Like the general public, our Hilliker industrial agents continue to hear about gigawatts and megawatts. Historically, we have always rated an industrial building’s power by the amount of volts and amps available. This is easier for our manufacturing clients to match with their machinery. The new hyper scale Data Center leases are now quoting their prices in megawatts of critical IT load not square footage. So, what is a megawatt?
A watt is a basic unit of power: Watts = Volts x Amps (x Power Factor)
1000 Watts = 1 Kilowatt (kW)
1000 Kilowatts = 1 Megawatt (MW)
1000 Megawatts = 1 Gigawatt (GW)
(Back to the Future’s Dr. Brown needed 1.21 GW for the flux capacitor)
A bolt of lightning is estimated to be 10GW but only for millionths of a second.
Your home likely has 200 A of 240 V (2X 120V legs) power totaling 48 kW, but that is capacity; you are only likely using 5 kW on a regular basis.
- St. Louis Armory data center is rated at 120 MW
- Proposed Festus data center is rated at 600 MW
- Amazon & Google campus under construction in Montgomery County is scaled to handle one GW
These power levels are not completely new to our Missouri world as the New Madrid aluminum smelter built in the 1970s used up to 500 MW when it was in production until it closed in 2016.
FUN FACTS
James Watt, the 1800s engineer of steam engine fame invented the unit of “horsepower” (amount of work one horse can do in one minute). The watt (one joule of energy transferred per second) was named in his honor 60 years after his death. So, James Watt never knew the term watt.
Phil Hulse, the renowned St. Louis developer behind the Armory Innovation District and now the affiliated data center started his real estate career at Hilliker in 1985. Thanks to Phil for all his help growing our city!
Contact your favorite HC agent should you have any questions about requirements or need a commercial property.