Indonesia to get first green data centre campus in 2020

The Space^DC booth at DCD>Singapore.

By Q120, Indonesia will have its first green data centre campus. 

Jakarta typically experiences unreliable electricity supply countrywide, as there is insufficient electrical generation capacity. To address this, Space^DC, the company behind the initiative, will use natural gas to produce electricity to power the data centre.

“Lowering the environmental impact of data centres is at the heart of Space^DC’s company philosophy. When selecting a site, we always look for innovative ways to use local natural resources to create green energy and reduce our carbon footprint,” says Darren Hawkins, CEO of Space^DC.

Space^DC seeks to deliver efficient, resilient and network-rich data centre solutions Southeast Asia’s fast-moving digital markets.

“Our 26.6 MW Indonesian campus will be powered by natural gas, which will both reduce the environmental impact and increase the overall fault tolerance of the site.”

The 1.8-hectare campus in Jakarta Barat is located to take full advantage of natural gas pipelines and Internet service provider cables. Its infrastructure offers benefits such as fibre connectivity for up to 15 ISPs and PUEs* of <1.5 when fully loaded. Its highest uptime availability will be no less than 99.982%.

The campus will house two data centres, the first being JAK2, a 2.6MW Tier III facility. This will be the company's first data centre in Indonesia. The second facility will offer 24 MW of capacity for a total of 26.6 MW.

Jakarta currently has 50.2 MW data centre capacity with 70 MW more in the pipeline by 2021. Space^DC plans to bring the 26.6 MW of capacity by June 2021, which represents a 38% of the current pipeline and 22% of the overall data centre capacity in Indonesia by 2021.

“Creating a stable power supply to ensure service continuity was a major consideration for Space^DC when building a data facility in Indonesia,” says Hawkins. “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.”

The new data centre will also recycle waste heat from the gas generators to provide cooling through absorption chillers, which the company said is a unique energy-saving feature for a Southeast Asian data centre. While it may look counter-intuitive for heat to provide cooling, the refrigerant that is key to cooling requires heat as part of the process to enable it to be reused.

In the event of a problem with the natural gas supply or gas generators, full backup 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.

Cloud-based services and a maturing youth population are key factors driving data centre market growth in in Southeast Asia. markets. There are 132 data centres in Southeast Asia as of August 2019. The data centre construction market in Southeast Asia is expected to reach US$2 billion by 2024, according to ResearchAndMarkets, with a CAGR of 7% between 2018 and 2024.

Over 260 million people live in Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia. Interest in data centres is being driven by the fact that 65% of the population are active Internet users; regulations on data sovereignty and PP 82/2012, on the Protection of Personal Data in Electronic Systems, as well as the popularity of cloud computing. The impending implementation of 5G networks is another factor.

Space^DC was formerly Polymer Connected. The company is building and operating data centre campuses that are strategically located to tap the host cities’ natural resources. It aims to set new standards for data centre reliability, flexibility and energy efficiency.

1 Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is the industry metric used to measure the energy efficiency of a data centre. The ideal PUE is 1.0. The higher the PUE, the more it costs customers to operate their business.