Crestchic has provided two of its 1MW resistive only loadbanks to the first ever underground data centre, based in Norway.
The Lefdal mine, a 120,000 sq m facility based within an old mine shaft, is set to be one of Europe’s largest and greenest data centres. The facility is powered exclusively by four glacial hydropower stations and two wind farms, providing a capacity of more than 300MW.
Crestchic was asked to provide two 1MW, 400V, 3ph 50Hz resistive only loadbanks. Paul Brickman from Crestchic said: “The underground location uses cold seawater from a neighbouring fjord as a cooling source.
“The seawater is passed through a heat exchanger and cooled from 30oC to 18oC to create a closed fresh water circuit, which is a very effective way of keeping the computers and servers cool. He added: “The bespoke loadbanks supplied to the mine have been created with our enhanced microprocessor-based Eclipse control package – which includes a Modbus interface for full loadbank control.”
Crestchic loadbanks feature forklift pockets in the base and lifting eyes at high level – making the loadbanks easier to transport and lift into place. The Modbus mode allows the loadbank to become a stand-alone Modbus server, accepting commands from the customer’s Modbus client application program.
By using Modbus this way, the Crestchic loadbank can be incorporated with other data acquisition and logging equipment to form a part of an integrated system.
