Fresh details on Blackpool data centre emerge
Billed as Project Edison, Elite UK REIT’s plans to redevelop a 39-acre site next to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Peel Park campus would also include a 400-space multi-storey car park.
The Singaporean real estate investment trust lodged plans for the data centre project earlier this month. Those plans have now been validated by Fylde Council.
Documents submitted with the application outline the scale of the two data centre buildings, which will span a combined 157,000 sq ft [gross external area].
The 20m-tall buildings would also comprise “multiple data halls accommodating in the region of 600 racks [the infrastructure that houses servers] each”.
The data centres would be constructed on the site’s existing surface-level car park, prompting the need for reprovision of car parking spaces for staff working at the DWP offices.
A 400-space MSCP is therefore proposed. A planning statement prepared by consultancy Cassidy + Ashton states that the need for car parking spaces will drop when around 1,000 DWP staff relocate to Blackpool town centre next year.
Elite UK REIT chose the site due to its connectivity to the North Atlantic Loop, a subsea fibre optic cable that connects the USA, UK, and Ireland and provide extremely fast and reliable internet speeds.
The cable is expected to make Blackpool more attractive to tech companies and data centre operators.
Within the Blackpool Airport Enterprise Zone, the council is progressing a scheme known as Silicon Sands – a 40-acre data centre cluster.
Elite UK REIT’s data centre scheme would “thrust the Fylde Coast to the pinnacle of the AI frontier and simultaneously support the economic aims of the nearby Blackpool Enterprise Zone”, according to Cassidy + Ashton.
To learn more about the project search for reference number 24/0516 on Fylde Council’s planning portal.
As well as Cassidy + Ashton, the project team features KeySource, TTSP, Murphy Geospatial, SLR, GEA, and Bowland Ecology.
