How Steel Buildings Are Speeding Up High-Tech Projects

Many steel frame buildings have very straightforward, low-tech uses, such as a warehouse or a cattle shed on a farm. But the speed of construction and simplicity of building in kit form are playing a role in helping establish more high-tech industries and facilities under their roofs.

Few technologies are more cutting edge or important than electric vehicles as the quest to decarbonise transport continues. This requires lots of EV batteries and the largest factory for this purpose in the UK is now under construction, with bosses declaring it has reached a new milestone.

The Agratas battery factory at Puriton in Somerset is being built from steel frames and the company states a “significant milestone” has been reached in the process with the first steel frames now in place.

It will be built in phases, with this project being rather more complicated than some steel frame schemes, both because of the size of the undertaking and the need to drive 17,000 piles into the ground at the outset to stabilise the foundations.

Vice president of marketing operations at Agratas, Earl Wiggins, said: “It is the start of a new chapter where our vision of a world-leading facility starts to visibly take shape.”

If steel offers the best solution for a technical challenge and large scale in the case of the Agratas factory, it offers fast construction and a modern building when new developments like data centres are built.

One of the latest instances could be the proposed data being planned by renewables firm Apatura at Ravenscraig in Lanarkshire, ironically on the site of the town’s former steelworks.

Many of the important new data centres are being constructed from steel frames, helping control the environment within the buildings that need to maintain cool temperatures.

Recent examples of this include the Kao Data centre in Stockport, where construction began last year.