A small data center is set to be located in a residential area in Wales to power a district heating network.

First reported by the Caerphilly Observer, Kensa Contracting Ltd has applied for planning permission with Caerphilly County Borough Council to set up the facility inside a shipping container on Cwrt Nant Owen in Llanbradach, a village outside Caerphilly.

The application would see an 8ft by 8ft timber-clad shipping container placed in the 1,940 sq ft (180 sqm) communal garden of a social housing development. At present, the area houses a simple slab patio and grassy area.

The container would house a rack of servers and associated equipment, primarily to capture the waste heat from those servers and send it into the existing local estate heating network, which serves the social housing development buildings.

The developments’ housing association is said to be working with Kensa on the project.

What workloads or customers the data center would be serving weren’t shared.

Natural Resources Wales noted, however, that the site could be at risk of flooding, and recommended that “consideration be given to the incorporation of flood resistance/resilience measures” into the design and construction of the development.

“These could include flood barriers on ground floor doors, windows, and access points, implementation of suitable floodproofing measures to the internal fabric of the ground floor, and locating electrical sockets/components at a higher level above possible flood levels,” it said.

Part of Kensa Group, Kensa Contracting is a specialist installation business focusing on large-scale new build and social housing retrofit programs featuring ground source heat pumps. The company is partly owned by Legal & General Capital and Octopus Energy.