
This article was published by The Energy Mix on May 29, 2024.
By Christopher Bonasia
A project that began with the need to cool down the data centre that tech giant Google operates in Hamina, in the south of Finland, is now expanding into a district energy project for the surrounding community.
Beginning next year, the facility will launch its first offsite heat recovery project along with local utility Haminan Energia, Google says in a May 20 blog post.
“Heat coming out of our Finnish data centre will be rerouted and provided free of charge,” Google writes. “We will be recovering heat at the Google Hamina data centre, which operates today with carbon-free energy at 97 per cent. This means the recovered heat will also be 97 per cent carbon free.” Haminan Energia says the project will 80 per cent of the local district heating network’s annual demand.
Google is already a major presence in Hamina, an historic port city on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. “Data centres create a significant amount of heat as a byproduct, operational manager Olavi Kemppi said in a company video, and since 2011, the company’s “creative solution” for cooling down its servers has been to pump in water from the nearby bay.
But “we’ve long wanted to channel our recovered heat offsite to be used by the local community” just across the bay, added Site Operations Manager Jukka Vainonen. With the Hamina installation about to go into service, the company says it’s “working hard to share recovered heat offsite at as many of its data centres as possible.”
“It is inspiring that a single action such as this enables almost an entire city to run its district heat distribution on excess heat,” said Minister of Climate and the Environment Kai Mykkänen. “This will deliver savings to households, but first and foremost, this is an important climate measure.”
The district heating news coincides with Google’s decision to pour €1 billion into its seventh expansion of the Hamina data centre. That investment “will help to unlock the potential of artificial intelligence for companies not only in Kymenlaakso (the region where Hamina is located), but across Finland and Europe,” the Helsinki Times reports, citing Google’s global head of data centres, Joe Kava.
The investment cements Google’s position as Finland’s biggest investor in the last decade, Business Finland Director General Nina Kopola told the Times.
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