Colocation data center provider CoreSite announced Friday a plan to expand its Los Angeles, Calif., facility. The company is planning to add 2 MW of power to the data center and to bring the extra capacity online by the first quarter of 2010, according to a CoreSite statement.

The expansion will add 14,000 square feet to the existing 50,000 square feet of raised floor, said Billie Haggard, the company's VP of data centers. The existing floor is about 80 percent full - used by both colocation and wholesale customers - and contracts are pending for leasing out the rest. The facility will provide about 240,000 square feet at full build-out and CoreSite is planning to continue expanding in 1.3-2 MW increments every six months.

The company will undertake several measures to increase efficient energy use by facilities equipment serving the new space, Haggard said. Among those measures are deployments of variable-speed cooling fans under the floor, efficient scalable UPS units and zoned lighting.

The data center - located at 900 N. Alameda - serves more than 15 network carriers on-site and is also connected to a facility CoreSite manages at the One Wilshire building. The company operates a meet-me room and a 100,000-square-foot data center there, providing its customers with a wide choice of networks and service providers.

Equinix - another major colocation player and CoreSite's main competitor in the Los Angeles area - also announced an expansion there this week. The company launched a new data center in El Segundo (a Los Angeles suburb) on Thursday - its fourth colocation facility in the region. Equinix has two data centers in downtown Los Angeles.

Both CoreSite and Equinix said they got a lot of business in Los Angeles from entertainment companies, who increasingly rely on digital production tools. Among CoreSite's other cutomers at 900 Alameda are eHarmony, Slide and AppNexus.

CoreSite Senior VP of Sales and Marketing David Dunn said the Los Angeles-area market has been "erratic" over the past decade, with demand peaking in the late '90s (before the burst of the so-called "dot-com bubble") and picking up again in 2005 and 2007. Today, the market offers strong demand from smaller local companies but not much in terms of large international enterprises.

Even though energy prices have risen over the past two years, they remain lower than or comparable to other U.S. markets CoreSite operates in, Dunn said. Electricity in Los Angeles is provided by a public utility, controlled by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the rates are slightly lower than those in Northern California's Silicon Valley and much lower than the rates in New York City.