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Echelon
Data Centres a significant project currently underway in County Wicklow, around an hour south of Dublin, where Echelon is developing the onshore grid infrastructure that will support SSE Renewables’ 850-megawatt offshore wind farm off the east coast of Ireland.“ We feel that supporting SSE Renewables and other companies that build large renewable energy projects is our way of contributing. That wind farm will play an important role in Ireland achieving its renewable energy targets, and we are proud to help make it happen,” Simon adds.
Reinvigorating local communities
Echelon has just broken ground on the County Wicklow project and is in the middle of construction.“ This project is particularly important to me, as it is the first scheme I worked on when I became involved with Echelon, so it has been quite a journey. But the lasting impact it will have, particularly on jobs in the local community, on the local economy and on the grid infrastructure in the area, makes it all worthwhile.”
The site itself adds another layer of meaning to the project. It is a former fertiliser factory that once provided numerous local employment opportunities, and Echelon is not only rehabilitating the environmental condition of the site but transforming it into a new source of jobs and economic activity for the area.
“ Through a mixture of construction and operations contracts as well as their ripple effects, we are going to invest a lot of money into the local economy,” Simon clarifies. For Simon, whose background as a chartered civil engineer and chartered surveyor and member of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors gives him a particular appreciation for the regenerative potential of infrastructure projects, that aspect of the work is particularly rewarding.
Echelon’ s current pipeline stands at nearly two gigawatts. If the company were to fully build that out, it would represent
an investment of tens of billions. To begin making meaningful progress against that pipeline, the company recently secured a € 1.7 billion loan from Morgan Stanley, which will go towards funding expansion across Ireland, the UK, Italy and Spain.“ That capital is just the beginning, but it allows us to take our first substantial steps across a number of locations simultaneously. The funds will be invested into physical infrastructure and systems to support our
broader build programme. One thing with data centres that always catches people not from the industry off guard is the scale of capital required, as these truly are mega projects,” Simon highlights.
H & MV Engineering are partnering with Echelon Data Centres as their specialist high-voltage engineering partner, scaling globally to meet surging demand for critical energy and data centre infrastructure.
Global Experience. Local Expertise.
+ 353( 0) 61 357 496 info @ hmveng. ie Limerick, Ireland
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