to the construction of the two photovoltaic solar plants (400 and 120 MWp, the latter to cover the demand of the buildings planned in the industrial park).

Another 100 million will go to urbanization of the land and urban planning, which is developed by the company Exedra.

The investment also includes another 24 million euros for the creation of the 'free cooling' system, an innovative cooling technique that uses the mass of water from an artificial lake to achieve energy savings of over 35% and thus meet the goal of being a 'carbon neutral' data center.

Santiago Rodríguez Agúndez, Executive Director of IngenostrumD.V.

The Swedish multinational Alfa Laval, a world leader in heat transfer processes, and the Spanish engineering company Empresarios Agrupados, which uses a similar system for cooling the Almaraz nuclear power plant, are participating in the study of this system.

In parallel, the company in charge of supplying 100% renewable electricity to the project is the Norwegian multinational Statkraft, which is the largest producer of renewable energy in Europe and wholly owned by the Norwegian state.

In total, 200 MW available for consumption.

For the construction of the Cáceres data center

and then another 100 for its maintenance.

The end of the works of this first phase of 'CC Green Data Center 1' is expected by the end of 2024. The final investment of the project could rise to 2,400 million euros in an execution planned in six phases until 2030. The project has also with the advice of the American company TLM Group and other important Spanish engineering companies, such as Quark and Savills-Aguirre Newman, in its alliance with Nexitic, as responsible for marketing.

POWER CAPACITY

The available power capacity of the servers (IT) of these large infrastructures is key to the development of the project.

In Cáceres, the construction of seven buildings (each of 5-10 MW) is planned, which would enable an IT power of 35 to 70, explains Santiago Rodríguez.

The maximum capacity of the centers in Madrid at the moment is 30. A forecast indicates that for every 35 MW IT, a business volume can be produced by the ecosystem of companies that settle in the area

.

The significant volume occupied by each of the backup diesel generator sets is going to be replaced by green hydrogen fuel cells for greater sustainability, again aiming towards carbon neutrality.

Similarly, in this project the new technology developed by the North American company Malta Inc has begun to be explored, which would include the real possibility of achieving large-scale electrical energy storage (100 MW between 10 and 24 hours) by means of high-speed electrical heat pumps. temperature (turbo machinery) to heat molten salts.

In this context, another of the essential elements in the self-consumption solar power plant that is linked to the project, together with the water from the Cáceres treatment plant, where it will be pumped during daylight hours.

"The idea is to build a large peri-urban park, like the one that exists in Los Barruecos (Malpartida de Cáceres), where bike lanes, trees, walking paths are made available to citizens... and thus involve society from Cáceres in the project", explains the director of the company.

OPTICAL FIBER

According to this expert, there are currently few "efficient" data centers, although important steps have been taken in this direction in recent years: "Now more work is being done on energy efficiency as a sustainable model and to optimize the costs of operation".

For this, the measurement system used in the sector is called PUE (Effective Use of Electricity), which has been improving from an average of 1.7 before to the current 1.15.

His Cáceres project

, he assures.

The provision of fiber optic infrastructure is also very important for its positioning, in this case through its proximity to Sines (Portugal) as an entry point for the connection of Intercontinental Maritime Fiber and the closure of the Bilbao-Madrid ring.

In this area of ​​Extremadura there are currently possibilities of electrical power of up to 200 megawatts, an essential supply to be able to tackle the project pending the national electrical planning that will be presented in the coming days, it is carried out every five years (the last of the Miteco approved last week in the Council of Ministers will be for the period 2021-2026).

The 'Data Center' ecosystems have caused great growth in the area where they have been located.

The most significant case is Ireland, which has become the fastest growing country in Europe, with a 27% rise in its GDP in the last three years.

In the province of Cáceres, with the Almaraz nuclear power plant (still with a useful life until 2028) and an important renewable energy infrastructure (Extremadura leads growth in this sector in Spain), "the positioning of a

it is ideal because in addition to this way we would reverse the investment in the area, because where you put the data the companies go", unlike other energy industries, emphasizes Santiago Rodríguez Agúndez. At 52 years of age, the executive director of Ingenostrum (with headquarters in Seville) is getting closer to seeing his dream come true of investing in a major technological project in his own hometown, where he studied Civil Engineering at the Polytechnic School of the University of Extremadura (UEx).In this region he has actively participated in some of the latest large photovoltaic projects, such as those of Enel Green Power.Through his company he collaborates with a chair of the UEx for the study of alternative uses of renewable energy associated with industry, agricultural production and to new technologies.

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