Data Centres
What Ontario Owners Should Settle Before Committing to a Data Centre Site
Back to Data Centre Construction
Start with the load, not the land
Most site decisions we are asked to review were made in the wrong order: land first, utility second. For a data centre the order has to be reversed. The parcel is only as good as the power that can reach it, and everything else on this list flows from that.
Seven questions to settle first
- How many megawatts, by when, at what cost? Put the question to the local distribution company in writing and get the answer in writing. Firm available capacity, the upgrades a larger load would need, and the earliest energisation date are the three numbers that sort sites.
- Distribution or transmission? The size of the load decides which network it connects to, and that decides the approvals path, the equipment the owner funds and the timeline. A load that crosses into transmission territory is a different project.
- Is there a second feed? Higher tiers want two independent utility paths. Where a second feed is impractical, the redundancy moves onto generation, with its own approvals and cost.
- How diverse is the fibre? At least two physically separate routes from more than one carrier, entering the building at separate points. Confirm the routes exist, not that a carrier says it serves the area.
- What can the cooling design assume? If the mechanical concept needs municipal water, confirm the allocation. If it cannot be confirmed, design for closed-loop or air-cooled plant from the outset rather than discovering the constraint at site plan.
- What do zoning and servicing allow? Data centres do not fit neatly into every industrial zone, and generator yards, fuel storage and noise draw attention at site plan. Servicing capacity for sanitary and storm is checked the same way as for any industrial site.
- Which tier does the business need? The tier is an owner decision made against the cost of downtime. It sets the plant, the footprint and a large share of the budget, and it should be settled before the site is shortlisted, because it changes what the site has to provide.
Why this is a construction question
Every item on the list lands on the builder eventually: in the yard layout, the service entrances, the fire compartments, the slab and the schedule. Settling them before the land is bought is how the building gets designed once. We put the utility conversation first on every site we take from raw land through servicing, and the discipline is the same whether the end use is a warehouse, a pharmaceutical facility or a data hall.
