iomart, a leading provider of cloud hosting and managed services, has installed 560 solar panels on its flagship data centre in Maidenhead, which will contribute to the aim of self-sustaining energy during the summer to power the site.
The solar panels will generate circa 250,000 kWh of energy per annum at the data centre, avoiding 96,061kg of CO2 emissions annually.
The 2,800 sqm data centre in Maidenhead is iomart’s largest site across its entire UK estate, which comprises 13 data centres. It’s also the cloud hosting provider’s main self-managed infrastructure facility, powering more than 12,000 servers.
This investment is part of iomart’s wider long-term sustainability strategy, which has seen the cloud hosting provider power all its data centres with 100% renewable energy coming from sources including wind, hydro and solar.
The business also partnered with Katrick Technologies in 2021 to pilot a world-first heat cooling system, which aimed to turn iomart’s Glasgow data centre waste heat into power to drive its servers’ essential cooling system.
David Gammie, CTO at iomart, said: “We have a large portfolio of data centres across the UK and making sure they’re as sustainable as possible is one of our biggest focuses at iomart.
“We’ve already committed to powering all our data centres with 100% renewable energy. This installation at Maidenhead takes that commitment one step further – generating our own energy onsite, and in addition the potential to export energy back into the grid network in the future.
“Our Maidenhead data centre is the ideal location for a project like this. It has a vast roof space, making solar panels the ideal solution.”
The installation, delivered by solar energy company 3ti, was completed earlier in May.
