Energy constraints remain a critical debate for the data centre industry, particularly as businesses look to scale AI further. For Dame Dawn Childs, President of Pure Data Centres Group (Pure DC), the challenge is not just about building more capacity – but doing so in a way that aligns infrastructure growth with the realities of Europe’s energy systems.
She offered her insights exclusively to Capacity, ahead of her moderating a panel at Datacloud Energy Europe on the European grid perspective.
‘Onwards and upwards’: Easing grid pressures and prioritising partnerships
Having recently become President of Pure DC, Childs reflects on how the company is excited to have a sharper focus on long-term strategy.
“It’s great to step up and sit more in the policy space to drive our future,” she said. “With Gary Wojtaszek coming on board [as CEO], he’s helping us put into context the great AI initiatives that have been going on across the US.
“Pure is onwards and upwards, scaling at speed.”
When it comes to challenges across Europe, the data centre industry is now looking at ways it can help to ease grid pressures. For Childs, these challenges are to do with issues of timing – where data centre timelines are not matching those of energy infrastructure.
“Digital infrastructure needs to scale at speed, and we have a real near-term timeline for that scaling,” she explained. “Power infrastructure also needs to scale to meet our demands and other demands for electrification, and it simply cannot scale quickly enough.”
This offers data centres an opportunity to work with energy companies to unlock opportunities to generate more capacity, she said, adding: “It’s a transmission issue. Helping all the grids across Europe figure out how to better use the data centre assets, but also optimise for capacity, is something that we can collaborate on to come up with the best solution.”
Microgrids and the sustainability advantage
Pure DC recently took a significant stride in sustainability, having partnered with fellow data centre company AVK to launch Europe’s first data centre microgrid. Located within Pure DC’s data centre campus in Dublin, the on-site energy system is expected to provide dispatchable capacity to support data centre operations during the initial development phases.
Ultimately, it should enhance flexibility, resilience and system stability – while avoiding burdening Ireland’s national grid.
“Solutions like this are going to be part of the jigsaw puzzle that is needed to enable us to build out critical digital infrastructure,” Childs told us. “The key to unlocking it, though, is to make sure that it’s not kept as an islanded solution, but it’s enabled to be connected back into grid infrastructure so we can offer flexible grid services. That is where the optimisation is, because it helps actual energy users.”
Pure DC’s microgrid consists of three interconnected energy centres, with each building generating up to 30MW of power. Energy Centres 1 and 2 (EC1, EC2) will be fully operational by the end of 2026, both companies said, which will be followed by EC3 at a later stage.
Childs added: “We need to make sure they’re connected to the grid and that it supports collaboration between the data centre sector and grids throughout Europe.”
Additionally, the system is designed to accommodate changes in fuel composition, including hydrogen blending, to support future decarbonisation of the gas network.
“Hydrogen is a nascent technology in terms of being able to be deployed at scale,” Childs said. “There are small, fragmented solutions currently being looked at, like hydrogen cells. You can also look at the greater context of gas grids, with the UK’s gas utility, for example, working to figure out how to best support hydrogen.”
However, the challenge remains that the cost of creating green hydrogen is significantly high. For Childs, hydrogen looking forward is figuring out the stability for use in homes, in addition to bringing the cost point down.
“There’s a blended solution here for future optimisation,” she said. “Being ready for hydrogen is important, but we can’t think of it as a singular solution – there is no singular solution to these current challenges.”
AI is both ‘the challenge and the solution’
As AI continues to be the main talking point of the global infrastructure sector, the data centre industry has a task to combat rising energy and capacity demands, while also now prioritising sustainability.
“I think there is a sweet spot to be found,” Childs said. “Of course we need to continue building infrastructure to meet demands, but we need to have the future in mind.
“AI is both part of the challenge and the solution.”
Childs advocates for enabling AI use cases where the technology can support the electrical grid or water utilisation, while also being conscious about the ultimate end solution.
“Our microgrid in Dublin, for example, can be run on natural gas but we’re using a secondary fuel to make a greener solution,” she said. “The future is to then connect it to the grid and offer flexible grid services.”
She added: “While the solutions you build now might not be 100% sustainable in this moment, understanding how they become 100% overtime is important to both meet pace and a necessary sustainable future.”
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