Diesel generator firm Enrogen, based in York, UK, has signed a deal to provide 30MW of diesel generators to a large data center in Saudi Arabia.

The twelve 2.5MVA generators will be to provide back up for a new data center being built by a "global computer company," in the North East of Saudi Arabia.

The customer is likely to be Google, which this month announced a new cloud region based in Dammam, a city in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Region.

Deal doubles turnover

It's Enrogen's biggest ever deal and will double turnover at the family firm which was founded in 2005 by brothers-in-law James Brown and Gavin Wilkinson. The company is building new capacity at its factory in Pocklington near York, and will be employing more staff.

“It’s already won us the ‘Exporter of the Year’ 2021 award from the Association of Manufacturing Power Systems,” said sales director Kevin Griffiths, “and there’s no doubt this deal will get us noticed in this industry." He hopes for more Middle Eastern deals following on from this, seeing it as a "real growth center at the moment."

The Saudi job is being handled by a UK intermediary which commissioned Enrogen, based on its ability to put together a bespoke backup system. The project will use twelve 2.5 MVA, 16-cylinder (60 liters), 2700hp engines, which will be housed in acoustic containers at the data center. Enrogen says the facility is being built at a large new business park with its own road and rail network.

“The site is basically in the middle of the desert but we’ve seen computer-generated images of what it will look like in the future and it’s going to be a huge business park featuring all sorts of companies and even served by its own railway network,” said Griffiths.

Enrogen sourced 60Hz engines for the job from Mitsubishi in Japan, and will build and test the backup systems in the UK, before dismantling them and shipping them to Saudi Arabia to be rebuilt at the data center.

“It’s a specialist job that not many companies in the UK can actually do,” said Griffiths. "There are a lot of generator manufacturers that supply basic, off-the-shelf solutions, whereas we build our generator sets to suit what each client wants, which is outside many other firms’ comfort zones.”

“The UK used to be one of the biggest generator manufacturers in the world and that has slowly declined as companies have gradually moved their production to China or Eastern Europe. However, we hope to play our part in putting UK back on the map and champion British manufacturing, and hopefully, this project win is just the start of that.”

Human rights issue

Whether Enrogen is involved in the Google project or not, any data center project in Saudi Arabia is controversial, given the country's well-documented history of human rights abuses, and the potential for data centers to assist in government repression. The Google project has been criticized by 39 human rights groups, who have called on the cloud company to withdraw.

“Saudi Arabia has a dismal human rights record, including digital surveillance of dissidents, and is an unsafe country to host the Google Cloud Platform,” Rasha Abdul Rahim, director of Amnesty Tech, said in May 2021, “In a country where dissidents are arrested, jailed for their expression and tortured for their work – Google’s plan could give the Saudi authorities even greater powers to infiltrate networks and gain access to data on peaceful activists and any individual expressing a dissenting opinion in the Kingdom."

The Saudi project has been a long-held ambition for Google with negotiations stretching back to 2018 and has continued despite the murder of the journalist Jamal Kashoggi.

It is doubly unpopular with activists, as it's being built in partnership with Saudi Aramco, the world's largest producer of oil - at a time when the world needs to abandon fossil fuels.

Enrogen declined to comment on this.