Stockholm Data Parks (Stockholm - Sweden)
The City of Stockholm has a target: to become fossil fuel free by 2040. Among several initiatives in their action plan, they have found a creative way to recycle wasted energy and convert it into a reusable source of energy.
The project is called “Stockholm Data Parks”, and it consists on attracting large data centres to the city to recover their excess heat (that would otherwise go to waste) for the purpose of heating or cooling the homes in Stockholm. This way they can save energy and money in cooling the data centres, while at the same time making a good use of the resulting heat of their activity and reducing their carbon footprint.
The data centres that are part of this initiative run on renewable energies and are equipped with a heat recovery system that is connected directly to the district existing heating/cooling network.
In order to facilitate the implementation of the data centres, Stockholm Data Parks offers attractive sites and dedicated support along the entire construction process.
Sources:
https://stockholmdataparks.com/
Improved Energy management.
Description of the specific objectives:
- Achieve a data centre industry with zero heat waste, reaching the next level of cost efficiency and sustainability;
- Fight climate change (in line with Stockholm’s objective to be entirely fossil fuel free by 2040);
- Turn the city into an attractive hub for large data centres with heat recovery.
City of Stockholm; Fortum Värme (district heating and cooling provider); Ellevio (power grid operator); Stokab (dark fiber provider).
- Stockholm Data Parks are already working with some small data centres, and now they have to scale up the project for bigger data centres;
-Transform this project into a scalable business model for other cities to replicate, spreading the sustainability benefits all over the globe.
Power infrastructure at the ready to build land; Cooling as a Service (CaaS) and heat recovery; Renewable electricity contracts; Dark fibre.
Stockholm’s first data park is located in Kista, a technology hub, and there are already two new data parks under preparation for 2018.
There are two options of participation: Cooling as a Service is offered for free in exchange for the excess heat when the data centre load reaches above 10 MW, or the cooling process is managed by the customer and Fortum Värme purchases the excess heat at a price that reflects its alternative heat production cost.
- Calculations estimate that a 10 MW data centre could heat around 20,000 modern residential apartments;
- More than 30 data centres are connected to district energy networks and involved in heat recovery in Stockholm;
- Reduction of 7,950 tonnes of CO2 emissions in a 10 MW data centre load with renewable electricity and Cooling as a Service with Heat recovery.