Stockholm, Sweden
An article written by Yevgeniy Sverdlik in the January issue of Data Center Dynamics FOCUS magazine, titled “Sweden pitches for data centers,” reviews the attractive pitch the Invest in Sweden Agency (ISA) has for data centers. The country boasts district heating and cooling systems that allow customers to feed their waste heat energy into the system and trade it for cooling energy. IBM is one of the companies taking advantage of this, using its waste heat to warm its own building as well as selling its excess heat back to the energy company in the form of hot water. Fortum, the energy company, uses seawater for cooling from about January through August. The company provides the cold water at a temperature of 6°C (43°F). Fortum recently built a thermal storage facility in a mountain, capable of storing 40MW worth of cooling. By taking advantage of its cold climate, Fortum is able to provide some of its Swedish customers with a heating and cooling value proposition that is better than in other areas of Europe.
Tieto, one of the leading data center owners and operators in the Nordics, is also taking advantage of Sweden’s environment for energy efficiency and cost savings. Tieto is currently building a data center in a cave. The data center, which is scheduled for opening in April 2010, will use outside air and the cave’s long tunnels for cooling the data center most of the year. In the summer, the company will use chillers to supplement the cooling. Like IBM’s facility, Tieto’s cave facility also plans to use excess heat to warm its facility and sell its excess heat to the utility.
One other way of taking advantage of a cool climate is to use a liquid-to-liquid cooling system for data center cooling. A liquid-to-liquid cooling system supplies temperature controlled coolant to liquid cooled cabinets. The cooling is provided by a separate facility water loop, which could be cooled by the environment.
Although we can’t all take advantage of caves for cooling or district heating systems, we can look for innovative ways to cool data centers more efficiently. With the large expense of cooling a data center, it pays to take the time to be sure that the data center cooling solution selected will be the most economical and easy-to-manage over the long term.
